Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership 0816675457, 9780816675456

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CHARISMA AND THE FICTIONS OF BLACK LEADERSHIP

Difference Incorporated Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong SERIES EDITORS

CHARISMA AND THE FICTIONS OF BLACK LEADERSHIP

Erica R. Edwards

Difference Incorporated

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously published as “Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Black Leadership’s Gothic Tale,” Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008): 1084–102.

Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edwards, Erica R. (Erica Renee) Charisma and the fictions of black leadership / Erica R. Edwards. p. cm. — (Difference incorporated) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-7545-6 (hc : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-8166-7546-3 (pb : acid-free paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. Blacks in literature. 3. Leadership in literature. 4. Charisma (Personality trait) in literature. I. Title. PS153.N5E34 2012 810.9'896073—dc23 2011031793 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 17 16 15 14 13 12

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Dorothy Lee McCoy Edwards and Evelyn Virginia Maclin Lockett

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

ix

Part I. Charisma 1. Restaging the Charismatic Scenario Fictions of African American Leadership 2. Leadership’s Looks The Aesthetics of Black Political Modernity

3 35

Part 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

77 105

Part III. Curiosities 5. “Cyanide in the Kool-Aid” Black Politics and Popular Culture after Civil Rights

135

6. Claim Ticket Lost Toni Morrison’s Paradise and African American Literature’s Holy Hollow

167

EPILOGUE

187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTs

195

NOTES

199

INDEX

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Introduction

IT WAS IN THE IMMEDIATE WAKE of destruction, loss, and dispossession wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina that performing and recording artist Erykah Badu stopped the clock on the progress of black public protest. Called to stage to sing her own “Time’s a Wastin” at a televised rally organized by the Millions More Movement to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March, Badu interrupted her scripted performance and staged what performance theorist Diana Taylor calls un relajo, “an act with an attitude.”1 At her cue to sing, she instructed the band to “hold on,” then launched into a recasting of her own role in the drama of protest: offering a slightly extemporaneous speech rather than the song, Badu invited the marchers to reevaluate their expectations for social change after Katrina. The performance was a restaging of what I will call throughout this book the charismatic scenario, a cosmology, mythology, and performative technology for African American mass mobilization that has structured public desires for black political leadership throughout the long twentieth century, from Reconstruction to the present. I am offering Badu’s performance as an entry point into the work that follows for two reasons. First, it exposes how the contemporary scenario of charismatic black political leadership unfolds in tense articulation with understandings of race, gender, nation, and authority. Wearing a pencil skirt and a matching ten-inch-high head wrap, surrounded by stocky men in dark suits who stood silently with arms folded until they were called on to interrupt the singer’s “acting out,” Badu called attention to the woman’s role in the charismatic scenario as, at best, a conscious supporter who helps introduce the authentic source of power and a social reproducer responsible for passing on long-held political morals, and, at worst, an essential prop in a drama that was all about millions of men despite its language of inclusion. She walked bold-faced into a discursive trap of politicoreligious authority ix

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configured around one powerful male aura; it was a trap that left only a momentary opening for her radicalization of the politics of the march. Second, Badu’s performance serves as an analog for how African American cultural texts have existed in constant tension with charismatic leadership as a scenario of black political modernity and postmodernity. African American cultural production, over the course of the twentieth century, has served as an archive of contestation, a record of discursive struggle surrounding the making of charisma as an animating fiction of contemporary black politics. Erykah Badu was one of the dozens of public figures to address the Millions More March, including Washington, D.C., councilman Marion Barry, National Black Leadership Roundtable president Walter E. Fauntroy, opera singer Brenda Jackson, Rainbow/Push Coalition founder and president Jesse Jackson, author Charles Johnson, professors Ron Karenga and Cornel West, economist Julianne Malveaux, African Methodist Episcopal bishop Vashti McKenzie, talk show host Tavis Smiley, Nation of Islam minister Ben Chavis Muhammad, and, most centrally, minister Louis Farrakhan. She appeared late in the televised program that Saturday afternoon in October on the National Mall, when the program was running short on time. After greeting

Figure 1. Erykah Badu performs at the Millions More March. Millions More Movement, Afternoon. C-SPAN Video Library, Washington, D.C., 2006.

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the crowd and halting the first bars of “Time’s a Wastin,” Badu stood still, hands folded over her stomach, and offered a cumbersome exhortation that delayed her song for nine minutes2: Y’all hear me sing all the time, and I didn’t come out here this evening— this afternoon—to perform. . . . I came representing all the mothers . . . the fathers . . . the sisters, the brothers, the children, [prolonged silence] the new world. Our thinking has become very progressive. . . . so it’s time to leave the old ways behind. . . . I want to acknowledge the elders and ask them if I may speak freely [prolonged silence]. I’m not gonna waste your time . . . because we have a very short time. . . . A lot of us believe in God. . . . Well I’m here today to tell you that the God you serve is real [prolongued silence]. I don’t—I don’t need you to clap, I just want to say these words because I’m ready to hear the Minister perform.

As she continued her impromptu lecture, she stared into the crowd, squinting in the afternoon sun, and punctuated her oration with mystical exhortations: I didn’t come here today to get applause! I came to you to speak . . . from my mind and my heart, that this is the beginning of the new world. . . . We have no more time. . . . There will be no more leaders. . . . The waters have come, but we forget: we are water. We are the land. We are the reparations. We are the dead. . . . We are the children!

Much of the speech was an attempt to disrupt a narrow racial politic, a plea for progressive organizing across racial lines; Badu had joined the Millions More conveners months before, in fact, to be a public voice for cross-racial unity. So she chastised the crowd, “It’s total ignorance to continue to hate one another! If we continue to move in the same direction, we will never get there.” By the time Badu finished her disquisition to the tiring crowd, finally instructing marchgoers that if they want to “see a real revolution,” they should look in the mirror and “fix [their] hatred,” a scramble had ensued. First, as Badu spoke, a master of ceremonies had crossed the stage to the security force assembled on stage with Badu and whispered to one of the guards, appearing to express impatience with Badu’s lengthy deliberation. Second, as she appeared to wrap up her speech, the track of “Time’s a Wastin” began to fill the silence of the sound system, prompting Badu to repeat three times, “I’m not gon’ sing.” Finally Badu shifted hesitantly and conceded, saying, “I want to help bring on the Minister right now.” After a final long silence, she turned to the marchers (now, the audience) and delivered an abbreviated version of “Time’s a Wastin,” a B-side groove from her 2000 Mama’s Gun that is an instructive encomium for young men: “Time’s

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a wastin / Don’t you take your time, young man / Keep on driftin’ / Ain’t no tellin’ where you’ll land.” The command that punctuated the song’s abrupt end after the two short verses—“Stand up and scream your own damn name!”—was met with halfhearted cheers from the crowd, and some time later, after several other performances and exhortations, Farrakhan arrived onstage to give a ninety-minute-long speech outlining post-Katrina recovery and post–civil rights black political involvement. In what can be read as shaky deference to leadership or a momentary disruption of it—or both— Badu invited participants both to honor and to disidentify with the charismatic leadership they impatiently awaited.3 Badu’s Millions More performance, a “blissfully failed performative,” can be read as an insurgent intervention into politics as usual, one of many that have shaped her career since the late 1990s.4 From the rebellious claim with which she entered the music scene with her 1997 single, “On and On”—“Goddamnit I’ma sing my song!”—to her undressing herself to reveal a tattoo reading EVOLVING between her shoulder blades in her 2010 video for “Window Seat,” Badu has developed a reputation for self-conscious, selfdirected acts of intellectual disruption. As an industry leader in alternative R&B, Badu has often provided an unobtrusive critique of the very black nationalist symbols and values she has appropriated. Throughout her career, Badu has articulated at once a kind of pop feminist social critique in songs like “Certainly” and “Tyrone”—an anthem in which she instructs a falsehearted lover to “call Tyrone / and tell him come on help you get your shit” while quipping “But you can’t use my phone”—and a warm embrace of family values in songs like “Orange Moon,” “Time’s a Wastin” and “Otherside of the Game,” in which she takes a clearly subordinate position to a male lover or father figure. This tension is best captured by the autobiographical “Me” on New Amerykah, Pt. I: 4th World War, often recognized as her most politically astute album, when Badu sings, “Sometimes I don’t know what to say / So many leaders to obey,” while paying homage to Farrakhan in the same verse: “So I salute you Farrakhan, yes, ’cause you are me.”5 Badu’s inclusion in the Millions More March was, then, both unusual and neatly compatible with the march’s political vision. The “Million Man March, Part II” was convened to commemorate the 1995 gathering of black men, which was called by Minister Louis Farrakhan with the aim of moving men to “atone” and “take responsibility” for themselves and their communities, and which would become the largest political rally in African American history. The earlier march’s masculinist politics have been well noted by social critics.6 Badu’s performance at the Millions More March was her attempt

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to show her understanding of “the minister’s whole plight, bringing all religions and groups and communities, and ways of thinking and ways of life together.”7 Although the anniversary march was staged as a call for unity among people of different races, religions, cultures, and genders, it could not shake its connection to the romanticized, paternalistic vision of black heteromasculinity characterized by the earlier rally. This vision was, in fact, scripted into the rally’s very performative architecture. Structured along the teleological lines of traditional African American charismatic spectacle, the people were made to wait for hours, through various preliminary speeches and opening acts, for the appearance of Farrakhan, who was to be the singular voice of authority, knowledge, and political promise. Even as he introduced Badu, Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons (who himself was introduced as the “godfather of hip-hop”) told rallygoers of his journey to the Million Man March in 1995 and reminded them of Farrakhan’s charisma. He said, “In 1995 . . . I was taking my first steps toward God, conscious steps, and I came to the Mall here and I heard the Honorable Louis Farrakhan speak.” Testifying to Farrakhan’s speech—“it inspired me so much that my steps which were ordered started to move faster”—Simmons admonished the crowd to ready themselves for Farrakhan’s appearance. “He has given us great inspiration,” he said, “and I am excited—and all of you should be excited—to prepare to hear the Minister today.” Finally, as if as afterthought, he introduced Badu as “one of our sisters in hip-hop.” Badu’s femininity was in this way called on to sustain, stabilize, and normalize a gender hierarchy that not only, as black feminists have long argued, has limited black social and political movements, but that also announces itself anew, in event after event, through appeals to the leader’s mystical authority and through the affective complex of anticipation and arrival that is built into the charismatic leadership scenario.8 Badu’s momentary disruption of the program, then, was a dangerous interruption of commonsense black politics. The awkward ambivalence that shook her performance to its core—it was both song and not-song, opening act and refusal to act, deferent introduction and irreverent pause—embodied a tug-of-war within contemporary African American cultural production about the nature of political leadership and what it has meant for notions of black solidarity. In this performance, Badu acted out a tension that has shaped African American letters over the last century: a simultaneous investment in and critique of charismatic leadership. In the time that Badu wrested between the halting of “Time’s a Wastin” and the end of her speech, she disrupted the march’s terms of order—which intended a steady crescendo until

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Farrakhan’s arrival—while calling for a heteroglossic response to the loss occasioned by Katrina. “Y’all can’t fool these kids out here,” she told the crowd. “They’re already united—they’re just waiting for a . . . a chance to lead. So, family, today I’ma leave the stage, but I want you to put both hands up in the air. Scream out your own damn name. Scream out your own name.” This was a call that must immediately be erased from public record: not waiting for the marchers’ self-affirming screaming, the Millions More organizers ushered Badu off the stage, and another pre-Farrakhan opening act was introduced and greeted with jeers from the massive crowd, who was becoming impatient after waiting hours to hear the Minister. In a historical moment when “public and sociopolitical voices of black female discontent remain muted, mediated, circumscribed, and misappropriated,” Badu’s reluctant performance and call to the crowd to “scream [their] own damn name” limned the possibilities of black feminist political petulance in the shaky soprano of charisma’s contestation.9 Badu’s contest (the physical competition for position) and contestation (the discursive disruption that that contest forced) attest to how African American cultural work has historically confronted, as many have suggested, Western forms of political order as inscribed on individual decorum. Here, the black singing voice, in its “sly alterity,” is a “form of contestation,” the medium of “an indirect but effective self-expression,”10 a vehicle of “improvisatory disobedience.”11 It is guided by “an anarchic organizing principle” that manages the interstitial space between the one and the many, radical singularity and ensemblic totality, individualistic Western modernity and the collective ethos of precolonial lifeworlds that it necessarily uproots and renders valueless.12 But Badu’s visible struggle between silence, song, and speech also shows how cultural production has become a site of resistance not only in African Americans’ challenges to captivity and to the political value of whiteness, but also to the commonsense political value that has accrued to black heterosexual manhood and black patriarchy since the end of U.S. chattel slavery. In one sense, the performance was a “black thing” that worked to affirm the march’s black nationalist agenda—a “black thing” that succeeded so well it might be overlooked as a nearly indecipherable point on the march’s ideological axis of uplift. In another sense, though, its veiled disruption of singular charismatic authority altogether destabilized black nationalism’s own systems of value through its content and its form. The very iteration of the stunted performance as a vocal self-cover-up that activated “minoritarian coding . . . in order to survive in the public sphere” worked to halt the anticipation of the

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charismatic leader’s performance even as it repeatedly refused to deliver the aesthetic object—the song—that it itself promised.13 The form of the performance, a palette of silences withholding “Time’s a Wastin,” forced an uncomfortable wrestling with the very idea, the fiction, that until the leader made his entry into the spectacle, time was indeed wasting in the waiting. This book theorizes how African American cultural production throughout the contemporary period, from World War I to the present, has disrupted one of the central fictions of black American politics: that freedom is best achieved under the direction of a single charismatic leader. Scholarly and popular histories alike have privileged charismatic leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., over the arduous, undocumented efforts of ordinary women, men, and children to remake their social reality; I argue that the uncritical investment in charisma as the motor of history ignores its limits as a model for social movements while showing us just how powerful a narrative force it is. Drawing on the cultural work of African American writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals over the last century, I show how as a structuring fiction for liberatory politics, charisma is founded in three forms of violence: the historical or historiographical violence of reducing a heterogeneous black freedom struggle to a top-down narrative of Great Man leadership; the social violence of performing social change in the form of a fundamentally antidemocratic form of authority; and the epistemological violence of structuring knowledge of black political subjectivity and movement within a gendered hierarchy of political value that grants uninterrogated power to normative masculinity.14 In my inquiry into how the representation of and engagement with the violences of charisma have shaped contemporary African American narrative, I elaborate how black fiction and film restage the charismatic scenario. This concept, as I discuss more fully in chapter 1, repositions Diana Taylor’s description of the scenario, a loose script containing multiple possibilities within a single “basic sequence,” a dramatic setup that “grab[s] the body” and directs it while leaving it “space to maneuver,” by considering how the modern, and now postmodern, constructions of black political leadership comprise a narrative and performative regime, a story of black solidarity and script for acting it out, a rarefied ideal and its fraught embodiment. If historical memory is transferred through scenarios, through bodies acting out relationships power, then the notion of the scenario can help us “to keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously and

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thus recognize the uneasy fits and areas of tension.”15 The scenario is an unbound script for political movement and an open container of historical memory. African American literature has registered the fault lines in black politics since Reconstruction, contesting how the charismatic scenario has often structured black political desire, the social life of black politics, and black political history as a field of knowledge itself. Broadly conceived as the means by which blacks articulate their desires for solidarity, wholeness, nationhood, access to public facilities and distribution of public resources, reparation for collective injury, and/or sovereignty, the term black politics encompasses, for my purposes here, a range of informal and formal movements and gestures that have defined black public culture since Reconstruction within black social and religious movements, black nationalist movements, black electoral politics, black popular culture, and black intellectual culture. As it surfaces on the page and screen in African American narrative, the charismatic scenario recalls a history of black political performance in these formal and informal fields and restages it. As authors like W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, and Zora Neale Hurston respond to the growth of the United Negro Improvement Association under Marcus Garvey’s leadership in the 1920s or the culture of street-corner and pulpit preaching that sprang up in Harlem during the New Negro era, for example, they represent charismatic leadership alternatively as romantic ideal, irrational social upheaval, and ancient tradition. In their novels—Du Bois’s 1928 Dark Princess, Schuyler’s 1936– 37 serial Black Empire, and Hurston’s 1939 Moses, Man of the Mountain—the charismatic scenario houses black freedom dreams while also impeding their realization. The black leader is messiah, deliverer, and spokesman for the race as well as charlatan, mad scientist, and murderer. In William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 novel, A Different Drummer, the scene of civil rights protest is restaged as a disappearance, a clearing away, a march of ghosts through an open field rather than a spectacle of charismatic leadership. And post–civil rights narratives like Paul Beatty’s 1996 The White Boy Shuffle, Toni Morrison’s 1997 Paradise, and the 2002 and 2004 Barbershop films figure charismatic leadership as a farce, as a tragic joke, and as a site of dismal violence that gives way to communal rebirth. In all, the tendency within African American literature over the past century is to raze the scaffolding of the charismatic scenario and to raise the question of what remains—in addition, perhaps, to our own damn names—when we are left to consider the scene of black politics without a race man in the foreground.

