Assembling Counter-Majorities: Mark Twain’s Democratic Mugwumpery

Abstract

In this essay, I read Mark Twain as a practitioner of what Deleuze and Guattari call an “active micropolitics,” focusing especially on his depictions of race and racism. In his popular stories, essays, speeches, and autobiography, Twain gave voice not only to marginal and underprivileged characters, but also to minoritarian, changeable sentiments circulating among popular majorities. Moreover, he suggested these sentiments might comprise not only actual counter-majorities, but also potential counter-majorities, linking personal complexity to democratic potential. I argue that despite his appreciation for the inertia of popular prejudice, Twain’s appeals to minoritarian sentiments, and the popularity thereof, testify against Tocqueville’s fatalism concerning majority opinion in general, and white supremacism in particular.