Who exactly are the specters in Ivy Wilson's illuminating Specters of Democracy? The ghost is not Marx (or Ian Baucom), for as much as Wilson focusses on slavery – and thus asks what it means for a human to be a thing – commodification, value, and reification are not integral to his thinking. Nor does Derrida cast a lasting shadow, for if Wilson invokes him along with Spivak and Bhabha to link literary representation and political critique, Wilson is more committed to historical particulars than to any theoretical project. Nor even is Specters of Democracy haunted by Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach. The book productively attends to the circum-Atlantic dynamics of the slave trade and the possibilities of transnational revolution, but it remains centrally concerned with how blackness in the antebellum United States shapes concepts of national belonging.

In this, Wilson joins a lineage stretching back from modern scholars (including Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Dana Nelson, Carla Peterson, and Eric Sundquist), to African American writers of the twentieth century (such as W. E. B. Du Bois and especially Ralph Ellison), to the primary subjects of Wilson's book – Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances Watkins Harper, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and the journalist William J. Wilson. The specters in Specters of Democracy are African Americans whose “residues and outlines of black subjectivity” simultaneously define and subvert democratic citizenship within the antebellum public sphere (5). Generally this topic may seem familiar enough, but “familiar” is also a noun – a spirit or specter often embodied in liminal, uncanny, semi-human forms.

The strength of Specters of Democracy lies in its own spectral execution. The book dwells in the specific locale of antebellum America, even as it glides through barriers between literature, music, and the visual arts. Wilson reads the period's literature of blackness with an ear and eye for “the rhetoric of aural resonances and the spatial arrangement of visual forms” (11). Literary critics accustomed to extending the logic of intertextuality to the evidentiary practices of cultural studies will hardly object to Wilson's methods, particularly when his synergistic approach to aesthetics renders more visible the phantasmagorical contradictions of American race relations.

The first half of Specters of Democracy focusses on aural traditions and tropes. Douglass's writings are taken as “polyphonic discourse system[s]” (20) with a “reverb mechanism” (21). Brown's Clotel becomes a “remix” that “sample[s]” from various texts (50). Harper's poems show how “political discourse is circulated and translated on the sonic frequencies of popular culture” (59), while the slavery conflict forms a “soundscape” for Whitman's racial ambivalence (85). At times such language is merely a metaphorical way to discuss rhetoric, allusion, genre, and historical context. More poignantly, Wilson brings fresh claims and evidence: Douglass's liberalism and oratory depend on repetitions (both earnest and ironic); Brown figures the liminal position of blacks by setting visual and aural narratives in tension; Harper and other black poets push conventional forms to establish “a new civic humanism” (78); Whitman absorbs marching cadences and is, in turn, absorbed by art songs at the end of the century. Wilson does not delve into ethnomusicology, nor has he attempted to write a cultural history of antebellum hymns, spirituals, and popular songs. Rather, he leverages echoes and improvisations in the service of literary explication.

If sound, by nature, is especially difficult to reconstruct historically, images provide a more stable archive for the second half of Specters of Democracy. A chapter on genre painting that emphasizes Eastman Johnson and William Sidney Mount turns toward questions of representation, citizenship, and print culture, thus setting the stage for a reading of “Benito Cereno” in which the San Dominick becomes a museum of “outsider art” holding open revolutionary possibilities (128). Such thinking culminates in a final chapter on William J. Wilson's “Afric-American Picture Gallery.” Here Specters of Democracy traces a rich interplay between black radicalism and aesthetics on the border of literature and the visual arts. Here, too, the specter of Crispus Attucks testifies to the whitewashing of American history. That a Paul Revere print of the Boston Massacre moves Attucks off-center and lightens his skin is a great way to end Specters of Democracy, though it's hard to argue with an epilogue that moves from Stevie Wonder to Parliament–Funkadelic before giving Ralph Ellison the final word.