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The archive of contestation—discursive disruption, dialogic disturbance— leaves us not with answers but with a blank slate for invigorated dialogue. We will witness both the fashioning of the charismatic scenario in the context of black migratory modernity and the genres of contestation, from the romance to the science fiction serial to the gothic to the civil rights novel to the post–civil rights parody, that restage that scenario. Moses will disappear and leave a young nation to sing its own tune at the end of Hurston’s rewriting of Exodus; a black population will opt out of Jim Crow segregation by simply disappearing in Kelley’s A Different Drummer, leaving empty picture frames and evacuated homes as the only evidence of their freedom making; Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle will leave us with the poetry of suicide and the infinite deferral of charismatic leadership; and Morrison’s Paradise will move beyond charismatic leadership, through a mystical opening in a magical-real garden, only to drop us off in the “holy hollow” of a question mark. These images of contestation—the sudden departure, the parade of spectres, the empty picture frame, the speech withheld, the leader’s self-disappearance, the opening in the garden—are points of entry into a new field of black political vision, a vision based in what I theorize in part 3 of this book as a politics of curiosity rather than a politics of charisma. In this way, literature is a repository for counterstories and alternative visions of black American politics. I self-consciously enlist black cultural production in the open-ended project of historicizing and theorizing contemporary black leadership, positing these texts as points of contact for a discussion about the ways that black political leadership has been culturally produced, enacted, and imagined throughout the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. My point in discussing twentieth-century African American narrative as an archive of contestation is not to position literature as exceptional, as if it is somehow superior to other fields of public culture or to black politics itself. The texts I discuss in the pages that follow do not present readers with pat solutions to the problems of black politics that it diagnoses; rather, narrative is a dialogic site for reimagining the histories and possibilities of black politics in both its formal and informal incarnations. By clearing a space for wariness, multivocal dissension, insurgent invisibility, silence, humor, nonnormative gender and sexuality, and self-direction within, and at times beyond, the charismatic scenario, African American literary texts from Du Bois’s Dark Princess to Toni Morrison’s Paradise defamiliarize cha risma while gesturing to its alternatives: raucous collectivity from below rather than ordered political direction from on high; what Ella Baker called

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“group-centered leadership” rather than “leader-centered groups”; and an insistent fugitivity rather than an orchestrated telos.16 Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership is meant to reorient the study of twentieth-century black politics and black literature by reading African American narrative since World War I as a stage where artists, authors, cultural critics, and at times leaders themselves call into question the myth—or fiction—that charismatic leadership is a necessary precondition for social change, political access, and historical progress. But this reorientation turns on the premise that literary texts both participate in and contest cultural ideals, that they diagnose social problems even as they reproduce them. To understand how African American literature contests charisma, then, is not to endow it with the very burden of representation against which leaders themselves struggle. I would place the responsibility of considering and sustaining a politics of and for an us—in whatsoever fashion such an us can or should be imagined, if at all—upon us. The maneuvers of contemporary African American narrative that I am concerned with here are exercises of opening rather than closure, questioning rather than answering. The flight from genius; the plummet underground; the splitting of the page; the breakout to the dreamscape: such are the movements of contestation, and the perverse beginnings, perhaps, of a postcharismatic politic. This book is informed by the modes of inquiry that shape contemporary American studies and that have historically served as the often unwelcoming homes of black feminist critique: ethnic studies, literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, religious studies, Marxist theory, and performance theory. If black feminist inquiry has been able to hold in tension a critique of dominant structures and a critique of how ethnic nationalism compromises with these structures, the aim of this book is squarely in line with that of classic black feminist texts like “A Black Feminist Statement,” in which the members of the Combahee River Collective confessed that it was their experience and their disillusionment with civil rights and black nationalist movements that “led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist . . . and antisexist,” and more immediate precursors like Hazel Carby’s Race Men, which argued just over a decade ago that the “issue of acting as a race man for particular audiences is still relevant in a society where the mass media all too eagerly assign to a few carefully chosen voices the representation of the racialized many.”17 Although I think the study of individual leaders themselves, particularly women leaders, is a worthy project that still requires attention, my work here is concerned with the making and unmaking of charisma as a cultural–political ideal that rests on a particular and persistent

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marking of normative masculinity as the most proper site of political expression. The feminist project of historicizing black leadership, that is, is not a contributionist project of adding women and stirring; it is a scandalous metacritical project of interrogating the entanglement of charisma and masculinity. In this latter project, which this book attempts to solidify, the cultural history of twentieth-century black politics is not a parade of leaders from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama—or even from Harriet Tubman to Elaine Brown. It is a sustained detour, a movement away from leaders and toward leadership as ideal, as fantasy, as phenomenology, and as hauntology. The insurgent feminist detour, in this case, considers the multiple intersectionalities of black leadership—race, class, gender, sexuality, nation—as they make contact at the site of normative male masculinity in general, and black political masculinity in particular. The aim of this book is to produce a new cultural history of the fictions of political leadership in contemporary African American culture. While American scholarship has often examined the political exigencies of black literature—by analyzing, for example, how the Black Arts Movement politicized literary texts by calling for an aesthetic movement that would be the cultural arm of Black Power, or by showing how the literature of the New Negro Movement intervened in how African American identity was being constructed after Reconstruction—it has not fully appreciated how African American narrative challenges public constructions of what Wahneema Lubiano calls a black American common sense, an everyday black nationalism that is constituted by public calls for black male responsibility, the oppression of black women, the heteropatriarchal policing of sexuality in the name of the black family, and, importantly, deferral to charismatic leadership.18 An analytic capable of apprehending the wide range of political engagements in contemporary African American narrative is one that necessarily, as Roderick Ferguson suggests, reads texts to show how they disrupt the exclusions and regulatory ideals of both the state and black nationalist formations by resolutely “referring to a gender and sexual multiplicity constitutive of African American culture.”18 This critical analytic for reading contemporary black cultural texts, in works like Lubiano’s foundational “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense,” Lindon Barrett’s Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (1999), Sharon Holland’s Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (2000), Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004), and Candice Jenkins’s Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (2007), is both a recapitulation and a repositioning of black feminist inquiry. Charisma and the Fictions of Black

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Leadership attends to the making and unmaking of the charismatic scenario in contemporary African American narrative with the analytical tools of this collision of gender critique, black literature, and black public culture, reading it as a vibrant site for both the reproduction and the reimagination of social reality.20 The book is divided into three parts. In part 1, “Charisma,” I provide the historical context for my reading of twentieth-century African American narrative’s engagements and disengagements with black leadership. I trace the deployment of the charismatic scenario in the making of black political modernity, a term that I elaborate in chapter 1, and argue that from the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to Marcus Garvey’s UNIA parades in Harlem after World War I, the spectacle of black leadership during and after Reconstruction provided the prima facie tableau for twentieth-century black politics—a tableau that would haunt, if not explicitly write, the black freedom story throughout the twentieth century for journalists, Great Man historians, and social scientists after Max Weber. I argue in part 1 that the text has historically served as a site of charismatic formation and critique; accordingly, narrative has to be understood as a crucial site of inquiry for charismatic political leadership. I read W. E. B. Du Bois’s and George Schuyler’s nonfiction writings about political leadership with their New Negro–era novels, considering how the two authors represent the aesthetics of charisma— the way that the leader’s power inheres in erotic exchanges of beauty and the way that charisma is an optical phenomenology of black modernity corresponding to the new sensorium of the urban—in the context of an emerging black political modernity that was both in awe of and suspicious of nonrational forms of political knowledge. Charisma in Du Bois’s and Schuyler’s fiction, given this matrix of aesthetics and politics, is a fraught complex of black modernity in the making, a form of political authority and desire that is to be alternatively feared, discredited, and idealized. Part 2, “Contestations,” covers the World War II and post–World War II years in African American fiction, showing how Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 Moses, Man of the Mountain and William Melvin Kelley’s civil rights novel, A Different Drummer, represent black political leadership as haunted by two figurations of modernity: authoritarian rule and minstrel performance. While Moses stages charisma as a horror fiction of gendered violence, refiguring the biblical Moses as a fascistic black leader who terrorizes and disempowers his sister, Miriam, Drummer problematizes the way that, by the time of its publication in 1962, black protest leadership was being spectacularized by a burgeoning news media that would just as readily consume black protest

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as entertainment as the segregationists in the novel would brutally force a black cult leader to sing and dance a minstrel tune before bludgeoning him. The scene of contestation in these two novels, as I suggested above, disappears the leader—in Moses, Moses himself, and in Drummer, the silent “leader” who catalyzes the black population’s silent exodus out of a fictional Southern town—and reads black radical resistance as that which can only be grasped at the vanishing point, on the horizon, of the charismatic scenario. In part 3, “Curiosities,” I read post–civil rights texts like Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and the feature film Barbershop as restagings of black protest that are primarily concerned with charisma as an expression of post–civil rights lack, post–social movement loss, and post– Reagan era disappointment. Reading the 1990s as a decade that witnessed the acceleration of a neoblack nationalist consumerism that made easy trade of black leadership icons, I place the emergence of post–civil rights black leadership critique within the context of a shift in how charisma is represented as a spatiotemporal structure of affect in black expressive culture. That is, the post–civil rights disappointment with leaders is part of a larger cultural milieu of mourning and melancholia for civil rights leaders that circulates both a salable celebratory mourning for leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and a melancholic refusal to let them go. The cultural production of lack, loss, and deferral as constitutive elements of post–civil rights black public culture gives rise, I argue, to a series of restagings of the charismatic scenario—humorous on the one hand, gothic on the other—that engage black leadership as a spatiotemporal impossibility, as present absence and absent presence, as a constant and constantly deferred appearance all at once. In the Epilogue, I carry forward this analysis by maintaining that a fuller analysis of the political engagements of twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century African American narrative helps us understand the myth of messianic black political fulfillment that surrounds the presidency of Barack Obama. In calling attention to the distinct nature of the hauntological labor with which his campaign was involved between 2006 and 2008, I discuss how the ghostly remains of civil rights protest reconstruct and repurpose the charismatic scenario in the service of global capital, even enlisting the African American literary text in the project of reorganizing and reconsolidating the U.S. racial state around the palimpsestic imagery of the protest leader cum charismatic black president. Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, public culture bemoaned the black leadership void and presumed the natural and inevitable necessity of singular, male charismatic leadership for African American

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political and social advancement. The myth, or fiction, that black political history is the product of gifted male leadership has been produced by popular and print cultures, high and low cultures, academic and lay cultures. Any reading of the past century in African American letters must recognize how that literary tradition has been shaped by the discursive struggle to perform, reform, and deform charismatic black leadership as scenario, as a portable structure of black politics. My labor in these pages thus points toward an archive of disruptions that, like Badu’s incantation, risk defying the authority of tradition and forsaking the supposed safety of singular political authority for the hope of a more radical collectivity and the urgency of the creative complaint.

Part I

Charisma

Won’t we ever amount to anything? Won’t we ever get any leaders? —The lawyer’s wife to the physician’s wife, W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess

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Chapter 1

Restaging the Charismatic Scenario Fictions of African American Leadership

A SUSTAINED ENGAGEMENT with the multifarious experiences, perspectives, movements, stories, and players that make up the contemporary history of black American movements for social change and political progress requires both historicizing and disposing of the fiction that social transformation is impossible in the absence of singular charismatic leadership. Charisma is a political fiction or ideal, a set of assumptions about authority and identity that works to structure how political mobilization is conceived and enacted. This fiction is staged in real time and in media playback: its narrative thread is woven into the fabric of what might be called the charismatic scenario, which has throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries taken forms as diverse as United Negro Improvement Association parades, the Million Man and Millions More marches, and the various scenes that make up the historical imaginary of the civil rights and Black Power movements. In African American political culture since Reconstruction, charismatic leadership has been a fraught discursive compact—a narrative and performative regime—that has had to contend repeatedly with the contestations of performing artists, writers, social critics, and activists, such that while the presumption that charismatic leadership is the beginning of black politics might be conceived as the macrofiction of twentieth-century African American culture, the microfictions that have restaged the movements toward black citizenship and radical social transformation make up an essential repository for the imaginings and counterimaginings of contemporary black politics. More fully understanding contemporary African American narrative means considering how it has functioned as such a repository. The aims of this chapter are thus to situate the twentieth-century cultural complex of black charismatic leadership within the making of post-Reconstruction black political culture; to analyze how the charismatic scenario, as a challenge to and compromise with the post-Reconstruction containments of 3

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Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

black mobility and political expression, is structured in specific forms of ideological and material violence; and to inaugurate a discussion of how African American literature throughout the twentieth century served as an archive of contestation where these forms of intraracial violence would be reimagined and redressed. Charisma, more than a static social structure or universal phenomenon of social and political movements, has to be understood in African American cultural history as a complex of ideological, kinesthetic, narrative, political, and psychosocial responses to the containments and terrors of Western modernity, a complex composed of both compromises with and radical challenges to those containments and terrors. If African American literature has worked to contest charisma as a structuring narrative of black politics, a cultural studies model attuned to the workings of narrative might best suit the study of charisma as the animating fiction of modern, and now postmodern, black political life. The tangle of freedom and captivity for black Americans after slavery— what Saidiya Hartman calls the “double bind of freedom,” in which former slaves were “free to exchange one’s labor and free of resources”—was the originary condition for the forging of black citizenship and the terrain upon which black culture came to articulate charisma, after the end of slavery, as a politicocultural ideal or “structuring structure” of black political modernity.1 By black political modernity, I mean to signal a period, beginning with emancipation in 1865 and ending in the late twentieth century, when globalization, multiculturalism, the end of affirmative action, and the rise of a new “postsoul” black cultural formation occasioned the end of modern black politics. I also mean to signal a set of cultural ideals, practices, and structures of feeling that defined black American culture’s relationship to modernity and its emerging discourses on the one hand, and its own politics of liberation on the other. As Nikhil Pal Singh points out, American “black modernity,” figured as the access to the rights and processes of citizenship within the modern democratic state, did not begin to actualize until at least the mid-1930s, when it was precipitated by “increasing heterogeneity and political radicalism of black freedom struggles.”2 However, the struggle to reconcile the promises of liberal democracy with the very processes of brutalization that conditioned the entry of black peoples into the modern, “civilized” world preceded the New Deal era and gave rise to a set of cultural milieux that might rightly be understood to correspond with this struggle for modern citizenship.3 This set of cultural milieux includes Du Boisian double consciousness, an investment in what Paul Gilroy classically named the politics of fulfillment, and, most importantly, the perennial wish for and

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performance of singular male leadership as the antidote to the withholding of formal black participation in the governing processes of the nation-state and the dispossession and disposal of black peoples that continued after the end of chattel slavery.4 These structures of feeling correspond to an emergent black political modernity in the era between Reconstruction and World War I. The transition from slavery to freedom was a period in which the mundane and spectacular performances of gender and sexual regulation became sedimented in a vast array of culturally productive sites of African American life such as the home, the novel, the church, and the newspaper. During the struggle to make black political modernity between Reconstruction and the New Deal era, the biblical myths and social formations that had become central in blacks’ individual and collective self-fashionings during slavery combined with the post-Reconstruction-era politics of respectability to found the twentieth century’s ideals of leadership and political community formation in African American culture. The charismatic scenario, circulating in religious services and political collectives and being reproduced in various forms of print culture, from the pamphlet to the novel, is one such site. As Manning Marable explains, the charismatic structures of black churches had come to dominate the black political imagination: The political culture of the segregated South after slavery reinforced the messianic and autocratic leadership tendencies within the black community. The principal social institution within every black community was the church. Ministers occupied both spiritual and secular roles.5

In the wake of emancipation, when black political organizations mimicked black ecclesiae, black leaders were cultivated in and by the church’s peculiar mixture of democratic vision, religious devotion, and gender hierarchy. Here, the black leader’s voice was both the locus of “autocratic leadership tendencies” and the apparatus of the “exorbitant originality” that has accrued to the black singing voice since slavery. As Lindon Barrett argues, this “exorbitant originality” erupted in black sermons as preachers presented the Bible with “an incipient preoccupation with what might be imagined as the alterity of the singing voice”—the very alterity that intervened in the system of value cohering around race, literacy, and professional knowledge.6 One of the founding problematics of a black political modernity in the making is this double potential of the charismatic leadership role: to discipline, on the one hand, and to disrupt, precisely by way of charismatic performance, the disciplinary machinations of the capitalist order on the other.

