Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas

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 bears a complicated history, often describing a group, a movement, or a community. Indeed it conveys multiplicity and complexity, a collective power. This metaphor�s many uses illustrate Henkel�s main concerns, the problems of democracy, slavery, and labor, the dynamics of racial repression and resistance, and the issues of power which run throughout the Americas.