Desmond Jagmohan

My current book project, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), studies the politics of deception under conditions of extreme oppression. To do so it recovers Booker T. Washington (1856–­1915) as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. First, I argue that Washington not only practiced but also normatively defended equivocation (Ch. 2), concealment (Ch. 3), and deception (Ch. 4) as necessary for surviving and subverting Jim Crow, which he understood as a distinct form of race-based domination (Ch. 1). In dark times—such as slavery and Jim Crow—these dimmer dispositions can serve emancipatory ends. But since they are seen by most as unethical, one must conceal one’s use of them.  Second, I show that Washington used deceptive words to mask radical deeds. Where scholars have assumed a hidden transcript or merely read between the lines, I opt for a different approach. I base my case on several years of archival work in the Booker T. Washington’s Papers at the Library of Congress (a collection of nearly a million documents) and other locations, including Tuskegee University. This historical excavating allows me to recover his clandestine challenges to Jim Crow in three spheres of life—law (Ch. 5), economy (Ch. 6), and society (Ch. 7)—and show that his compliant public image was, indeed, a well-crafted mask. Demanding the most vulnerable be transparently radical, rather than prudentially seditious, confuses martyrdom with politics, I argue. Those under extreme domination—from Frederick Douglass (Ch. 4) to Primo Levi—have often relied on deception as a means of subversion. Third, I consider the fate of such realism by scrutinizing deception in the writings of Washington's two most important critics: W. E. B. Du Bois sketched the psychological consequences of deception (Ch. 8) and Ida B. Wells defended candor and courage as morally required because they are politically efficacious (Ch. 9). Drawing on their critiques of Washington, I conclude that his realism was, indeed, tragic (Ch. 10). So, in addition to offering the first comprehensive study of Washington’s political theory I analytically reconstruct and historically contextualize the place of deception in African American political thought between 1850 and 1915, from Douglass to Du Bois.  Ultimately, I hope to enrich our understanding of moral agency under oppression.  

My first book project resulted from a methodological question. While every text has multiple intentions I wondered what we should do when faced with an author who  uses equivocal, ambivalent, and even deceitful writings to veil his true intentions and politics? I found my answer in the history of ideas and by turning to work by colleagues in political science and history that study strategic interactions and the politics of those living in autocratic and other repressive regimes. Learning from their response to the problem of preference falsification, I turned to the archives to see beyond public performances to concealed truths. But what should we do with an author who left a single brilliant text but wrote nothing else and therefore left no real archive to aid interpreting the text or its context? 

This question motivates my second book project, The Political Thought of Harriet Jacobs, which reads her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as a work of moral and political theory. My approach is once again broadly contextualist, but this time I must create the archive from the discourses she assumed knowledge of. I begin with the assumption that a polemical work like Incidents requires an attention to the political and social context in which it was produced, and more particularly to the range of meanings available to Jacobs at the time. It is difficult to imagine that one could fully understand the role of, say, property and paternalism, honor and shame, deception and self-enslavement in Incidents without a fuller account of how these themes were deployed polemically in the intellectual and political crisis over slavery in mid nineteenth-century America. In Part I, I argue that Jacobs wrote Incidents to normatively rebut three proslavery arguments: enslavers are merely exercising property rights (Ch. 1), African Americans are “natural slaves” (Ch. 2), and slavery is a paternalist institution (Ch. 3). Part II recovers her account of what I call veiled agency. Scholars who celebrate fugitivity, fight or flight as the only admirable response, ignore or morally downgrade less confrontational forms of resistance, the sort most enslaved women employed. I recover Jacobs’s defense of the cunning use of shame (Ch. 4), fidelity to fellow slaves (Ch. 5), and testimony (Ch. 6) as forms of moral and political agency that center the gendered wrongs of slavery. Through deep archival dives—into newspapers, magazines, legal and popular debates, academic discourses (including receptions of the ancients), and other sources—I historically contextualize her critical response. I situate each theme in the proslavery public sphere. To distill which of her claims were representative of abolitionism at large and which broke new ground, I further contextualize each idea within the antislavery public sphere and, specifically, the political spaces in which Jacobs moved and wrote: namely, antislavery circles in New York and Massachusetts. A central part of Chapter 1 appears as “Peculiar Property: Harriet Jacobs on the Nature of Slavery,” in Journal of Politics, which argues that ownership, not domination, constitutes slavery’s unique injustice, and ownership explains why slavery is a distinct rather than merely an extreme form of domination.