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Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

It is important to note that the fashioning of black leadership as a distinctly modern trope of normative black masculinity—and here I use trope deliberately, as opposed to history, or phenomenon, to call attention to “black leadership” as a cultural ideal rather than static social structure—corresponded to the restructuring of the relationship between blacks and the emerging industrial capitalist order after slavery as much as it did, as Marable suggests, to antebellum black religious collectives. In other words, if the Christian church was a formative institution of black life in the wake of slavery, it was not solely responsible for the shaping of black leadership along strict lines of gender and class. Rather, the transformations that took place within black religious life, and in black life more generally, at the end of Reconstruction suggest that gender hierarchy in the realm of political participation and social movement building corresponded to the resettling of U.S. racial capital after emancipation as much as it followed up on an already existing gendered division of labor in black religious and social collectives. U.S. black charismatic leadership, as a trope or discourse of black political modernity, is a product of the postemancipation containment of state protections and rights for its black “citizens,” the many ways that black social, cultural, religious, and political institutions accommodated and resisted that containment, and the explanatory devices by which the dominant culture made sense of those accommodations and resistance to white supremacy. Emancipation inaugurated blacks into a system of “mimetic enactment of identity and entitlements,” a system in which the performance of “possessive individualism” through manly dedication to dutiful, subordinate labor was coerced through ideological forms as seemingly benign as the freedom manual and physical forms as outrightly brutal as convict leasing and peonage.7 The injunction to former slaves to “show themselves as men” was one way in which the language of freedom “dissimulated the encroaching and invasive forms of social control” and solidified “racial and gender inequality through the guise of social rights.”8 As former captives were nominated citizens, they were inaugurated into the liberal complex of possessive individualism, whereby sovereignty was a gendered function of property and manly self-possession.9 Given this ideological complex, the brief period of black (male) political enfranchisement between 1865 and 1876 has to be understood as a democratic opening as well as a closure, a tightening that limited how citizenship would be figured and performed, particularly as it related to black masculinity and the precarious rights of citizenship. The depoliticization of blacks that was hastened by the Hayes Compromise of 1876 catalyzed the turn to patriarchy in the home, the church, and

Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

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political assembly as a marker of black fitness for freedom. This turn participated in the process of making black manhood the privileged site of political subjectivity and activism, a process that was still incomplete during Reconstruction. Elsa Barkley Brown contests the notion of a priori gender hierarchy in the African American church by revealing that from the immediate postemancipation period until the retrenchment of Reconstruction solidified in the late 1880s, black churches in Richmond, Virginia, constructed “a fully democratic notion of public discourse” that allowed for the creation of a public sphere that included women and children in political participation and community building and was characterized by a “disregard of formal rules for speakers and audience.”10 Blacks’ needs to counter the ideas of black bestiality created by late nineteenth-century racial pseudoscience and performed in public acts of violence led to the strict policing of gender and class roles. In the cradle of the uplift ideology that centered ideals of black respectability, women in Richmond’s black religious community, for example, could be found “seeking . . . not a new authority but rather a lost authority.”11 The patriarchal structures of black leadership ideologies and practices, in this way, solidified over the course of the period that I designate as the moment of possibility for black political modernity. The formation of black charismatic leadership as a performative structure that would be the race’s bulwark against dehumanization and white supremacist terror after Reconstruction was part of a larger cultural shift toward the politics of respectability, one that many scholars have recently examined in great detail.12 The attempts of white supremacists to limit black political power after the withdrawal of federal troops from the Southern states sought to re duce the number of black voters by using, in addition to violence, fraud, gerrymandering, and poll taxes, a “meritorious concept—the ideology of the Best Man,” as Glenda Gilmore’s history of post-Reconstruction North Carolina shows. This concept “was not real but rather a theoretical device that worked to limit democracy by invoking the language of merit,” the same language of merit that circumscribed the discourse of self-possession during Reconstruction. And now blacks “seized upon the Best Man figure because it offered their only path to power,” even as it reified intraracial class and gender hierarchies. “Black Best Men,” according to Gilmore, “believed that in order to continue to enjoy ‘manhood’s rights,’ as they referred to the franchise and officeholding, they must conform to middle class whites’ definitions of manhood.”13 Given the historical context, uplift ideology was a collective survival strategy.14 Uplift ideology posited leaders as mediators, as exemplary spokesmen who championed and exhibited the marks of the civilized. If, during the 1880s

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Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

and early 1890s, newspapers, statesmen, and lynch mobs “reconstructed” blacks as enemies of a “state organized around herrenvolk republicanism,” the collective efforts to combat the post-Reconstruction ideological regime were often waged at the site of black political and social leadership.15 For example, black colleges worked to create a leadership class by enforcing Victorian manners and morals; and black churches expected that clergymen’s credentials and performances would correlate to class identity. As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains, middle-class men and women “embraced educated ministers and laypersons who sought to employ intellect and skill,” but “the illiterate masses” preferred ministers who “adhered to emotionalism and ‘superstition’ and exhibited no knowledge or interest in temperance, education, and Victorian morality.” As Best Men and Best Women worked toward ideological fixity within black leadership structures by eschewing emotionalism, the middle-class struggle for black leadership was waged at the sites of literacy and gender: black leadership was increasingly expected to transcend the “age of voice” by exhibiting the marks of bourgeois decorum. Brown explains, “As formal political gains. . . began to recede. . . the political struggles over relationships between the working-class and the newly emergent middle-class, between men and women, between literate and nonliterate, increasingly became issues.”16 The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago exemplified the postReconstruction trend of nominating middle-class black leadership to safeguard against white supremacist ideological and physical violence. It might be understood as an inaugural scene for twentieth-century black politics, as it “embodied the definitive failure of the hopes of emancipation and Reconstruction and inaugurated an age that was to be dominated by ‘the problem of the color-line.’”17 The World’s Fair presented an ethnophilic panoply of colonial others: along the mile-long strip of the Midway Plaisance were a string of anthropological exhibits that presented folk representations of European villages followed by Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Algerian, and Egyptian villages. “At the very end of the Midway—and scale of civilization,” Paula Giddings writes, quoting a New York Times reporter, “was a Dahomeyan village where sixty-nine Africans ‘blacker than buried midnight and as degraded as animals capered numbly to the lascivious pleasings of an unseen tom-tom pounding within.’”18 Representations of African American identity after slavery conformed to late nineteenth-century stereotypes of undomesticated black savagery as well as to notions of domesticated black servility as entrepreneurs at the fair debuted a twentieth-century breakfast icon: Aunt Jemima.

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The fair was a definitive event in the making of black political modernity vis-à-vis emerging ideals of leadership in at least two ways. First, it witnessed the display of middle-class decorum as the antidote to representations of black savagery: the formal tone of black religious ceremony along the Dearborn Street Corridor just outside of the fair contrasted with the raucous representations of blacks in the Dahomeyan Village on the Midway Plaisance. Here, the Exposition registered the growing class rifts in post-Reconstruction black communities and the secularism taking over middle-class black religious expression. According to Christopher Reed: Parallel activities ran continuously in Chicago’s African American churches throughout the duration of the fair in contradistinction to the usual Sunday ceremonies that marked so much of the rural and small-town southern experience. Emotive expression yielded to the cerebral serenity of northern, cosmopolitan African American church life.19

Interestingly, charismatic performance ameliorated this class schism in communal modes of expression by embodying at once erudition and emotion, frenzy and decorum.20 The preacher was to be both instructed by sacred scripture and by the spirit; he alone was allowed and able to achieve the proper mix of emotionality and literate, secularist poise. The charismatic figure might be seen in this context as both the embodiment of and the excess of racial uplift ideology and decorum. To this point, Frederick Douglass’s address at the Haytian pavilion on August 25 quieted blacks’ anger resulting from the fair’s racist exoticism as well as many of the intraracial political disagreements circulating around Colored Day at the fair, even the disagreement between Ida Wells-Barnett and Douglass himself. Paula Giddings describes the speech in her biography of Wells-Barnett: Reports about the seventy-five-year-old Douglass’s speech remarked how he, seemingly overcome by the moment or the heat of the occasion, began his own oration with a trembling voice, and that he had to cling to the podium with his hands in order to steady them. Encouraged by his apparent fragility, some of the whites in the audience began to heckle him, which, it appeared, was exactly what was needed. Douglass steadied himself, flung his notes aside, and found the sonorous voice that had inspired generations before him.21

Here, the miracle of speech both quells white supremacist heckling and forges intraracial unity while tying black energies for freedom to the postReconstruction secularization of black religion. Douglass punctuated his

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Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

speech with an exclamation of black American respectability and progress: “Look at the progress the Negro has made in thirty years! We have come up out of Dahomey unto this. Measure the Negro. But not by the standard of the splendid civilization of the Caucasian. Bend down and measure him—measure him from the depths out of which he has risen.”22 Douglass’s rhetoric drew a protracted distance between savage Africans and emerging black American political moderns in a move that prefigured black leadership performance in the decades to come. As Marlon Ross argues, “new century race promoters” like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington would repeatedly stage the race in two senses: “document the particular stage that the race has reached in the race toward modernity” and “place a visual embodiment of the race on a metaphorical stage in which characters are cast as racial specimen, scenes are set to provide sociohistorical context, and a performance is mimed to illustrate the momentary status and ongoing prospects of the race.”23 Douglass’s political performance at the World’s Fair dramatized how he was now “the representative colored man in the United States because he was the most presentable. And he was most presentable because of the presence he had established as a master of voice.”24 For her part, Wells-Barnett registered her objection to the ethnophilic discourse of the fair by boycotting Colored Day and circulating the pamphlet that she had worked with three other activists to produce, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Still, even Wells-Barnett, whose own antilynching campaign was known to be “quiet but effective,” “educated and forceful,” “refined,” and “free of ‘oratorical tricks,’” “had swelled with pride when she read how [Douglass] had turned such a frugal opportunity into an illustrious moment.”25 The fair, then, proved to be a moment of discursive battle in at least two ways. First, African Americans engaged a collective struggle against the marks of savagery in attempts to become politically modern. Second, spectacular rhetoric from the Haytian Pavilion punctuated this struggle while both palliating Wells-Barnett’s contestation and enforcing the rhetorical performance of spectacular, singular male leadership as the prima facie tableau of the coming century’s black politics. The solidification of singular black male leadership as a post-Reconstruction trope, in addition to erecting a gender hierarchy that continued to shape black politics over the course of the new century, foreclosed a number of potential interracial and international alliances against racial capitalism as black representatives like Washington, Du Bois, and others scapegoated or disciplined Asian immigrants, Native Americans, or “naked Africans” in the modern race of the races in which spectacular leadership was a sign of racial

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power. The solidification of charisma as the proper mark of black political gifting bestowed on the black political spokesmen thus contributed to the making of black political modernity as a series of conservative foreclosures of radicalism and liberal compromises with capitalist modernity. By the arrival of the twentieth century, blacks’ desires for political selfdetermination had combined with messianic imagery of savior-led emancipation to instantiate charismatic authority as the principal structuring idea for black political organization. By midcentury, Negro leadership had become a sociological and journalistic category of its own. Later, through the mediatization of post–World War II scenes of protest and the solidification of social scientific discourse of black politics, the very concept of black leadership had solidified as a classed and gendered concept. Women’s and local histories of civil rights—which have, since the turn to social histories of black activism after the 1960s, invented new historiographies to discover important ways that “women organized while men led”—may have enlarged the historical record while failing to fully apprehend how charismatic black leadership was produced as a disciplining social fiction decades before the televisual spectacle of the civil rights struggle of the late 1950s and early 1960s and continues to be produced, in new and even more spectacular ways, in the twenty-first century.26 The problem of leadership is not unique to civil rights scholarship or civil rights memory; it is a larger cultural problematic that informs scholarly and popular historiographies and defines the conceptual limits of collective political desire. Historian Kathryn Nasstrom’s lament that “the association of leadership with men is an exceedingly stubborn one” emphasizes both how well historical scholarship has disrupted the master narrative of the civil rights movement and how efficiently the myth of charismatic black leadership continues to gain steam, that scholarship notwithstanding.27 Charismatic leadership, as it would come to be inscribed by the culture of an emerging black political modernity, and later by a post–World War II television press corps (a press corps that was, like its print predecessors, seduced by the authority of one among the many, by the spectacular posturings of the leader, and by the narrative convenience of black exceptionality), thus became, in the dominant culture as well as in the commonsense forms of black nationalism, a definitive fiction of black politics for the twentieth century. By fiction I mean both explanatory narrative and fantastic dissimulation: black leadership is seductively troped as the motor of black history in a way that always hides and represses the heterogeneity of the movements toward black self-determination throughout the long twentieth century.

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Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

Even as charismatic authority came to express itself as a prime expression, or founding fiction, of political desire during black migratory modernity (as I discuss at greater length in the next chapter) and, later, during the spectacular, public forging of black citizenship after World War II (as I point out in chapters 3 and 4), and now, in an era so thoroughly infused with post– civil rights nostalgia both within and outside of African American culture (as I discuss at length in chapters 5 and 6), it should not be mistaken—and it often is—as the motor of black history. As social and cultural historians have taken pains to point out, African American political history can hardly be reduced to a succession of charismatic movements. Certainly charisma has served to structure black political desire and, in many ways, to stimulate black political progress in the United States. But a default deployment of charismatic leadership as political wish (that is, the lament that “we have no leaders”) and as narrative–explanatory mechanism (that is, the telling the story of black politics as the story of black leadership) is as politically dangerous, as I explain below, as it is historically inaccurate. Contemporary African American literature has been shaped by its grappling with these problems of charisma: by the end of World War I, when charisma had taken root as a cultural force in black political life, African American literature began to register discontent with charismatic leadership as a privileged paradigm for black self-determination. The literary text after World War I would come to mark not only charisma’s formation in the postslavery black United States, but also its de-formation as a cultural ideal and, throughout the twentieth century, serve as a necessary counterarchive of black political modernity, plumbing its silences and redressing its violences. The Charismatic Scenario Charisma, literally meaning “gift of grace,” might be conceptualized in three ways: as phenomenon, as formation of authority, and as the discursive material for the elaboration of black social and political identities, relationships, and movements. First, as a phenomenon (or phenomenology) of social, religious, or political community formation, charisma refers to the access to supernatural power, often evidenced in the display of bodily passions. When church historian Rudolph Sohm writes in his 1892 Outlines of Church History, for example, of monasticism in the fourth-century Catholic Church, he explains that asceticism or renunciation of the flesh “passed for a charisma or gift of the Holy Spirit; but only for one charisma among others, not for a special charisma with a value belonging to it alone.”28 Where here the renunciation of the flesh “through ‘Ecstasy,’ that is, through detachment from the

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body, can alone lead the spirit of the wise man to God,” many African American charismatic social formations, quite in contrast, center the body and bodily expressions such as speaking in tongues, dancing, and faith healing.29 As Jonathan Walton explains, black Pentecostal and charismatic mainline churches in the contemporary United States often seek the evidence of an experiential encounter with God through glossolalia, healing, and prophesy and ecstatic collective worship. The “charismatic style of worship,” he writes, “can create an environment that feels more like a nightclub than the A.M.E. Zion Church you may have attended with your grandmother.”30 The charisma that I am referring to as the ideal of singular black leadership only loosely relates to this more ecclesiastical understanding of charisma as prophetic collectivity. As I discuss more fully in chapter 4, the scenario of charismatic leadership covers over a history of expressions of black collective radicalism that might actually be best understood in the terms of ecclesiastical charismatic phenomenology. For the purposes of clarity, I find it useful to distinguish between charismata as the graces or talents of the faithful that St. Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 12—“Now there are varieties of gifts [charismata], but the same Spirit”—and the charisma that took hold in sociological knowledge, business literature, and popular culture over the twentieth century, with the latter charisma being figured as an individual’s singular magnetism or capacity to inspire duty and devotion. Second, charisma is a structure of authority shaped around the singular gift of grace. Here charisma becomes synonymous with domination, or what is sometimes referred to as the authoritarian personality. When the sociologist Max Weber defined three types of political authority in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization and Economy and Society—bureaucratic, traditional, and charismatic—his aim in theorizing charismatic authority was to make sense of a “prerational” form of social organization operating in the modern secularized world. Charismatic authority, for Weber, was the locus of modern excess, a site where extraordinary—that is, extrarational—needs were satisfied; charismatic leadership satisfied human longings that bureaucracy and traditional authority would not meet “through ordinary, everyday means.”31 Hence “‘natural’ leaders, in moments of distress. . . were neither appointed ‘officeholders’ or ‘professionals’” but rather were “the bearers of specific gifts of body and mind that were considered ‘supernatural.’”32 While bureaucratic organization structured the modern capitalist nations, charismatic authority was both the “specifically creative revolutionary force of history” and an irruption—a miraculous disruption—of history and the status quo: “charisma rejects as undignified all methodical rational acquisition, in

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Restaging the Charismatic Scenario

fact, all rational economic conduct.”33 Given that charismatic domination, for Weber, opposed scripted laws and regulations, it could be understood as an abolishment of juridical power. In “a revolutionary and sovereign manner,” he writes, “charismatic domination transforms all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms: ‘It has been written. . . , but I say unto you. . . . ’”34 Still, for Weber, the revolutionary force of charisma could not be sustained. Once charismatically dominated masses were corrupted by the institutions of power and became stakeholders in them—“taxpaying subjects, dues-paying members of a church, sect, party or club (Verein), soldiers who are systematically impressed, drilled and disciplined, or law-abiding ‘citizens’”—the charismatic message was no longer ‘new’ or ‘revolutionary’ but rather “dogma, doctrine, theory, reglement, law or petrified tradition.”35 For Weber, then, charismatic authority was one condition under which social subjects would defer authority to another and subject themselves to domination, at least until the charismatic bond was contaminated by “routinization.” What is useful here is Weber’s insistence on particularizing charisma as a social structure: more than a natural trait, an unnameable kind of individual magnetism or charm, charisma is a social bond of duty and faithful affiliation. But Weber’s theory of modernity, which circumscribes his discussion of charismatic authority, is flawed. As Roderick Ferguson notes, Weber’s theory of rationalist Western modernity—which charisma is supposed to momentarily interrupt—fails to figure racialized exclusion and subjection as constitutive of Western rationality. If black subjects “have historically been located outside the idealized and normative properties of rationality,” then we are on “the margins of political and economic spheres” and thus “represent the underside of rationalization, that location left untheorized by Weber.”36 (At its most extreme, this logic would suggest that black social formations would be, by virtue of existence, always already charismatic: bodily, irrational, emotionalist, deviant.) What this means, in the practical sense, is that studies of charismatic movements as irrational irruptions of the modern fail to take into account the processes by which rationalist Western modernity subjected certain peoples to the violent effects of the discourse of rationality: neither race, nor gender, nor sexuality, nor class, nor history, are understood as significant independent variables in the canonical studies of charisma. It is not simply that charisma studies, as a subfield, folds historical change into an ahistorical narrative of social structure that can equate, say, Ghandi’s satyagraha to Sukarno’s political program in Indo nesia. It is that charismatic leadership as an epistemology has never been

