The Trouble with Unity

In issue 32 of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Northwestern literature professor Betsy Erkkilä writes a comprehensive review of John Seery's A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, in which I have an essay on Whitman and Barack Obama, titled “Mestiza Politics: Walt Whitman, Barack Obama, and the Question of Union.”

Erkkilä writes: "Whereas in the past, Whitman’s politics would have been dismissed as irrelevant, hopelessly quaint, and even naïve, all of the theorists in Seery’s Political Companion approach Whitman as a poet actively engaged in the constitution of a democratic citizenry and community.… [A]s the first volume to bring together political theorists to reflect on Whitman as a political writer, A Political Companion to Walt Whitman provides a rich and compelling view of Whitman’s political insight and teaching, his shortcomings in relation to race, slavery, and women, and his enduring radicalism as a democratic visionary who shared many of the concerns of contemporary political theory."