Political Science

Columbus is an eighth year Ph.D. candidate interested in political theory and American politics. He received his B.A. in Political Science, and M.A. in Gender and Race studies from the University of Alabama. His interest includes how race and gender are used to describe social societies and political discourse in the United States, traditional democratic theory, and cultural studies.

Job Market Paper Title

Liberalism’s Limits: Race, Narrative, and the Boundaries of Justice in Political Theory

Job Market Paper Abstract

This paper intervenes in debates about race, justice, and political belonging by positioning Toni Morrison’s literary vision alongside Angela Davis’s radical political theory, Robert Gooding-Williams’s reflections on Black politics and historicism, and Charles Mills’s critique of liberalism’s racial epistemologies. I argue that Black radical thought—particularly as developed through Morrison’s Home, Davis’s abolitionist writings, and Mills’s concepts of white supremacy and cognitive ignorance—challenges liberalism’s faith in moral consensus, procedural justice, and state-centered reform.

Through this lens, race is not merely a site of exclusion to be reconciled within liberal frameworks but a constitutive force that exposes liberalism’s historical complicity in racialized violence and political abandonment. While Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos offers a rigorous defense of justice for the Black urban poor within a Rawlsian framework, I argue that his account remains insufficient for capturing the depth of racial domination and the ethical life of black communities.

Drawing on Morrison’s Home and The Source of Self-Regard, alongside Black feminist theorists such as Christina Sharpe and Hortense Spillers, I theorize “narrative rupture” as a mode of political critique that unsettles the moral consensus of liberal theory. Morrison’s literary techniques—haunting, fragmentation, and refusal—offer a political vocabulary rooted not in liberal recognition or redistributive fairness but in care, mourning, and embodied survival. Mills’s concept of white ignorance deepens this critique, revealing how epistemologies of liberal justice actively obscure the histories of racial oppression and the lived experiences of black life.

Thus, this dissertation extends the critique of liberal political thought by drawing together literary, feminist, and philosophical resources to reimagine democratic life beyond fairness and inclusion. It offers a literary-political intervention into political theory by demonstrating how Black radical traditions illuminate the structural absences of liberalism and reorient the project of justice toward ethical life, historical consciousness, and collective responsibility.