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apprehended as a social construction of capitalist modernity coterminous with slavery in the Atlantic world. This kind of work seems urgent given Hartman’s influential contention that performance—and, I would add, particularly political performance—constituted the terrain of both resistance and subjection to containment and captivity during slavery and in the transition to freedom in the United States. If Weber’s theory of modernity set out to explain the three social structures in which human beings would submit their sovereignty to the authority of another, how could he ignore the very terms on which authority was inaugurated by racial capitalism and the ways that the very idea of the self-possessed sovereign subject sacrificing his or her self-will to bureaucratic, traditional, or charismatic authority was a conceit of Western liberalism? Further, charismatic social formation is not simply a matter of domination, and Weber’s generalizations of the German case cannot be applied uncritically. Weber’s theory, Cedric Robinson explains, “was ideological in its prescription that the reemergence of a (German) people in crisis would come as the result of the appearance of a (German) charismatic leader.” By “universalizing that experience, Weber followed the order of things in the parent epistemology.”37 Weber provided no account of charismatic authority as a historically situated phenomenon—he preferred a “values-free” typology that could just as easily apply to Hitler as to the founder of Mormonism; he imagined charisma as a suspension of history, a miracle of history in the Schmittian sense.38 This generalizing trend meant that Weber would only understand charisma as synonymous with political authority. For Robinson, in contrast, singular political authority “is the perversion of charisma.” The charismatic leader might be understood as “the responsive instrument of ” rather than leader of a people, and “contrary to Weber’s view that charismatic authority is the most total dominance of a people by a single individual, it becomes the most pure form of a people’s authority over themselves.”39 If Weber did not theorize charisma as historical rather than universal, neither did he imagine how New World captivity shifted the ground on which charismatic social formation would be articulated, narrativized, and set to work to challenge capitalist modernity and, at times, to compromise with the West’s racist, sexist, and heterosexist forms of domination. What Weber would not do, and what sociology since Weber has not done, is interrogate how charismatic authority as a cultural construction operates within gendered, racial ideologies of the self and the political and, further, how charismatic authority authors hierarchy as much through terror as through the seemingly benign manufacturing of consent. I would argue that while

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Robinson’s significant revision of Weber posits charismatic authority as a myth of modern social science, the discourse of charismatic authority not only provides the terms of order for Weber and the studies in charisma that follow his, but also works to construct and constrict African American wishes, longings, expressions, and narratives of freedom making in the New World. To this point, my aim is to understand charisma not simply as phenomenon or as an architectonic of authority—both of these understandings, I think, fail to explain black leadership as a loaded and fraught conceptual apparatus in twentieth-century American life—but rather as a discursive and performative terrain for the elaboration of black movements for social and political change. Charisma, finally, is a storytelling regime and a set of performative prescriptions, a compact of mythologies that covers over a matrix of liberatory and disciplinary impulses that both compel and contain black movements for social change. When a 1930 Chicago Defender columnist pleads for “men who have the capacity to lead—men who can command the respect of those who must follow,” for example, charisma functions as a motivating fiction for social change; the leader plays necessary protagonist in a messianic narrative of black progress centering around male manliness and class stratification. The citation of black leadership here as a gift of grace—“God, give us men!”—cooperates with what had already begun to solidify as a master narrative and master performative of twentieth-century black politics.40 More than a static form of authority, charisma names a phenomenon, a dynamic structure, a figural process of authoring and authorizing. Charisma, a mixture of sacred and secular narrative impulses—a public narrative at once mystical and practical—is an ideal that situates authority, or the right to rule, in one exceptional figure perceived to be gifted with a privileged connection to the divine. The charismatic leader is both gifted and a gift himself: he is given divine authority and power, given to the people, and given for the sake of historical change. Diana Taylor’s formulation of the scenario, for me, is the most useful concept for explaining how black politics has been deployed as a cultural complex throughout the twentieth century. The scenario as a mode of formal theater emerged in the mid-sixteenth-century Italian genre of commedia dell’arte, in which players followed not a script but rather an outline. The room to improvise “allowed for variations and surprises. Contemporary events could be easily folded into the loosely structured plot, allowing actors to adapt to audience responses, which in turn helped shape the drama.”41 A scenario thus “grab[s] the body” while leaving it “space to maneuver.”42

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It provides the basis for a kind of physical theater that is open to variation and surprise even as it is rooted in convention: while actors “could test the limits of the scenario by suggesting alternative possibilities and outcomes, at the end of the play they returned to the conventional endings and reinforced the assumed worldview.”43 A scenario is not only a sketch but also a mode of thinking, a way of transporting historical knowledge through ritual; that is, “people learn, experience, and come to terms with past and future behaviors by physically doing them, trying them on, acting them through, and acting them out.”44 A scenario is thus a malleable historical container, a loosely scripted series of directions that serves as the basis for reenactment, ritual, role-playing, and other forms of performance that transmit and transport history and historical knowledge. The charismatic scenario in twentieth-century African American culture is a portable sketch, a movable set of prescriptions for body and affect. Charismatic events and narratives articulate a range of performative and narrative gestures within a single pattern that determines, in broad outlines, both the single event—march, rally, convention speech—and the historical circumstance that necessitates it—scarcity, suffering, lack. So it goes: a people cry out for liberation from a brutal and foreign regime while a leader is instructed in the spirit. The leader struggles against self-doubt and convention to rise to the promise of his calling. Passage through the burning bush experience, the kitchen conversation with God, the jailhouse conversion, or the wilderness flight builds toward the leader’s swift entry onto the stage of history. Tables are tossed, angels wrestled, thieves expelled, frauds exposed, and, most importantly, collective desires and destinies articulated. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s fabled conversion experience, for example, the leader emerges from a dark night of wrestling with his earthly calling over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Charles Johnson imagines the scene of revelatory wrestling in his 1998 novel, Dreamer: At last he began to pray. To whom—or what—he could not say. Not asking for anything then. Not fighting, only confessing. . . . Then it came quietly, unbidden. He was traveling light again, for the long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, the very belief in an “I” that suffered and strained to affect the world, dissolved, and for the first time he felt like a dreamer gently roused from sleep and forgetfulness.45

After the leader’s conversion, the answer to the people’s cry for leadership collides with historical exigency, and the leader makes his long-awaited entry into the social movement, the political rally, the church service, or the march’s

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telos. His gifting is evidenced by some form of miraculous proof: spectacular oratory, death-defying stunt, conversion of water into wine. And there is, of course, the miracle of prophetic speech: the gracious acknowledgments; the methodical gripping of the podium; the measured wiping of the brow; the soulful cadence; the slow, steady wading into the subject matter at hand; the libidinous cries borne of charismatic hearing among the congregation or audience; the eventual digression from the script; the casting aside of the manuscript and the journey into improvised speech; the anaphora and the anecdote; the working up into crescendo and acceleration to achieve rhetorical climax; the precipitous exit; and the breathless wonder of a crowd left wanting more.46 The African American charismatic scenario is a series of extemporaneous bodily, spiritual, musical, and rhetorical affectations as well as the performance of an idealized, narrative of liberation that is rooted in history. As David Krasner writes of the United Negro Improvement Association parades, by 1920 the events “had become for [Marcus] Garvey the locus of physicality. . . . Marching, gesturing, and spectacle established reflexes and habits that were reinforced and consolidated in the repetition and uniformity.”47 Garvey’s “visceral rhetoric” was “the galvanizing element that captured the imagination of the black working class. Through pomp and circumstance, a resonant voice, superlative stage presence, and physical confidence,” the leader “displayed a sense of pride and fashion to black people who had felt removed from the growing economic and cultural advances of Americans in general.”48 The charismatic scenario, sketched here and there with the same broad strokes, was, throughout the twentieth century, the aesthetic vehicle through which commonsense black nationalism was staged through repitition. By referring to commonsense black nationalism, I point specifically to its representation, in Lubiano’s terms, “in slogans of black responsibility, in increased attention to black self-help, in black military or militarylike trappings, in the valorization of black male self-assertion predicated on the silencing of women, of black gay males, of anyone who falls outside of the parameters of the black nationalist ‘family.’”49 The scenario transports historical knowledge in the body. It “activates the new by conjuring up the old,” becoming, in each instance, the latest version of an ancient story that gains “affective and explanatory power” through imprecise repetition.50 To call attention to charisma as a scenario of black politics is not to reduce black political leadership to a closed system of authority or to trivialize how leadership has functioned or changed throughout contemporary African American history. Rather, it is to understand

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black political history as a dynamic complex of power. It is to read the history of black political leadership as neither simply liberatory nor simply disciplinary but always already both. Charisma is a process of figuring that encompasses a dynamic interplay between performance, power, and aesthetic idealization. The charismatic scenario, accessed continually in the American political repertoire—from the dais to the page—normalizes a charismatic aesthetic, a specific organization of symbolic elements that fabricate and produce political authority that includes elements as banal as the podium; the positioning of the leader in front of, in the center of, and/or above the collective; the deployment of music to create a collective ethos of resistance and change; calling upon or silencing women to authorize masculine power; the habits of black sermonizing; and the call-and-response format of black improvisatory speech. The black politics scenario gets reenacted over and over again like the repetitive cadences of black sermonic exegesis, and the result is the same: it “bears an element of infection; everyone is compelled toward the same story.”51 Scenarios are thus caught up in power, but they are not closed systems of narrative and/or performative authority. Players are not locked in by a script but rather are granted room for improvisatory movement. Scenarios “can rehearse other worldviews. Ordinary people can take them back . . . to envision more liberating outcomes.”52 So Mahalia Jackson, for example, breaks into King’s “I Have a Dream” speech by way of call-and-response interruption and gospel conjure, urging black struggles for citizenship toward “a ‘greater’ unity, an Eros that saw the necessity of community when the ‘troubles’ of citizenship reached its limits.”53 Shirley Chisholm plays “quintessential lady” even as she stands “as a bridge between previous and present eras of hypermasculine black racial uplift agendas.”54 Bob Moses responds to Wyatt Walker’s insistence on singular leadership in his 1960 apologia for Dr. King and asks, “Rev. Walker, why do you keep saying one leader? Don’t you think we need a lot of leaders?”55 And Erykah Badu teeters off-script to reimagine antiracist politics at the 2005 Millions More March. Violences of Charisma If charisma is understood as phenomenon, as authority, and, most importantly, as discursive and performative regime transported through time and space by way of scenario, it can be said to function culturally through three primary forms of rhetorical and material violence: social, historical, and epistemological. As such, I activate what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a “reparative reading” of twentieth-century African American narrative in

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order to show how African American culture has proven a site of contest and contestation, where political ideals, narratives, and expectations are both made and unmade. Such a reading practice, attuned to how “selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture— even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them,” helps us better understand, I argue, how even African American freedom dreams are at times structured in unseemly violences of charisma; it is a reading practice that assists in the critical work of redress.56 My formulation of the charismatic scenario as a cultural regime structured in three forms of violence builds on Toni Morrison’s discussion of “national narratives” or “official stories” as narratives “born in and from chaos” that work to restore order through ideological closure.57 The official story creates the public language with which people articulate their desires, ideas, and very identities; it is the narrative vehicle of their common sense. Fulfilling the same essential function of master narratives or official stories more generally, the charismatic leader is a discursive sign, a narrative fixity of black nationalism. He promises excitement, then stability, as alternatives to meaningless chaos and lack. As Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman suggest, “He becomes the indispensable guide in a confused world, the center around which the faithful can gather and find safety. He comforts sufferers . . . takes over the responsibility of history and becomes the exterior replacement of their disintegrated individuality. They live through him.”58 The romantic investment in leadership in black culture, I argue, ignores three constitutive violences. First, historical silencing, or historiographical violence, undergirds cha risma as an explanatory device of black history in American scholarship on black activism and in public narratives of the black freedom struggle. The black leadership model that structures the sociological study of black leadership—for example, in Harold Gosnell’s 1935 Negro Politicians, Ralph Bunche’s 1940 Negro Leadership: A Tentative Analysis (despite his objections to the leadership paradigm and the text’s scathing critiques of black leaders), and Oliver Cox’s “Leadership among Negroes in the United States”—has also structured the study of black social movements in history, contributing to a top-down historical viewpoint that situates historical agency solely in the hands of great men. The silences in historical production are active, even violent, not passive or innocent.59 “One silences a fact or an individual,” MichelRolph Trouillot writes,” as a silencer silences a gun.”60 So a history of the African American freedom struggle that relates historical transformation as a story of leadership effectively silences masses of historical agents; as such,

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the aim of social history in recent decades has been to retell black history from “way, way below” or from the perspective of the “local people.”61 Even so, contemporary black historiography, black religious studies, and black literary studies often still rely on an implicit valorization of singular, charismatic leadership. The second violence of charisma that I want to highlight is social: the undemocratic relational structure that charisma as a form of authority potentially generates. Theodor Adorno explains, for example, that the idea of the leader is coterminous with modern democracy; the leader is supposed to be a representative who speaks for and to the people, a necessary rhetorical presence in a representative democratic society. But, he writes in 1950, “the truly democratic functioning of leadership . . . has vanished . . . and become increasingly rigid and autonomous.” For Adorno, “inflated leader figures” are a product of the modern culture industry, a controlling mass media in which “the idea of people becoming self-determining subjects . . . seems rather utopian.”62 Charismatic leadership here represents a certain fall from a truly democratic social ideal. Even Robinson, who objects to the reduction of charismatic leadership to singular authority, concedes that contemporary political leadership “tend[s] increasingly to subvert the capacity of the individual to respond to his or her environment creatively, intelligently, and ingeniously.”63 The third of charisma’s violences is conceptual: the reinscription of gender and sexual normativities. Charisma is a gendered and gendering structure of knowing and conceptualizing social and political movement. I do not mean to suggest that women cannot or have not become charismatic leaders. Rather, I mean to emphasize that charisma participates in a gendered economy of political authority in which the attributes of the ideal leader are the traits American society usually conceives as rightly belonging to men or to normative masculinity: ambition, courage, and, above all, divine calling. It is for this reason, for example, that black female leaders have often either been written out of history, accepted as proper leaders and duly masculinized (for example, Harriet Tubman is figured as a female Moses), or subjected to violent gender policing (as I discuss in detail in chapter 3). The conflation of charisma and normative manliness—the desire to maintain charismatic authority as a prime marker of masculinity most properly attached to the biologically male body form—is an epistemological, conceptual violation that has actual and physical effects. If charisma is a structure of political affect and effect with clear limitations, contemporary African American narrative is a staging area for new

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considerations of black politics, a space where a plurality of voices challenges charisma’s singular source of authority and where the hierarchies inscribed within the charismatic paradigm of political leadership are called into question. African American fiction and film call attention to the interplay between text and performance that is at the center of the charismatic scenario. They provide sites of engagement, restaging the leadership scenario and allowing for fuller understandings of both the workings of political ideal making and the possibilities of literary intervention in those very processes of political narrative formation. How does the literary text represent and restage a black leadership scenario that is structured around charismatic authority? How does the form of the literary text disrupt or reinscribe the narrative structure of the charismatic event; that is, what alternative political aesthetic is offered by contemporary African American literature? Finally, how can scholars in leadership studies come to a fuller appreciation of the theoretical and practical possibilities opened up by sustained attention to the violences, as well as the promises, of charismatic black leadership? Literature and New Black Leadership Studies In his 1972 essay on Malcolm X’s charismatic formation, Cedric Robinson suggests that the study of leadership must necessarily find a home in the humanities, noting that the leadership phenomenon “incorporates, it seems, in compelling fashion, the total range of human experience. The leader and the led are theatre, history, psychology, sociology, politics, religion—a list of analytical frameworks, constructs and events which extends almost infinitely.”64 Robinson pioneered the interdisciplinary study of black leadership, following the “Malcolm” essay with his 1980 book The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, which provided the first comprehensive poststructuralist theory of political leadership in the American academy. Several humanists in the field of black literary and cultural studies, including literary critics Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Hazel Carby, have gestured toward a model for the cultural or literary study of black political leadership. However, work in this area has yet to produce sustained treatment of either the cultural production of charismatic leadership or the work of culture to contest charisma.65 Further, social scientists following the posthumous publication of Weber’s sociology of politics (Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 1947), which first introduced the term charisma into scholarly parlance, have not considered culture—or, for that matter, race, gender, sexuality, class, or geography—to be an important independent variable of sociological, social psychological, or political scientific

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analyses of charismatic leadership. A 2000 essay by sociologist Philip Smith sought to correct this trend, but foundational monographs in charisma studies, such as Irvine Schiffer’s Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (1975), Ann Ruth Willner’s The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (1984), and Albert Schweitzer’s The Age of Charisma (1984), understand charismatic authority as a static social structure rather than a culturally constructed set of values, associations, and contestations.66 I argue that if charisma is not a static social structure but rather a portable structure, a sketch, of sociopolitical history and engagement—again, a cultural regime— then it might be deciphered as a fiction emerging from a particular cultural context (here, an American history of race, gender, and class oppression) and might be historicized and deconstructed rather than understood as a natural structure of human sociality. Building on the premise that embodied practice is a repository for cultural memory and cultural critique, I am drawing our attention to the African American charismatic scenario as a public archive for widely held beliefs about authority and identity. To theorize the scenario, as I have suggested, is to bring narrative analysis and performance analysis together: “The scenario includes features well theorized in literary analysis, such as narrative and plot,” but “we also pay attention to the milieux and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language.”67 The scenario differs from the text in critical ways: it is ephemeral rather than enduring, and the repertoire that houses it hosts a set of performances rather than a collection of concrete narratives. In Smith’s “Culture and Charisma: Outline of a Theory,” he argues that sociology, bound by treatments of social structure, has missed the distinctly cultural aspects of charisma, a group structure that depends on beliefs in divine power and sanction that are always deeply individual and intimate but also enacted publicly. More than an empirical phenomenon discoverable by science, charisma is a discursive matrix produced at the site of cultural production; this matrix is best approached through an interdisciplinary framework. My methodological aim is to center cultural theory and close reading as important tools for analyzing black political modernity and postmodernity and in so doing to intervene in the relegation of black leadership, as an object of study, to the social sciences. Black politics is, after all, “a performance genre.”68 “Insofar as the black political performer seeks efficacy,” Tavia Nyong’o argues, “he or she seeks to do something with blackness that has not yet been done, to re-frame or re-key performance in such a way as to disrupt the ordinary distinction between playing at something and really doing

