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Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas (Caribbean Studies Series) by Scott Henkel is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas (Caribbean Studies Series) about?

Winner of a 2018 C. L. R. James Award for a Published Book for Academic or General Audiences from the Working-Class Studies Association Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, Scott Henkel lays out a literary history of direct democracy in the Americas. Much research considers direct democracy as a form of organization fit for worker cooperatives or political movements. Henkel reinterprets it as a type of collective power, based on the massive slave revolt in Haiti. In the representations of slaves, women, and workers, Henkel traces a history of power through the literatures of the Americas during the long nineteenth century. Thinking about democracy as a type of power presents a challenge to common, often bureaucratic and limited interpretations of the term and opens an alternative archive, which Henkel argues includes C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins , Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas , Lucy Parsons's speeches advocating for the eight-hour workday, B. Traven's novels of the Mexican Revolution, and Marie Vieux Chauvet's novella about Haitian dictatorship. Henkel asserts that each writer recognized this power and represented its physical manifestation as a swarm. This metaphor be

Author

Scott Henkel

Publisher

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi

Published

2017

Language

EN

ISBN

9781496812261

Subjects

History, Science, Literary Fiction

Updated

2026-03-24