Political Science

Columbus De’Marcus Pruitt is an eighth-year Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Brown University, specializing in political theory and American politics. He holds an M.A. in Gender and Race Studies and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Alabama. His research sits at the intersection of political theory, American political thought, Black political thought, American studies, Black studies, and gender studies. His work examines how race, gender, power, and narrative shape democratic life in the United States, with particular interests in democratic theory, political identity, subject formation, and the role of literature and lived experience in American political development.

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Race Beyond Liberalism: Morrison, Democratic Life, and Black Political Thought

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This dissertation examines the limits of racial liberalism within American political thought by bringing Tommie Shelby, Charles Mills, Elizabeth Anderson, and Toni Morrison into conversation around the relationship between race, power, and democratic life in the United States. Situated at the intersection of political theory, American studies, and Black political thought, it argues that while contemporary liberal and racial liberal theories have significantly expanded political theory's ability to address segregation, inequality, and white supremacy, they often continue to understand race primarily through the language of injustice, exclusion, and institutional failure. I argue instead that race is not simply a problem internal to democratic life but a constitutive feature of the political world itself.

Drawing on Morrison's fiction, essays, literary criticism, and broader contributions to Black intellectual life, alongside Black political thought and Black feminist theory, I develop the concept of race as a grammar of democratic life. By grammar, I mean the historically sedimented structures of meaning, recognition, memory, and belonging through which democratic subjects come to understand themselves, others, and the political communities they inhabit. Race helps shape who appears as a citizen, whose suffering becomes politically legible, and what forms of freedom and democratic belonging become imaginable.

The dissertation begins with Shelby's effort to reconstruct liberal justice through reciprocity, civic obligation, and democratic repair, before turning to Anderson's account of segregation and Mills's conception of white supremacy as a constitutive political system. While these thinkers move beyond traditional liberal abstractions, I argue that their frameworks remain primarily concerned with rendering racial domination politically visible rather than explaining how racial subjects themselves are formed within racialized democratic worlds.

Turning to Morrison's body of work, including Home, Beloved, Paradise, and The Source of Self-Regard, I argue that narrative, memory, care, and survival offer an alternative framework for understanding democratic life. Morrison reveals how race operates not only through institutions and laws but through the stories, identities, and forms of recognition that structure political experience. Rather than beginning with ideal principles or institutional repair, her work directs attention to the lived realities of democratic subjects and the ongoing labor of creating meaning, dignity, and belonging under conditions of racial domination and white supremacy.

Engaging themes central to American studies, including national identity, collective memory, citizenship, belonging, and the cultural production of political life, the dissertation demonstrates how literature and phenomenological experience function as sites of democratic theorizing alongside more traditional political texts. By bringing political theory into conversation with Black studies, Black feminist thought, literary criticism, and American political thought, this project reimagines democratic theory beyond the confines of liberal justice alone. It argues that understanding race requires attention not only to institutions and principles, but also to the narratives, memories, and forms of subjectivity through which democratic life becomes intelligible. In doing so, it contributes to debates in political theory, American political thought, American studies, Black political thought, Women studies, and democratic theory by demonstrating how race functions as a constitutive feature of democratic life and political belonging in the United States.