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it.”69 While critics viciously attack the performance or putting on of formal black politics and black cultural politics—think of Adolph Reed’s “posing as politics” thesis—it may be more productive to theorize performance as generative, as not simply reflecting or supporting but rather surrogating (endlessly casting substitutes for a supposed original) politics. Thus, a fluid understanding of political aesthetics that can address both the performative and the officially narrativized, to return to my earlier point, is essential to an understanding of the function of charisma, for charisma incorporates both extemporaneous playacting and the rigid narrative of its own history or official story. While performance is understood after the advent of performance studies to be “dynamic and generative, enabling difficult and controversial stances and poses that ultimately help us better to articulate our objects (and subjects) of inquiry,” aesthetics, more institutionally aged and settled neatly in the disciplines of art history and literature, refers to a particular arrangement of symbolic elements that, perhaps, is less “dynamic,” less “live.”70 A theory of charisma as scenario (dynamic structure of black politics) and aesthetic (standard of goodness and beauty for black politics) allows a mediation between disciplinary understandings of embodiment, textuality, and political engagement. More than requiring a process of disciplinary melting and merging, a cultural theory of black charismatic leadership demands attention to the productive possibilities of narrative, of texts’ potential to redress the flaws of charisma’s mythology.71 My point is simply that literary and cultural studies, which have historically been attuned to how ideology works at the site of both public and private narrative, might have something important to teach us about black leadership. Social scientific studies of leadership usually fall into one of four categories: the historical study, the sociological study, the political scientific study, or the social psychological or psychohistorical study.72 Among these social scientific studies, there is little agreement as to the precise meaning of leadership itself, and the scholarship of the field chronicles organic political leadership in social movements that sprang up in opposition to slavery and segregation, religious leadership, and electoral leadership. Oliver C. Cox’s “Leadership among Negroes in the United States” (1950) provides a classic example of black leadership historiography. Cox sets the periodizing and classifying parameters for black leadership that have been long recognized by scholars of the subject: the division of African American history into the leadership eras of slavery, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction (later scholars would add the civil rights and post–civil rights eras), and the identification of a basic “protest versus accommodation” leadership typology. Histories of

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black leadership like Cox’s tend toward the case study methodology and a top-down vision of history, in which African American history is told as the story of leadership, and the study of leadership serves as a shortcut for the study of history.73 Ronald Walters and Robert Smith’s African American Leadership summarizes the commonsense notions about political leadership produced by sociology and political science: “In summary . . . the studies reveal essentially a middle-aged, middle-class leadership of men, although the ‘radical’ or ‘militant’ leaders have tended to be younger and less middle-class in terms of their education and occupations.”74 Here Walters and Smith show how black leadership studies often shore up widely held notions about gender, class, and authority: “Canonical studies in leadership have focused on leadership without deconstructing the social structures that produce leadership as a gendered, racialized, and classed construction of capitalist modernity.”75 Further, studies of African American leadership have tended to be guided by methodological disciplinarity as well as an uncritical longing for charismatic leadership. The monographs on black leadership often betray the subfield’s mournful nostalgia for a kind of leadership that is always imagined as singular and male. Smith’s We Have No Leaders, H. Viscount Nelson’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Black Leadership, and Manning Marable’s Black Leadership all take for granted that readers will all agree on the meaning of leadership; that strong black leadership is a relic of the past; and that leadership is inherently a masculine sphere of influence. There has been no self-critical examination of the discourse of black leadership. Walters and Smith’s study of the field comes closest to providing such a metadiscourse, but even they conclude that “Negro leadership literature is certainly not theoretically robust.”76 In this way, the field of black leadership studies lacks critical reflection on the meaning of leadership and how it is circulated through narrative or cultural means. Scholars in American studies, however, have sought various interdisciplinary methodologies for studying twentieth-century black political culture. Interdisciplinary work in black cultural studies since the late 1960s has attended to the intersections of history, politics, and cultural production in music, dance, and fiction. As cultural studies scholarship turned to the history of black politics and the critique of middle-class forms of leadership and racial uplift in the 1990s, with, for example, the 1994 publication of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and the 1997 release of Joy James’s Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, feminist studies and social histories of black leadership

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emerged from history, literary studies, and political science. Hazel Carby’s foundational study, Race Men (1998), along with Kevin K. Gaines’s Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996), Evelyn Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1994), Elsa Barkley Brown’s “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom” (1994), Glenda Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896– 1920 (1996), and Cathy Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999), documents the gendered ideologies of black leadership emerging over the twentieth century, taking particular care to show how those ideologies were produced in the wake of a failed Reconstruction project and how they continue to motivate public understandings of black leadership in limiting, ahistorical, sexist, and heterosexist ways. Richard Iton’s 2008 In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era marks film, literature, and music as significant sites of the fantastic, the utopian impulse in black politics, since the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Most recently, Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2010) reapproaches civil rights history through the lens of sexual violence, while Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011) analyzes the uses of photography in black social movements. I situate this work within this trend of what might be considered a new formation of black leadership studies, which critiques the assumptions of an older model of leadership studies based solely in social scientific methodology by taking narrative and performance to be critical mechanisms in the production, circulation, and contestation of black political modernity and its founding fictions. African American literature and film, I argue, has historically restaged what I call the charismatic scenario, a loose sketch or portable script that is etched into, if not definitive of, the repertoire of public African American politics in the twentieth century. These restagings redress the violences of charismatic authority. I use the word redress deliberately, not to refer to a process of correction or rectification (for, to be sure, the restagings I discuss leave us with more questions than solutions), but rather to denote a process of re-dressing—creating a new political style, fabricating renewed visions for social life. In this sense, to redress the violences of charisma is to find a new symbolic language to articulate visions of social and political

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organizing. My framework for the study of black charismatic leadership takes into account the figural elements at work in commonsense notions and stagings of the leadership scenario—symbolic building blocks like the podium, the march, the exhortation, and the body that index gender ideologies, historical memory, and cultural assumptions about human access to the divine. All these scripting technologies provide a symbolic metalanguage for charisma that suggests we approach the subject with the cultural studies methodologies of materialist historiography and close reading. If charismatic leadership is indeed a kind of political fiction, then there is no way to understand the making of black political modernity without attending to the various narrative and textual ways that the charismatic scenario was fashioned and contested throughout the twentieth century. The Leader and the Text: Charismatic Contagion and Contestation By the opening of the twentieth century, the United States had witnessed a flowering of black charismatic leadership. Emerging from the evangelical churches of the South and surfacing on the street corners, banquet halls, and, still, the evangelical pulpits of the nation’s cities and towns, black community and national leaders commanded attention from followers and the media. “Black Nationalism was producing a cacophony,” writes Krasner. “What was needed was a leader who could obtain harmony.”77 For Krasner, Marcus Garvey symbolized this new consolidation of black nationalism after World War I. Certainly Garvey was an international icon of black activism. But other leaders would form a golden cast of charismatic protagonists in the drama of African American history: A. Phillip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Farrakhan. The scenes surrounding these figures bear important similarities: the spectacular oratory, the masculine (or masculinized) body, the positioning of the leader in front of or above his followers, the ecstatic call and response of political speech making and riposte. The wish for charismatic leadership was echoed in the literary text throughout the twentieth century as much as it was constructed by events like the World’s Fair, the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) parades, and the civil rights marches. In Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 The Marrow of Tradition, for example, rioting black masses ask a well-groomed, light-skinned black doctor to represent them—ironically, given the already existing grassroots leadership of a Josh Green—pleading, “Mr. Watson,—we’re lookin fer a leader,”78 while Du Bois scripts a cast of exemplary black leaders into his classic meditation on black American life in the 1903 Souls of Black Folk,

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writing of a “peculiar dynasty” of black leaders and listing the “new” leaders of the century as foils to Booker T. Washington.79 But the twentieth-century black literary text also registered now-canonical objections to black leadership. For example, when two lazing residents of Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville encounter Janie’s second husband and “s[i]t upright at the tone of his voice” in 1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, they are awed by Joe Starks’s intoning: “‘Dat man talks like a section foreman,’ Coker commented. ‘He’s mighty compellment.’”80 In the informal election scene that follows, Starks becomes mayor of the burgeoning black town, and the gender policing that his authority performs becomes part of Hurston’s oeuvre-long critique of black leadership as a form of gender subjection. When the instantaneous election prompts one character to invite Janie— now “Mrs. Mayor Starks”—to the podium, the “burst of applause was cut short by Joe taking the floor himself. ‘Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ bout no speech-makin.’”81 While the town is initially seduced by the performance of charismatic authority, the people grow to resent Joe’s “big belly[ing] round and tell[ing] folks what to do.”82 Janie’s marriage to Joe, something of a compromise with conventional gender roles, is not the only concession in the novel. As Joe’s mayorship represents Eatonville’s figurative marriage to its leader, it too is a concession— evidence that charismatic black leadership itself functions as a compromise with postemancipation ideologies of gender and social hierarchy. As Janie’s grandmother warns her early in the novel, “Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. . . . Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her.”83 In Hurston’s work—and I will discuss this at greater length in chapter 3—charismatic leadership inspires, first, awe, and second, fear and trembling. The charismatic scenario is the beginning of trouble, not the necessary precondition for freedom from the constraints of racial capitalism. Importantly, Hurston’s Janie shows how seductive singular, representative leadership is—falling herself for Joe Starks’s emancipatory promise of “the horizon” and rhetorical smoothness—and how much it is a product of lexical seduction and textual authority. It is Joe’s mastery of language and property—his purchase of 200 acres and his “com[ing] off wid de papers in his pocket”—that authorizes him as the town’s leader.84 In Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, published two years after Their Eyes Were Watching

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God, authority is not the product of property documents but of scriptural tablets—here, the Ten Commandments. In both cases, a man’s voice authorizes itself with, of, or for the Word, and the sonorous man with a text in his hand stands at the center of the charismatic scenario. I would argue that this holds true not only in Hurston’s work, but throughout a diasporic repertoire of modern black freedom dreams. In both Frederick Douglass’s and C. L. R. James’s accounts of black political heroism, the scene of inspired reading is narrated as the preamble to the charismatic leadership scenario more fully realized after the political conversion process is complete. Douglass writes in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. . . . The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master—things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.85

The Columbian Orator scene is a critical moment of political conversion and coming of age, as a twelve-year-old Douglass becomes convinced of rhetorical activism as he is drawn further into the text: I met with one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.86

Here Douglass is a key actor in a charismatic contagion. The rhetor in Orator gives voice to “his own soul,” just as charismatic speakers are often perceived to speak not to a hearer but from within a hearer. The text is a contact site where Douglass is radicalized by a Sheridan on the page. He is given new sight, much like a post–Damascus Road St. Paul: “The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts,” he writes; and “Freedom was now appeared, to disappear no more forever.”87 The Narrative’s canonicity

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reproduces Douglass’s charismatic authority; it strengthens the connection that the text implicitly draws between the scene of ecstatic literacy and male political heroism. Claudia Tate argues as much when she writes that for traditional historians and literary scholars, Douglass’s identity as a black man assumes, on the one hand, gender specificity in a male narratology in which two “master narratives”—the black liberational and the Western patriarchal discourses—condition his heroism and, on the other hand, categorical racial representation in which Douglass’s sexual identity is conflated into a standardized, generic racial discourse. . . . In other words, its gender specificity, implicit and explicit, inscribes the act of black heroic selfdefinition . . . as a masculine discursive event.88

The autobiography reproduces, in other words, the intra- and intertextual charismatic contagion: as Sheridan transfers to Douglass the power to make freedom through rhetorical persuasion routed through normative heterosexual masculinity on the page, so Douglass offers the same transfer of power through lectio divina to contemporary readers of what Tate calls “the prototypical black master text.”89 C. L. R. James’s privileging of the text as a site of charismatic formation in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution is even more deliberate. In detailing his history of the Haitian revolution from the perspective of “the property,” he discovers Toussaint L’Ouverture studying French priest Abbé Raynal’s call for slave revolution in his Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies. Here he quotes Raynal’s leadership longing—“A courageous chief is only wanted. Where is he?”—before showing Toussaint repeating the passage “over and over again.”90 Here James attempts to reconcile two disparate historiographical logics in The Black Jacobins: the Marxist notion of history as class struggle (“Men make their own history”91) and the assumption that singular leadership is the engine of history (“But if [the masses] could seize the opportunity they could not create it”;92 “Toussaint made the history that he made because he was the man that he was”93). Here again, the charismatic contagion routed through the scene of ecstatic literacy scripts black male heroism in a way that is at odds with the larger story of the book. While Toussaint’s charismatic lure is narratively irresistible—he has “that electrifying effect characteristic of great men of action”94—it also works to frame and simplify a story that would otherwise be “unthinkable,” as MichelRolph Trouillot would have it, or more difficult to reconcile with dominant narratives of black inhumanity.95 That other story is a messier, larger, more

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incremental, less teleological story of black people remaking their social reality: “The slaves had revolted because they wanted to be free. But no ruling class ever admits such things.”96 If the text is imagined as a site of charismatic formation, where lectio divina produces an ecstatic conversion that is confirmed by the gift of grace that finally surfaces in the charismatic scenario, the scenario itself privileges inspired speech as a proof of that gifting. The authority that inheres in the prophetic speech central to both the religious and secular sermonic scenario—the worship service and the political rally—is constituted both through texts, such as the Bible and official history, and the presumed divine source of oratory. The African American sermon, Hortense Spillers argues, is ritualized narrative: both social and literary event. Authority is both written and extemporaneously channeled from a source that is both beyond text and the source of logos, or text, itself. “African American sermons,” she argues, “offer a paradigmatic instance of reading as process, encounter, and potential transformation.”97 If the Bible is for the preacher a material symbol of power, the live sermon references the physical text as a way of citing the original authority or logos of a divine source. In this way, the text in the performance of authority mediates between presentist political action, practices of reading, and heavenward impulses. “With both feet planted in the actual mess of human being,” Spillers writes, “the sermon would convince the chicken that it is an eagle.”98 Although there is no one-to-one relationship between the sermons preached in pulpits and the exhortations of political speakers, the African American sermon encapsulates “variously secular transformations and revisions as urgent political address.”99 Charismatic black leaders like Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King Jr. have proven the quasireligious ingredients of black political prosthesis, or inspired speech. When Garvey appeared at a UNIA rally to deliver a speech five days after being shot and wounded, participation in the movement reached a new height, according to the Negro World.100 Virginia Collins, who heard Garvey speak, relates the mystical power of the speech: When he spoke, it was as if you were speaking yourself. It was not like somebody speaking to you, but like he was you, or you was he, and it just was a connected link and it was somethin’ like fire, like lightnin’, like something that went through everybody at the same time.101

In the shooting and the subsequent speech, Garvey was transformed from an ordinary “race man” into an brilliant hero who had emerged victorious over

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death and sealed his authority through the spectacle of speech making, which involved not only the content of Garvey’s message of self-reliance but also the mystical contagion that sweeps through the crowd like the “fire” or “lightnin’” of an evangelical or Pentecostal worship service as the speech is delivered. Charismatic authority had been created, first through the miracle of survival, and second through the mystical pageantry of the speechmaking spectacle.102 Taylor Branch’s description of King’s first speech as the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, like Collins’s recollection of her conversion to Garveyism, ascribes religious imagery to the ecstatic effect of the speech: The giant cloud of noise shook the building and refused to go away. One sentence had set it loose somehow, pushing the call-and-response of the Negro church service past the din of a political rally and on to something else that King had never known before.103

Here the speech ignites a contagion that transports the hearers and the speaker himself into the mystical realm of “something else” that they “had never known before.” In these scenes, the charismatic scenario is unalterably linked to the equation of prosthesis with the gift of grace that underpins black charismatic authority. The authority that is performed vis-à-vis lectio divina and prosthesis is porous, however, and the stage of charismatic formation—the text—is also the site that witnesses the struggle for discursive space that I have been calling restaging or contestation. For James, for example, the story of Toussaint’s rise is always troubled by the unruly revolution of the African captives whose repeated cries of “Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!” literally interrupt the formal scenes of charismatic leadership that the book stages in its foreground. The text implores the reader, in that sense, to “hear double”: to hear in excess of formal political speech, to pay attention to exchanges and shifting positions of players in the background and the foreground.104 Discussing the interface between the written T/text (the Bible or the manuscript sermon) of inspired speech and the oral/aural play of hearing double—the hermeneutical practice of the audience or congregation that hears both the Word and the extraliteral elements of the sermonic scene—Spillers argues that “the churchgoer hears double, or in excess, because it is between the lines of Scripture that the narratives of insurgence are delivered.”105 The hearers of the religious or political message do not simply hear what is said, but mishear or overhear— hear in excess—the speaker’s meaning. If messages of insurgent action slip

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between the lines of inspired address, mishearings also accrue to the charismatic scenario as it shows up in political performances and in texts: it is possible that the players in the sermonic or charismatic scenario overhear what is said, and, following Toni Morrison, revise the “already-read” by engaging in a practice of “thickened” reading, in which reading involves “not just [an individual’s] mastery of the inherited texts of his or her culture, but also its subversion.”106 The text—the novel, the film, the song, and the photograph—is a site of charismatic contagion and contestation. Such mis- or overhearings and rewritings are constitutive of twentiethcentury African American cultural production. If charisma functions as an official story and a portable scenario of black political engagement, literary texts reread and rewrite the ritualized narrative in new grammars. Cultural production thus shapes political desire even as it carries the potential to undo the influence of “official” stories through the production of restagings. Many of these restagings are produced in African American literature and film, and in these textual restagings, novels and films attempt to redress the violences of charismatic authority. To attend to these narrative processes of redress, I attend to various moments in which culture makers like W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, William Melvin Kelley, Tim Story, Paul Beatty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison intervene in or interrupt the charismatic scenario to restage—reimagine, restyle, redress—the history of black political imaginings. I read these culture makers’ fraught restagings of black leadership as creations that are themselves on the muted margins of American culture. They perform the critical redesign work needed to address the violences of charismatic authority, which often go unnoticed in the official stories of scholarship and popular culture, of black and history and politics. In this way, contemporary African American narrative has been, over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the very ground for contesting the prime fiction of black political leadership: that charismatic political leadership is the necessary precondition for survival, progress, political power, and social unity.

