A Democratic Enlightenment

In <i>A Democratic Enlightenment</i> Morton Schoolman proposes aesthetic education through film as a way to redress the political violence inflicted on difference that society constructs as its racialized gendered Semitic and sexualized <i>other</i>. Drawing on Voltaire Diderot and Schiller Schoolman reconstructs the genealogical history of what he calls the reconciliation image-a visual model of a democratic ideal of reconciliation he then theorizes through Whitman's prose and poetry and Adorno's aesthetic theory. Analyzing <i>The Help</i> (2011) and <i>Gentleman's Agreement</i> (1947) Schoolman shows how film produces a more advanced image of reconciliation than those originally created by modernist artworks. Each film depicts violence toward racial and ethnic difference while also displaying a reconciliation image that aesthetically educates the public about how the violence of constructing difference as otherness can be overcome. Mounting a democratic enlightenment the reconciliation image in film illuminates a possible politics for challenging the rise of nationalism's violence toward differences in all their diversity.