Douglas A Jones Jr.

Douglas Jones has wide-ranging interests in (African) American literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, performance studies, and political theory. He is at work on two book projects. One is a scholarly monograph on the power of characters to mobilize persons on behalf of political causes. Tentatively titled "On Political Character: From Schema to Attachment," it uses figures from African American political discourse (e.g., the Slave Mother; the Race Man; the Tom) to theorize characters' rhetorical power as the effect of their media portability, ability to enact narratives beyond the ones from which they derive, and affective bonds. A character, in short, can become a schema, and it is schema above all that moves person to act politically. The second project is a trade biography of the great contralto Marian Anderson, "Voice of the Century: Marian Anderson, A Life of Art and Activism." The first major biography of Anderson for the general public, "Voice of the Century" will be published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Professor Jones' forthcoming book this fall, Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature before Emancipation (Chicago), reads democracy as modern "slave morality" par excellence (Nietzsche), and proposes a typology of bodily events that disposes persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, impersonality, respectability, violence, and care. He is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan) and editor or co-editor of four books, including a new collection of the writings of political philosopher Maria W. Stewart (Oxford). His writing has appeared in major scholarly journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Theatre Journal, as well as public venues such as The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement (UK). Professor Jones is a long-time faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, where he has held the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair, and is a former fellow of the Princeton Society of Fellows.

He is represented by Elias Altman at Massie and McQuilken.