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Chapter 2

Leadership’s Looks The Aesthetics of Black Political Modernity

WHEN LITERARY CRITIC HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. lamented that that black Americans could not seem to “agree on what leadership should look like” as the twentieth century neared its close, he signaled a century-long anxiety about how race men would look while representing the race.1 In the transition from slavery to freedom, charismatic leadership came to occupy the central site of freedom’s experimental expressions. By the post-Reconstruction period, the various forms of black leadership—religious, intellectual, social, and political—continued to be haunted by, first, a putatively premodern form of leadership most accurately named charisma, and, second, by the final retrenchment of formal black political participation with the Hayes Compromise in 1876 and the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. It was during this period—referred to variously as the nadir of black history, the Age of Washington and Du Bois, the Age of Jim Crow, the Age of Voice, and the Age of Charisma—that the black male spokesman would be claimed in U.S. public culture as the most valued and visible site of black political expression. Further, as the first Great Migration found blacks leaving Southern fields for Northern cities, a reformed, remade, remastered black leadership scenario would arise in urban centers, defining black political modernity as an age of charismatic splendor. I pointed out in chapter 1 that understandings of black political leadership are lacking attention to charisma as a narrative and performative tropology, as a scenario or loose script for the acting out and recording of black politics. While social scientists have explored the social function of charismatic authority, they have often failed to note what I understand to be the cultural—performative and symbolic—aspects of the charismatic scenario and its circulation in contemporary African American culture. Charisma, as I have pointed out, is a performative and storytelling regime: a portable structure, formed under conditions of terror, that works to authorize itself 35

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precisely through its deployment, in performance after performance, of the erotic relationships between leader and people, past and present, lack and prosperity. More importantly, contemporary African American culture has functioned as an archive of contestation, housing a history of dialogic tension around questions of leadership, performance, and racial identity in African American life. The cultural text tells the story of how the twentiethcentury ideal of black charismatic leadership was made and unmade, produced and contested. During the 1920s and 1930s, as authors like W. E. B. Du Bois and George S. Schuyler attempted to dethrone existing charismatic exemplars—primarily Marcus Garvey—they introduced reading audiences to both charismatic charlatans and genuine race saviors in their fiction and nonfiction. Against the claim that the 1930s ushered in a certain fascination and affirmation of fascist leadership styles among black writers, including Schuyler and Zora Neale Hurston, I argue in this chapter that even as writers longed for the messianic arrival and rise of a black charismatic leader, at significant moments they also contested charisma as an organizing structure of black political engagement. The twilight years of the Harlem Renaissance were marked by the dynamic interplay of a range of black political possibilities in the cultural text; the literary text bore witness to a proliferation of attitudes regarding the look of black leadership during the interwar period and to the emergence of black leadership as a vigorously contested representational complex. African American letters, for example, “gave birth to a new, positive, and exhilarating chapter of a black radical tradition defined by Marxist political engagement”; but they also, Mark Christian Thompson argues, “begat monsters.”2 It is this dialogic relationship between what Robin Kelley calls “freedom dreams” and what Thompson calls “freedom nightmares”— particularly during the closing decade of the Harlem Renaissance, 1928– 38—that concerns me here.3 Reflecting a post-Reconstruction shift in the cultural values attached to black political representation and black leadership’s adjustments to the urban environs during the Great Migration, this decade witnessed a clash of leadership ideologies that had been building toward climax. Charismatic leadership, most readily identified in the early 1920s with Garvey and the other “black gods of the metropolis,” had emerged as the hegemonic form of black politics, but again, it was not without its vicious detractors.4 One of the most critical points of contestation within literary texts was this paradox of black political modernity: that black leadership was being posited as the answer to the discourse of blacks’ savagery and primitivism

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while the charismatic scenario was circulating as a vehicle of political passions expressed in ways that could be seen as irrational. Given this paradox, the leader’s body was a site of excess and discipline, nonrational desire and rationalist anxiety. Understanding how the charismatic scenario has functioned throughout the contemporary era thus requires analyzing these constructions of the black male body through the interwar scenes of political fanfare, erotic identification with the leader, and rationalist disidentification with the leader in both historical event and literary text. In this chapter, I interrogate the black modern leadership look in two forms: the visual imagery of the black charismatic scenario that was being cultivated over the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the ecstatic exchanges of looking in the charismatic scenario as indices of the connection that I am drawing between erotics, politics, and aesthetics in the cultural production of twentieth-century black leadership. Reading Du Bois’s 1928 Dark Princess against Schuyler’s 1937 Black Empire, I argue that the anxieties, fantasies, articulations, and looks surrounding expressions and visions of charismatic black leadership are constitutive of the culture of black political modernity, of the structures of feeling corresponding to blacks’ struggle for the rights and privileges of citizenship over the twentieth century. The preoccupations around black male representivity in the period beginning after Reconstruction and ending with the U.S. entry into World War II in 1939 solidified the charismatic scenario as a structuring structure for black politics throughout the twentieth century, even as black culture producers sought to interrupt a discourse of black modern politics founded in charismatic authority. Migrating to the Man Black political culture in American life has been shaped by at least three historical modalities animating modern black subjectivity. First, as I discussed in chapter 1, emancipation as an incomplete project led to both disappointment in freedom’s failure and hopes for its completion, such that if the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of black political modernity lay in emancipation and a historical bloc of “freed” black subjects, the foundation for postbellum black politics was circumscribed by the paradox of liberal freedom. Based in individual sovereignty secured through the claim to private property, “freedom” required subjects to prove their fitness for liberty, and this obligation to prove one’s rightness for citizenship would in many ways constitute and circumscribe the twentieth-century black freedom struggle.5 When the captive was freed, she was freed into an impossible position

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within the liberal state, one in which she bore the responsibility or burden of individual sovereignty without any stable claim to it in the face of white supremacist terror. The harsh conditions of a postbellum United States— with convict leasing, peonage labor, and restrictions on mobility belying “emancipation”—were the originary terms by which black political modernity was constructed and upon which black leaders articulated what Manning Marable calls “the essential problematic of black leadership in white America”: “whether and how the principles and practices of liberal democracy can be extended and guaranteed to black people.”6 Second, migration and the emergence of black urban culture reshaped and redesigned the leadership scenario that had defined black political culture in the postbellum era. While in 1900 some 90 percent of blacks were living in the South, approximately 500,000 black Southerners moved to Northern and Western cities between 1916 and 1919, with twice that many following during the 1920s. The urban scene of black freedom-making in the first decades of the twentieth century responded to the reorganization of black cultural life around the urban and the sights and sounds of the new American cities. Modernity “radically altered the perception and construction of space, given the large-scale increase in population density in metropolitan areas.”7 As blacks made their way to urban centers after World War I, hoping to flee a South hostile to their social, economic, and political advancement, what they found in the industrializing North were often shocking reminders of what they were fleeing in the postagrarian South: by 1918, the lynch mob had announced its presence in the Northern city; and as the 1919 Red Summer attested, the race war had little respect for the Mason–Dixon line.8 Black migratory modernity thus gave rise to new forms of cultural expression that were the vehicle for the contradictions of freedom as a stillunfinished project. The new black urban culture, inflected by emerging technologies of vision and reception (film),9 verbal display (rhetorical flair),10 sound (the phonograph and the loudspeaker),11 and body movement (new expressions of dance and performance),12 gave rise to multiple “expressive forms by which people sought to adjust their physical being to a new and often oppressive terrain.”13 As Jacqueline Stewart points out, the Great Migration produced a host of black urban cultures: In cities like Chicago, African Americans developed, among many others, vibrant Black religious cultures . . . Black music cultures . . . Black political cultures . . . Black sports cultures . . . Black print cultures . . . and Black business cultures. . . . These Black cultures intersected (across boundaries of class, gender, and age) to structure Black urban life as a matrix of experiences and

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sensations, including comfort and danger, familiarity and novelty, contemplation and action, proscription and empowerment.14

Urban black political culture in the 1900s and 1910s did not do away with the charismatic hierarchy emerging from Southern black churches; it ushered in a new version of black political pageantry centered around the charismatic leader’s aura and played out in cityscape performances like street sermons, United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) parades, and stage pageants like Du Bois’s 1913 “The Star of Ethiopia.” In New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Chicago, charismatic leaders of black social, political, and religious movements redesigned what I have referred to as the scenario of charismatic black leadership, a sketch that would come to set the broad outlines for both scholarly and popular notions of black leadership throughout the twentieth century. The proliferation of new religious movements in the first three decades of the twentieth century (Father Divine’s Peace Mission, C. M. “Daddy” Grace’s United House of Prayer for All People, the Church of God, the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, the Coptic Church); the street-corner agitating by Harlem’s Sufi Abdul Hamid, Carlos Cooks, A. Philip Randolph, Hubert Harrison, and others; and the proliferation of political brotherhoods organized by men in the urban North (the African Blood Brotherhood, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) all contributed to the reshaping of black modern political ideals during the Great Migration, often performing black modernity as charismatic in the religious sense of the word—as a structure of adoration that privileges emotionalism and the gifts of the spirit: speaking in tongues, spirit possession, spirited prayer, and faith healing.15 In this way, the making of black leadership in the age of charisma loosely cohered around the mythos of a singular leader bestowed with the gift of grace; the charismatic scenario served as a formulary for black organization, and the performance and position of leadership was the locus of a type of black masculine authority based in imitation, succession and perfectibility.16 Kevin Gaines points out, for instance, that Harrison was “the prototype of the Harlem soapbox street corner orator immortalized by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” He “held forth along with Randolph and other outdoor lecturers” and was a forerunner to Marcus Garvey, who “owed many, though clearly not all, of his political ideas to Harrison.”17 Harlem marked an essential location of the emergent black political modernity and housed, much like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., a vital mix of black religious, literary, military, sports, social, and political cultures. When the Fifteenth Regiment of New York’s National

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Guard marched home to Harlem in February 1919, having been awarded the Croix de Guerre from the French while faithfully serving in the Great War and earning the regiment the name “Hell Fighters,” the soldiers performed the staple scenario of an urbanized black modern politics. David Levering Lewis narrates the march into the center of Harlem: A field of pennants, flags, banners, and scarves thrashed about the soldiers like an elephant grass in a gale, threatening to engulf them. In front of the unofficial reviewing stand at 130th Street, Europe’s sixty-piece band broke into ‘Here comes my Daddy’ to the extravagant delight of the crowd. At this second platform, Harlem notables and returning heroes beheld each other with almost palpable elation and pride.18

Both in the account above and in other accounts, this scene marks the formal beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, as the black soldiers are taken to symbolize “the germination of a new self-confidence in the community.” Just as the soldiers, so too did “leaders like Cyril Briggs, A. Philip Randolph, and W. E. B. Du Bois [represent] the growth of a new consciousness and a renewed direct struggle against white oppression.”19 But the soldier march was only one of many events that signaled the emergence of a black political modernity centered in regimented performances of male leadership and male-male congratulation during the 1910s and 1920s. Figure 2 shows a 1924 UNIA parade carved into the same Harlem cityscape, designed with the same performative architecture as the New York Fifteenth’s march home. Smartly dressed men in dark suits and top hats and women and children clothed in white dresses and suits line up along opposite sides of the intersection of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue to receive the male procession penetrating Harlem; the crowd gathers below six-story buildings as the procession of cars—one boasting a sign proclaiming, “THE NEW NEGRO HAS NO FEAR”—maneuvers through the crossroads. While Hazel Carby reads the UNIA’s political structure as “conceived in terms of a premodern dynastic order,”20 its visual structure was modern to its core: shaped in and by the twentieth century city, it appropriated Harlem’s speaker’s corner for its own use. This again is the paradox of black politics’ relationship to the discourses of modernity: for social science, charisma is a premodern form of authority that only flashes up in capitalist modernity before being routinized or rationalized; but if black modernity is understood as a set of structures of feeling that “refuse the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics,” the twentieth-century black leadership scenario is a fundamentally modern, modernist performance of political authority.21

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Charisma in Western modernity weds a pre-Enlightenment mysticism to the promise of the new; and the African American charismatic scenario, more specifically, blends the mysticism of an “authentic” form of authority, rooted in appeals to an “authentic” racial identity, with the technologies of modern political performance—the car, the uniform, the loudspeaker—and the promise of citizenship. The leader “delivers” followers—here, marchers—“to the tranquility of the premodern through performatic display” while holding out the promise of a bright future, complete with a black citizenry accessoried with vibrant regalia and tricked out in shiny Packards or Model Ts.22 During the World War I and interwar periods, black urban populations journeyed into U.S. cities hoping to escape the terrors of the South, filtering their desires for freedom through the sights and sounds of the modern city. During and after the Great Migration, urban black political culture worked to define black politics as the performance black masculine leadership, making other forms of political labor, from everyday resistance to terror to the organizing of the Women’s Convention in the Baptist Church, invisible in the popular, and until recently, historical, imaginations.23 Third, innovation and the new technologies of labor, transportation, cultural production, communication, and exchange affected how black leadership would come to be defined throughout the twentieth century. In a

Figure 2. The New Negro Has No Fear; Harlem, corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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national landscape haunted by and perpetuating the violences of racialized slavery, ideas of black political leadership would have to evolve to become relevant in a newly industrialized environment. They would have to be narrativized in new ways and in new media. During the 1920s and 1930s, leadership would increasingly become an object of literary inquiry and aestheticization. It was in this period that “race conscious cultural giants provided a flair for leadership unparalleled in the annals of African American history,” and “leadership and literary genius seemed anonymous.”24 The Harlem Renaissance thus “reflected the modernist motif of the belief in the vision of one idea, or leader, who sets the tone and standard for others to follow.”25 Leadership was, like art, needed to make order out of the fragmented realities of modern black life in the urban North. The sedimentation of singular black male charismatic leadership as a cultural ideal can thus be understood to correspond to the post-Reconstruction reliance on gender hierarchy as a mark of civilization, the effects of mass migration during World War I, and the emerging technologies of the twentiethcentury charismatic scenario. The interwar black literary text bears witness to what corresponded in turn to this sedimentation: the fantastic and phantasmic appearances and disappearances of singular leadership and the restagings that form an archive of contestation around charisma as a structuring structure of black politics. In this context, the romantic longing for the charismatic leader on one hand and the cynical critique of charismatic leadership on the other makes the interwar years a constitutive moment in the making and unmaking of contemporary ideals of black leadership and points to the literary text an important site of contact for recovering this dynamic tension in modern African American life and letters. The Parade, the Pageant, and the Romance of Leadership The leader’s body would come to represent, in cultural productions such as Du Bois’s “The Star of Ethiopia” and Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint series, an aesthetic center around which not quite free, newly urban, technologically interpellated subjects could imagine their liberation from modern scenes of fragmentation, mechanization, and racial subjection. The visual citation of the leader, in parades, pageants, and other cultural texts, as the answer to the anxieties of black migratory modernity provided a set of terms by which interwar African American literature constructed and contested charisma as a scenario for modern black politics. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the race man fashioned himself, and the future of the race, through verbal display, as Marlon Ross explains:

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Even without actual pictures . . . the new-century race promoter can effect an arresting display by exploiting the technique of ekphrasis, the attempt to render a visual picture through descriptive language, whether through the extended description of a literal person or scene or through the showy array of fixed allegorical figures. The interaction between discursive and visual forms, between narrative and picture, enables the author to stage the race.26

If race men figuratively “staged the race” in their writing through ekphrasis, they also literally staged the race toward black political modernity in more properly visual forms like photography and political spectacle. Now, as Hazel Carby explains, the black male body offered the “possibility of unity for a fractious age,” palliating modern anxieties in such a way that it would become a privileged site for the projection of American innocence and black American hopes for redemption.27 Paul Robeson, for example, represented an individual ideal of nobility and spiritual beauty. And the black masculine body during the 1920s and 1930s “is presented as a modernist ideal to be desired by other men, a standard for social ideals of masculinity, and a means for bringing to account the masculinity of the male viewer.”28 What Carby refers to as “strategies of inwardness” or individualism, which “reappropriate[d] an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages,” posited the one over the many, the captain over the infantry, the transcendent subject over the historical subject, the leader over the follower, and the narrative trajectory, in modernist texts, inward, toward the psyche.29 I would add, though, that the crucial performative and narrative maneuver in black political modernity, in pageants and parades as well as in cultural texts like Du Bois’s “The Star of Ethiopia,” Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1921), and C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) and Black Jacobins (1938), is upward and outward as well as inward: the charismatic male figure stands on higher ground, beckoning modern audiences to cast their cares upon the singular form of his hard, authentic, uniformed, divinely anointed body and to trust that his spirit is the one among many chosen as divine oracle and representative. The upward–outward longing for the leader as “the indispensable guide in a confused world, the center around which the faithful can gather and find safety,” and the desire for his body as “the exterior replacement of . . . disintegrated individuality”30 is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the history of how Garvey functioned as an absent presence in UNIA spectacles during his detention in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he served two years and nine months between 1925 and 1927 after being charged with mail fraud. The Negro World reported on the August 1, 1926,

