Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership-this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition. By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, Edwards brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, Edwards demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics. Though recent scholarship has challenged top-down accounts of historical change, the presumption that history is made by gifted men continues to hold sway in American letters and life. This may be, Edwards shows us, because while charisma is a transformative historical phenomenon, it carries an even stronger seductive narrative power that obscures the people and methods that have created social and political shifts.
Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership-this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition. By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, Edwards brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, Edwards demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics. Though recent scholarship has challenged top-down accounts of historical change, the presumption that history is made by gifted men continues to hold sway in American letters and life. This may be, Edwards shows us, because while charisma is a transformative historical phenomenon, it carries an even stronger seductive narrative power that obscures the people and methods that have created social and political shifts.
Contents
Introduction
I. Charisma
1. Restaging the Charismatic Scenario: Fictions of African American
Leadership
2. Leadership's Looks: The Aesthetics of Black Political
Modernity
II. Contestations
3. Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Zora Neale
Hurston's Gothic
4. Disappearing the Leader: The Vanishing Spectacle in Civil Rights
Fiction
III. Curiosities
5. "Cyanide in the Kool-Aid": Black Politics and Popular Culture
After Civil Rights
6. Claim Ticket Lost: Toni Morrison's Paradise and American
Literature's Holy Hollow
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Erica R. Edwards is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.
"In Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, Erica R. Edwards
has constructed a radical re-imagining of black political culture
and an alternative narrative of its historical emergence. By
critically examining the myths of charismatic leaders as the
singular progenitors of liberation, Edwards takes issue with the
representations of the black freedom movement most frequently
rehearsed by biographers, social historians, and political scholars
of the modern era. The book is a powerful recapturing of lost
words, lost worlds." —Cedric J. Robinson, University of
California, Santa Barbara
"A critical read for anyone who is interested in the relationship
between literature and real life scenes of black
leadership—particularly as it plays out in the black political
sphere in the post-civil rights era."—New Books Network"An
insightful text in which Erica R. Edwards successfully presents an
alternative perspective on black political leadership through an
analysis of black literature and film, with the potential to offer
alternative social realities for the African American
community."—The Journal of African American History"An impressive,
field-changing interdisciplinary study."—American Literature
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