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anniversary of the first Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World that “the vast audience gave three resounding cheers for the imprisoned leader and, as if not content with this, burst into prolonged applause, as the sounds of the cheering died away.”31 At this anniversary celebration, which was called Garvey Day, a missionary from San Domingo encouraged the assembly to keep their eyes on Garvey, his absence notwithstanding: “He was convinced, he declared, as the audience cheered him to the echo, that the moment one kept his eyes fixed on Garvey from that moment he prospered, but the moment one turned one’s back on the great leader, that moment he perished.”32 If the culture of the UNIA during Garvey’s detention was suspended in a messianic temporality in which the memory of the leader’s past triumph and the hope for his reappearance determined how the image of the leader was invoked in both spectacle and sundry, the Convention of Negro Peoples that took place in August 1926 demonstrated this spatiotemporal architectonic of contemporary black leadership. When the convention opened on August 15, the tribute to Garvey “took on added significance because of the fact that the object of the adoration and adulation of the populace was not present in person, but languishing in a white man’s prison.”33 As the acting presidentgeneral, Fred A. Toote, addressed the assembly, “several persons began to sob” as he expressed regret for Garvey’s absence.34 When North Carolina’s Rev. J. H. Chase offered the assembly a homily about God’s provision to Abraham of a ram in the bush, an allegory of divine substitution, he gazed on Garvey’s robe, paying honor to “the absent one.” “When I cast my eye upon his robe,” he said, “it carriers [sic] my mind back to the beginning of this great organization, to the great master mind.”35 The empty robe conjures the leader’s body, even and perhaps especially in its absence, and invites a messianic identification that begins with the visual index of suspension in space and time. That is, the casting of the eye upon the absent presence and present absence of the leader carries political desire backward and forward, toward the past and toward the future, in the same moment. In the parade that followed the opening of the convention, the impulse to keep the eye fixed on the leader, even and especially in his absence, was reinforced by the portrait and the now-mobile empty robe, two essential props in the staging of the event. As the parade made its way toward the Commonwealth Casino on 135th Street in Harlem, the procession called up Garvey’s presence for climactic effect. According to a Negro World reprint of an August 16 report:

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They went wild over his name on banners yesterday, and close behind his leading band, surrounded by gaudy ranks of soldiers . . . crawled his big black car in which two gold-braided lieutenants held up a life-sized oil portrait on an ebony standard. The leader was painted in full dress, just as he appeared before officers whisked him away to the penitentiary in February, 1925.36

The Negro World reported that Garvey was “the cynosure of all eyes” as two officers in Garvey’s car lifted the “splendid life-sized portrait” and “the car, which also carried the leader’s robes of office” passed by crowds cheering continuously for the leader they conjured even as they lacked.37 Garvey’s regalia, now literally an empty fetish, took the place that his live body would otherwise occupy; and the life-size portrait linked the leader’s presence to his absence in a way that only heightened the anticipation from the sidewalks. The “eyes of all,” the Negro World reported, were trained on the portrait, “as a band played the National Anthem and The Star-Spangled Banner, and cheers for the absent leader rent the air.”38 In their literal enactment of facework—the method that leaders use to “protect or repair their image or that of their vision and organization”—the portrait, face without body, and the empty robe, body without face, drew a mutable triangle between aesthetic object, erotic longing, and political exigency in a way that is exemplary of the conjurational work of the twentieth-century black charismatic scenario.39 The scenario of modern black political performance as rooted in the tension between the absence of and the appearance of the singular form of the male charismatic leader—the charismatic leader being figured as both spectacular presence and spectacular void—is as much at work in the performative architecture of the UNIA as it is in Du Bois’s stage pageant, produced some eleven years earlier. Indeed, as Eric Sundquist suggests, “For all his claims that Garvey was a militant buffoon commanding a ‘comic opera,’ Du Bois himself was enamored of pageantry,” as his own work in live performance attests.40 Du Bois’s 1913 pageant, “The Star of Ethiopia,” mediates the twenty-plus years between The Souls of Black Folk—in which he offers a definitive vision of black political leadership in the twentieth century and offers a litany of leaders from the Maroons to “Toussaint the Savior”—and the interwar novel I am considering in this chapter, Dark Princess.41 The pageant performs Du Bois’s apocalyptic vision of black politics for a live audience, dramatizing his politics as a meditation on aesthetics with what his contemporary, George Schuyler, might well disdainfully label “hokum”— trite, sentimental depictions of modern black life. The pageant, performed in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles between 1915

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and 1924, stages the solidification of mysticized, singular black leadership as a cultural ideal and acts out Du Bois’s vision of history as what Ross calls “an Hegelian march of abstract principles and personages making their way through crisis.”42 Here, a pantheon of leadership cited earlier in Souls returns to act out the black freedom struggle: after the Maroons battle Spaniards and “march to the left to meet the Indians on the opposite side,” Haitian slaves, “helped by mulattoes and Toussaint, revolt and start back.” Next, the scene travels north to find Crispus Attucks leading the Americans against the British. Finally, a depiction of U.S. slavery shows Nat Turner rebelling and “George Lisle, a freed Negro, preach[ing] the true religion as the masters listen.” In the final scene, “the Sixth and Greatest Gift of Black men,” the “Gift of Freedom for the workers,” is wrought by Frederick Douglass’s proclamation that “God is [not] dead,” his statement that slavery “therefore . . . must end in blood,” and his leading a chorus of “O Freedom.” Douglass’s assertion of faith brings the pageant to its climax: With burst of music and blast of trumpets, the pageant ends and the heralds sing: “Hear ye, hear ye, men of all the Americas, ye who have listened to the tale of the oldest and strongest of the races of mankind, whose faces be Black. Hear ye, hear ye, and forget not the gift of Black men to this world—-the Iron Gift and Gift of Faith, the Pain of Humility and Sorrow Song of Pain, the Gift of Freedom and Laughter and the undying Gift of Hope. Men of America, break silence, for the play is done.” Then shall the banners announce: “The play is done!”

Racial exceptionalism and divine inspiration collapse in this staged spectacle of freedom, at the center of which is the black man promising faith, humility, and hope to a morally bankrupt America.43 Pageantry and political leadership in “The Star of Ethiopia” become in separable. As Du Bois’s proposal for “Star” shows, the performance promised to dramatize the progression of black history from its premodern (or “prehistoric”) inception in Africa, through various spectacular military and cultural battles, to its current embodiment in the American black: The proposed pageant begins with the prehistoric black men who gave to the world the gift of the welding of iron. Ethiopia, Mother of Men, then leads the mystic procession of historic events past the glory of ancient Egypt, the splendid kingdoms of the Sudan and Zymbabwe down to the tragedy of the American slave trade. Up from slavery slowly but resistlessly the black race writhes

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back to life and hope and with Toussaint and Douglass builds a new and mighty Tower of Light on which the Star of Freedom gleams forever.44

Here, the arrival of charismatic leadership in the pageant is meant to direct the eye and spirit upward, out of a dark but glorious past, out of slavery, and up the “Tower of Light” into modernity.45 Du Bois’s intent to convert the spectacle of “Star” into political morality play with charismatic leadership providing moral closure and spiritual climax is apparent in his very definition of the pageant as a didactic genre, as a “great Folk Play” that “seeks to teach some great historic lesson, portraying the deeds and thoughts of by-gone days and inspiring the young for unselfish work in the future.”46 The pageant would tell a messianic story of history, proving the Negro’s human and cultural worth through didactic references to his “gifts,” as well as demonstrate his exceptionalism by “symbolizing a new identity paraded before the American public.”47 It is not coincidental that the leaders make their dramatic entry into the pageant at its climax. Turner, Attucks, Lisle, and of course Douglass and Toussaint bring the pageant to its flourish of fanfare and world history to its height. It is they who comprise the “Gift” that prefigures and preconditions the gifts of “Struggle toward Freedom” and “Freedom for the workers” in Du Bois’s beautiful pageant. In making the black leader’s appearance the narrative climax of its world historical drama, “Star” not only “favors brotherhood as the reigning metaphor” for black national unity, but also figures the precipitous appearance charismatic spokesmen as the necessary climax in the political romance of the pageant.48 In this way, the charismatic leader propels the romance of black brotherhood forward. In turn, the romance is the privileged mode of narration through which such black national unity founded in masculine giftedness would be produced in black expressive and political cultures throughout black political modernity. Women characters in the pageant are introduced as maternal figures that enable the messianic progression of black history. As was Du Bois’s tendency in Darkwater and Quest of the Silver Fleece, he pictured the black women in the pageant as black Christian martyrs, betraying his own “‘double consciousness’ muddled with the contradictions of his gender politics.”49 In a photographic triptych printed in the Crisis, the Queen of Sheba and Candice of Meroe frame the portrait of Ethiopia herself, who bears the pageant’s iconic star (Figure 3). The pageant’s advertisements, leaflets, and programs circulated a kindred image of Ethiopia. An image of a woman with her arms upraised and head thrown back, triumphantly bearing a flag with the pageant’s title, portrays Ethiopia, as the pageant does, as the “Mother of

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Figure 3. “From the Pageant: The Star of Ethiopia,” Crisis, December 1950, 90. Courtesy of W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Men”—pictured in a posture that signifies both reverent praise and erotic pleasure—that is, as the literal reproductive vehicle of an emergent black nation (Figure 4). In this way, the pageant depends on the iconographic trade of women’s bodies even as it scripts women on the margins of a black history represented through spectacular, messianic portraits of male leaders. In this sense, it might be read as a performance of Du Bois’s leadership romance that predicts the plot of his 1928 Dark Princess and cites the larger cultural ideal of black leadership that was solidifying during the early decades of the twentieth century, when the parade and the pageant conjured the black man’s body as an aesthetic target for black political longing. Black Leadership’s “Weird and Colorful Nostrums” A 1930 columnist in the Chicago Defender pleads, “God, give us men!” We need men and we need them badly. We need men who have the capabilities to lead—men who can command the respect of those who must follow. We need men for leaders who are not hungry—men who withstand the temptations that come to leaders. We need men who have established themselves as doers and thinkers—men who are not afraid to tackle world problems.50

Figure 4. “Star of Ethiopia: Hollywood Bowl.” MS 312, series 12, box 9, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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The editorial unmasks a longing for leadership that Du Bois had already betrayed in his pageant, then later in his romantic novel, Dark Princess, when a Chicago socialite cries out in desperation, “Won’t we ever get any leaders?”52 I want to highlight Du Bois’s and Schuyler’s engagement with the black political wish that the Defender column betrays a public desire for a kind of self-sacrificing, forward-looking leadership—by counterposing their interwar writing. The authors’ fiction aestheticizes their two opposing viewpoints, marking African American literature between the two world wars as an important site of contestation where ideals and ideologies of black leadership were both shaped and undone. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Schuyler’s Black Empire, a serial novel published from 1936 to 1938 as weekly installments in the Pittsburg Courier, represent the challenges and promises of restaging the scenario of charismatic leadership that had become a defining mode of twentieth-century black politics. Du Bois was striving to articulate a vision of leadership befitting black modernity, a kind of leadership that, as “Star” imagines, could prove the black’s progress in a rational age as well as retain the image of the black body as the locus of ecstatic desire. It is precisely in works like “Star,” in fact, that Du Bois’s fascination with both historiography and the occult, according to Susan Gillman, “holds in tension a rational empiricism and a mystical faith in unseen correspondences between the darker peoples of the world.”52 Du Bois’s articulation of black modernity as both exemplary of rationalist progress and exceptional gifting will no doubt be familiar to readers who know his 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” in which he argues that Negro art promises to “let this world be beautiful” in an industrializing national landscape that “chokes” the “mass of human beings” away from beauty. Du Bois’s famous assertion that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be” and his belief that the burden of socially conscious art falls upon the black because he alone “can afford the truth,”53 resonates with the tenor of the later Black Aesthetic poets and critics, who argued that art, at its best, is politics. Du Bois’s vision of political leadership is as romantic and apocalyptic as his (proto-)black aesthetic. In fact, what Du Bois establishes in many of his writings is not an agenda or platform for black leadership but instead a leadership aesthetic that fuses together his conception of Negro art and Negro politics. In chapter 3 of Souls, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” Du Bois charts Washington’s rise to political fame. Beginning at the end of Reconstruction, Washington offered only a “programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights.” Washington’s politics of compromise assaults Du Bois’s

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idealism and leads him to “deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension.”54 For Du Bois, as becomes clear in Dark Princess, charismatic leadership promises to reconcile the expectation that black leadership will give spectacular expression to black exceptionality and the desire for that expression to be made legible to the United States public via respectable—that is, rational— representation. His leadership romance, then, answers the paradox of black political modernity by imagining charismatic leadership as both erotic irruption and embodiment of Victorian respectability. If the leadership aesthetic staged, first in Souls and “Star,” and later in Dark Princess, is a flight of political fancy, as I discuss in more detail below, George Schuyler’s writings on leadership are a study in contrast. A former military sergeant and a prolific journalist who published regular political commentaries and fictional pieces in the Messenger, Opportunity, the Crisis, the Nation, and the Manchester Union Leader throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Schuyler often offered a biting cynicism that contrasted with Du Bois’s idealism. One critic even argues that Schuyler’s writings against mainstream ideas of racial uplift placed him on the “lunatic fringe of African American political opinion.”55 Schuyler was actively involved in radical antiracist political and intellectual work throughout the 1920s, working with Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph at the Messenger and meeting weekly with a group of Harlem leftists, which included Ella Baker, Robert Bagnall, and J. A. Rogers, to discuss politics, history, and philosophy.56 In 1930, he and Baker organized the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, an organization aimed at economic empowerment for blacks that trained cooperative community leadership. As Barbara Ransby writes, the league’s “ultra democratic” organization “took steps to ensure the full participation of its rank and file in decision making and leadership,” insisting that its political structure represented a break with the black leadership ideologies and practices of the time.57 The organization turned out to be a brief “experiment in collective black self-determination,” not only because it lacked financial support but also because Schuyler’s derogatory attacks on the black church and the black middle class had alienated too many would-be supporters.58 His 1931 novel Black No More only worsened his reputation as an irreverent iconoclast as the novel made clear that Schuyler was “struck by certain inconsistencies (or absurdities)” in the 1920s New Negro Movement.59 Over the next decade, Schuyler’s dissatisfaction with the absurdities and inconsistencies in both black politics and communist organizing—particularly his anger at the International Labor Defense’s class-based analysis of the Scottsboro case—would move him so far to the right that he would become “an

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ardent anti-communist.”60 After his conservative turn, black leaders were his privileged whipping boys: he protested Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Prize; he published an editorial in the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader that lampooned Dr. King as a “pious fraud” and “some sable Typhoid Mary infecting the mentally disturbed with the perversion of Christian doctrine”61; and he blamed black urban rebellions of the late 1960s on Negro leaders who “gather crowds by blaming the white man for all the Negroes’ ills.”62 By focusing on Schuyler’s identification of the problems of black leadership in the interwar period, my aim is not to equate Schuyler’s ad hominem style of leadership critique to what I have been calling African American literature’s restagings of black leadership. Rather, my aim is to complicate Schuyler’s position within African American letters and to suggest that although it has been the trend in black literary studies, particularly after his conservative turn, to banish Schuyler’s work to a kind of no-man’s-land of black conservatism, his critiques of leadership might be contextualized within his history of participatory, democratic organizing during the 1920s.63 Further, the restaging of charismatic leadership as a modernist trope in his serial novel, Black Empire, and in his 1930s journalism highlight what is for me a crucial aspect of interwar black cultural production: linking charismatic authority to two crucial looks: to the cultural imagery of black politics, and to the erotic gaze shared between leader and follower. Schuyler’s 1937 commentary in the Crisis, “Reflections on Negro Leadership,” is a decidedly unromantic, strident critique of black leadership in its most romantic incarnations: the preachers of the church and the black middle-class uplifters. Schuyler does not reject leadership outright; he believes that “natural leadership always exists” but argues that it is often made ineffective “by ignorance”; he further believes that blacks naively “want leaders who will tell them what to do.”64 Schuyler blames misspent education and individualist materialism for the “ignorance” that corrupts black leadership: leaders could have organized an industrial program to increase black farm ownership, helping the black farmer who has abandoned agrarian life “preserve what he had” during the Depression years, but instead, Schuyler writes, “our agricultural and industrial school graduates chose everything except agriculture and industry, becoming mostly teachers, petty business men and professional folk with an unhealthy disdain for land.”65 Schuyler argues, against Du Bois’s idealism, that it is the failure to execute the Washingtonian industrial education plan for progress that makes Negro leadership ineffectual rather than a fundamentally flawed concept of advancement. Further, he blames parasitic Negro church leaders for the social problems of black urban life in the industrial North:

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From the viewpoint of group progress the Negro church, regardless of denomination, has no social program. The chief ambitions of most ecclesiastical leaders are to corral a lot of people, take up fat collections, pay off several layers of mortgages and start off congregations on new debts for new or castoff structures so that someone may win a reputation as “a church builder” . . . and last but not least to go on long annual vacations financed by worshipful washerwomen.66

Just as in Du Bois’s work, the leadership question is identified as more than an issue of agenda or program; it is a matter of aesthetics. While the middleclass uplifters, deluded by visions of “dignity,” choose a beautified bourgeois existence rather than farm life, and while the church is intoxicated by the promise of beautiful new buildings, the black working class “rot[s] in rookeries revolting even to rats.” The two fronts of bourgeois black influence comprise for Schuyler an “oleaginous old guard leadership” that quixotically apes white middle-class values, what he calls “Aryan superficialities.”67 In an earlier piece, Schuyler argues that contemporary black leadership is an impoverished display of its own romantic politics, calling black panAfricanist leaders “wistful watchmen,” “witch doctors,” and “hungry sociological shamans” who dupe the black masses with “weird and colorful nostrums.”68 Schuyler recognizes above all the aesthetic appeal of black internationalist revolution: it is pan-Africanism’s promise to make African Americans the “piece de resistance at some simple native feast” that lends it its power. It is, Schuyler argues, a beautiful idea but is “pure fantasy,” and, worse, “neither unique nor revolutionary.” What becomes clear in Schuyler’s writings on black politics, as in his writing on aesthetics, is his distrust of a mystified notion of blackness. The pragmatic Schuyler rejects the “crackpot proposals” of Negro leadership and Negro art that “[dazzle] the Ethiopian imagination with visions” because they are so much art-hokum.69 His political aesthetic can thus be more rightly called an antiaesthetic that privileges real-world pragmatism over the idealistic, Du Boisian pageantry of divinely ordained black supremacy. This antiaestheticism of black politics leads Schuyler to paint a satirical portrait of Negro leadership’s weird and colorful nostrums in his serial novel, Black Empire, a piece that confronts Du Bois’s 1928 political romance with a severe kind of political apostasy. Leadership’s Looks While both Dark Princess and Black Empire fashion a political vision to answer the malaise associated with early twentieth-century urban black life, they arrive at vastly different political aesthetics: Dark Princess paints an erotic portrait of messianic leadership that situates political eros in the sexualized

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body, while Black Empire writes a satiric, technophilic version of Afrofuturism that makes charisma a relic from the past that becomes obsolete—and therefore dispensable—in a black pan-African technocracy. Yet both write leadership as a love story involving changing conceptions of beauty, romance, and political mobilization, calling attention to the erotics of political authority that inhere in the aesthetics of the black charismatic scenario. Since Claudia Tate’s 1995 edited reprinting of Dark Princess, several critics have pointed to how the novel coincides with Du Bois’s messianic vision of black history and the treatments of gender and sexuality in his opus. Many of these, including Tate herself, have turned to “Star” to situate the novel’s pageantry within Du Bois’s larger body of work and within contemporary criticism’s “emerging feminist canon of Du Bois’s work,” or even to argue that the novel is perhaps “the single most important, newly canonized text for feminist studies of Du Bois.”70 But if we are to maximize Dark Princess’s usefulness for contemporary feminist critique, we have to untangle the lines that the novel draws between masculinity, erotic love, and the aesthetics of modern black politics. This means studying the novel’s careful construction of charisma as an essential figural complex of a black modernity in the making. Reading Dark Princess on its own terms, as a political romance, allows us to make sense of the fantastic vision of messianic black leadership that it offers in its closing pages. The novel represents, as Bill Mullen suggests, “an ecstatic mode of thought and writing,” a “leap of intellectual faith.”71 Du Bois’s ecstatic novel, a “dirty old man’s fantasy that should have never been published”72 by the standards of some critics, and a “revolutionary dream work”73 by others, equates the consummation of political authority with the fulfillment of romantic desire by indexing caricaturized images of Asia and a nostalgic fiction of an ancient Afro-Asian empire. For this reason, as Yogita Goyal convincingly argues, understanding Du Bois’s careful construction of the romance form allows us to see the limits of Du Bois’s panAfrican vision.74 Dark Princess converts the erotics of an Afro-Asian love affair into the raw material for a world revolution that begins with an overstylized charismatic scenario resembling “The Star of Ethiopia.” The geographies of revolution making in Dark Princess reveal the connection it draws between aesthetics, erotics, and politics. The African American protagonist leaves New York, meets an Indian princess in Berlin, attempts to bring the passion of that encounter home to an industrial America, and seeks to infuse the electric beauty of the Afro-Asian romance into a lifeless black politic that Du Bois removes from the modern city and returns to the rural black belt he

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so adores. For this reason, Mullen is right to insist that the story is propelled by a series of leaps of faith (and physical bounds) that for Du Bois characterizes the primary calling of the black leader. The beginning of the novel finds the antiheroic, wandering protagonist fleeing New York after being expelled from medical school because of his racial identity. On a ship to Berlin, Matthew Towns is well seen by the other passengers but sees, like Du Bois’s persona in Souls, “darkly as through a veil.”75 White passersby notice his “angry eyes,” and they “spoke about him, noting his tall, lean form and dark brown face, the stiff curled mass of his sinewy hair” (3). Although Matthew is hypersensitive to the passengers’ chatter about him, he does not look at them; rather, he stands “stiff and grim, gazing into the sea, his back toward all” (3). Matthew is endowed with the gift—or curse—of second sight and double consciousness. He has, as Du Bois describes the split subject in Souls, “no true self-consciousness” but rather only “see[s] himself through the revelation of the other world.”76 Matthew “long[s] to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double-self into a better and truer self ” (9). The process of self-unification will begin in Dark Princess with a conversion experience that remedies Matthew’s “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”77 To apply a Jamesian notion of psychological unification to Du Bois’s schema of contemporary black consciousness is to read the scenes of black political conversion in Du Bois’s body of work as both historical—in the Hegelian sense—and spiritual/psychological. William James explains: Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted; and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme.78

Conversion, for James, unifies a person and remedies the peculiar condition of double consciousness. Unity “may be produced by the irruption into the individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion.”79 On the connection between pyschospiritual unity and the aesthetic object, James explains that while some individuals prefer the bare trappings of worship settings, other converts require “something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic

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interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor,” making a critical connection between the erotics of human–divine encounters and the aesthetic demands of the conversion psyche.80 When Matthew arrives in Berlin and sees Princess Kautilya, the maharanee of Bwodpur, his conversion plays out what James’s lectures on conversion call the “violent emotional occasion.”81 The princess’s beauty is the antidote for Matthew’s split consciousness: the beauty of Kautilya’s “golden brown skin” lends Matthew’s world a “sense of color” (8), and like James’s converts, Matthew instantly “felt himself a man, one of those who could help build a world and guide it” (18). Matthew senses that the princess’s “steady, full, radiant gaze that enveloped and almost burned him, saw not him but the picture he was painting and the thing that the picture meant” (15). He in turn “star[es] almost unmannerly” (19). The eroticized look in the meeting between Matthew and Kautilya connects three of the novel’s central themes: love, beauty, and political leadership. Claudia Tate explains, “Du Bois repeatedly relied on the conventions of romance . . . to consolidate his racial analysis of history and his faith in the inevitability of black liberation, a consolidation that he repeatedly sexualized in conjugal symbolism.”82 The novel’s depiction of the meeting between the black male protagonist and the Indian princess, who invites Matthew to tea in order to gauge the relevance of the American “Negro question” to an international, interracial progressive alliance, appropriates the gaze as a vehicle through which to communicate an aestheticized political vision. The aesthetic exchange—Matthew’s consumption of Kautilya’s beauty—marks the beginning of sexual and political desire in Dark Princess. Matthew seeks, above all, political beauty. However, he is dissatisfied with a performance of political leadership that looks good but lacks pragmatic functionality. After he returns from exile to Harlem, Matthew meets Mr. Perigua, a zealous organizer who devises a plan for armed retribution against whites. Matthew’s talk with Perigua about the World Council of the Darker Peoples, the princess’s organization, is interrupted by “a song with some indistinguishable rhyme on ‘Perigua forever’” by Perigua’s followers (44). Matthew dismisses the man as artifice. He “felt his spirits droop. This man was no leader, he was too theatrical” (45). Matthew finds Perigua’s plans “wild, unthinkable, terrible”; sober and intellectual, he “felt that he must get at the facts before he took any steps” (45). Here, rational execution is tantamount to Matthew’s clear vision: “He must see. He must investigate. . . . He must see this thing through” (47). Matthew writes in his

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reconnaissance report to the princess that Perigua “is not to be trusted as a leader. His organization is a loose mob of incoherent elements united only by anger and poverty” (58). He remarks of Perigua’s charisma, “He has no real organization. He has only personal followers” (58). Perigua is of course “something like a Garveyite,”83 and his flair for drama leaves Matthew desiring a more truly beautiful politics. Perigua’s movement’s “incoherent elements” and lack of organization speak to its aesthetic failure and its unfitness for respectable representation. Matthew, under the influence of Kautilya’s inspiring beauty, searches for a black leadership more worthy of her plan for revolution. Du Bois’s romantic protagonist feels himself ill-suited for the ugly blackand-white realness of the American city and its coincident pragmatic political vision. The novel’s depiction of Chicago emphasizes this visual repulsiveness: Cold streets and hard faces; white death in a white world; but underneath the ice, fire from heaven, burning back to life the poor and black and guilty, the hopeless and unbelieving, the suave and terrible. Dirt and frost, slush and diamonds, amid the roar of winter in Chicago. (109)

Like the Chicago of Richard Wright’s stark Native Son, Du Bois’s Chicago is harsh, dirty, and unfeeling. It is a Chicago that, in its hostile, snowy whiteness, alienates the black protagonist. Part 3 of the Dark Princess, “The Chicago Politician,” self-consciously contrasts the austere city to the “ecstasy of the picture” of Princess Kautilya and the politics she embodies (8). Matthew’s work for an alderman, Sammy Scott, and his marriage to Scott’s secretary, Sara Matthews, exposes a political aesthetic that, in contrast to the Perigua movement, is overly rational and corrupt. If Matthew dismisses Perigua because he has “intelligence and fire” (57) but nothing “systematic” (58), he dismisses Scott’s machine because it is impersonal and too highly systematized. It has “power but little display” (129). He rejects Chicago electoral politics not because of “moral revolt” but rather “esthetic disquiet”: “His revolt was against things unsuitable, ill adjusted, and in bad taste; the illogical lack of fundamental harmony; the unnecessary dirt and waste—the ugliness of it all—that revolted him” (147).84 Matthew is an aesthete who throughout the novel works to articulate a kind of embodied political beauty. He struggles to fashion a counteraesthetic to the dirty, colorless world of the modern city by filling an old apartment with a Turkish rug—“a thing of dark, soft, warm coloring”—a Picasso painting, and a new fireplace and bathroom, creating of the unsightly space “something beautiful” (193). A Chinese carpet complementing the Turkish

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rug represents light and truth—it “burns with brilliance”—and together with the room’s other aesthetic objects, it helps create a sanctuary for Matthew in Chicago (128). This effort to center sensuality in the fabrication of black political agency establishes an alternative system of value that stands counter to Chicago’s liberal civil society.85 The art pieces serve to articulate a universe of political value that centers sensuous corporeality over disciplinarity, making the body a “political analog”86 and centering art, and artistic production, in the making of black politics.87 The aesthetic objects relay Matthew’s desire between himself, the princess, and the higher ideal of new-world making for which she stands. Art carries political desire along from one body to another body to the world at large. The beauty of the eroticized body preconditions the ecstasy necessary for political/social conversion. As the latter part of Dark Princess “unmakes” the cold, realist aesthetic of the city and “Chicago’s winter [thaws] and [melts] into a Southern spring,”88 Matthew’s longing for the consummation of his romantic–political desire is fulfilled when the princess heroically returns to the novel, the “steadfast glory of her eyes” promising to unite the best of the two warring leadership aesthetics that the novel critiques: Perigua’s heat-without-light “fire” and Chicago’s icy, artless functionality (209). When the princess makes a surprise entry at a political dinner at Matthew and Sara’s home, Matthew is reconverted by the beauty of the scene. He “searched her with his eyes; and then suddenly Matthew awoke” (209). The “eternally marvelous” Kautilya is the work of art that is capable of eclipsing the ugliness of Chicago’s bureaucracy. As in Berlin, Matthew is filled with the ecstasy of a new convert: “The cause that was dead,” he tells Kautilya, “is alive again; the love that I lost is found” (210). Sara is emptied of all aesthetic value as, in contrast to the princess’s saturated hues, she becomes “white to the lips” (210). Matthew and Kautilya exit the scene fully aware of the human–divine relay instituted by their consummation: “I am free!” said Matthew. The low voice of the Princess floated back again from the curtains of the hall: “Kyrie Eleison.” (211)

Kautilya’s Greek invocation of divine mercy here makes plain what the novel has been constructing all along: a three-way connection between man, God, and liberation politics. This triad is tied together by feminine beauty as art object: “Your body is Beauty, and Beauty is your Soul,” Matthew tells

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Kautilya. “And Soul and Body spell Freedom to my tortured groping life!” (210). As the princess and the protagonist disappear behind the curtains of the room, calling attention to the theatricality of the moment, a lawyer’s wife wonders in ironic disdain, “Won’t we ever get any leaders? I am simply disgusted and discouraged. I’ll never work for another negro leader as long as I live” (212). Du Bois’s project of merging art and politics will not allow a disappearance of political leadership but will, as in “Star,” move toward leadership’s final apocalyptic self-expression. Just as Kautilya promises to fulfill the unification of Matthew’s body and soul begun in the Jamesian conversion scene earlier in the novel, the story, as it builds toward its messianic finale in the final section, undertakes to fuse the body and the soul of black leadership, to convert Negro leadership into a more beautiful formation. Perigua’s emotionalist fire and Chicago’s rationalist ice come together to create a leadership aesthetic that realizes the revolutionary dream of uniting the world’s oppressed in opposition to soulless industrial progress. The narrative structure of Dark Princess reproduces the charismatic scenario, in which a people waits for the moment of erotic release occasioned by oratory or other proof of the gift of grace until the leader arrives. The reader lingers almost 200 monotonous pages until the novel delivers on the romantic promise of its opening pages, when Kautilya comes to the United States to rescue Matthew. The fourth section of Dark Princess follows Kautilya’s return with a series of dramatic flourishes: rain falls steadily in “the miracle” that is Chicago’s spring, washing away the corruption of the city’s political machine and revealing cleansed, converted versions of Matthew and Kautilya, who are ready to birth a perfected model of political authority premised on an international class alliance (217). Kautilya leaves Matthew in Chicago, retreating to the protagonist’s birthplace and the “Land of the Blacks,” Prince James County, Virginia. When Matthew joins her there after much pining, he arrives to crown a son who is destined to be the world’s savior. Matthew’s mother “chanted to her God: ‘Jesus, take this child. Make him a man! Make him a man, Lord Jesus—a leader of his people and a lover of his God!’” (310). The novel depicts an ecstatic scene of leadership that transforms the idyllic woods into the stage of a messianic pageant complete with infant, wise men, and Madonna: There fell a silence, and then out of the gloom of wood moved a pageant. A score of men clothed in white with shining swords walked slowly forward . . . and from their midst came three old men. . . . They carried dishes of rice and sweetmeats, and they chanted as they came. (310)

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And: Slowly Kautilya stepped forward and turned her face eastward. She raised her son toward heaven and cried: “Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva! Lords of Sky and Light and Love! Receive from me . . . by the will of God, Maharajah of Bwodpur.” (311)

The ultimate scene in the novel approximates the climax of “The Star of Ethiopia” by staging a birthing of a new, beautified black leadership. A preacher reads an apocalyptic passage from the New Testament Book of Revelation, and Matthew and Kautilya’s love child, Madhu, is proclaimed the revolutionary messiah. Charisma makes its triumphal entry onto the stage of Du Bois’s novel just as it draws to a close. The final pageant, Gilroy argues, should be understood “as a beginning rather than an ending.”89 Tate is right to call Dark Princess a “romantic and apocalyptic book of black idealism,” as well as to remind us that the text “is an important work for reconstructing Du Bois’s conceptions of black male heroism and black heroic art.”90 Charismatic leadership arrives in Dark Princess as a promise to unite African and Asian peoples in an international struggle against racialized oppression. Just as Madhu is the actual product of Matthew and Kautilya’s romantic desire, the kind of leadership he promises is the fulfillment of a political desire that the novel has been building since its opening pages. As his 1928 political romance indicates, Du Bois understood black political engagement as a phenomenological experience having everything to do with symbolic and performative makeup of the leadership scenario. The crafting of the ideal political persona does not, for the prolific social critic, take place outside of aesthetics but must ever do what for Du Bois Negro art is destined to do: produce social revolution as a kind of affect that is as viscerally felt as romantic longing. As Alys Eve Weinbaum argues, “Of all the generic forms that [Du Bois] might have elected as his principle vehicle for propaganda, Romance is the logical and natural choice.”91 If the formal properties of the romance, along with the thematic workings of the heterosexual love story, form the primary mode in Du Bois’s work through which “black life is expressed and lived in rebellion against Jim Crow and imperialism the world over,” romance is also the form best suited to frame and stage the author’s political longings.91 Beauty, in Dark Princess, becomes the necessary link between the two registers—one sexual, the other political—of romance. The messianic birthing masque that closes Dark Princess interlaces the novel’s charismatic scenario in the construction of heterosexual normativity as a constitutive formation of its alternative liberal governmentality. If the

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novel works to construct a “radical black heterosexual masculinity as the critique of the gender and sexual itineraries of liberalism,” it also shows how charisma and masculinity unfold in tense articulation to each other in the twentieth-century scenes of black leadership.93 Wilson Jeremiah Moses argues that Dark Princess’s “messianic vision . . . is perhaps bizarre, but no more incredible than the weird, picturesque expressions of black messianism that appeared in American cities during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.”92 Whether a reflection of contemporary black leadership’s weird and colorful nostrums or a romantic challenge to a kind of leadership that had yet to realize its own beauty, Du Bois’s Dark Princess arrives at “a chaos of meaning” that eludes simple categorization.95 What becomes evident when reading other interwar writers, however, is that the criteria for a beautiful leadership is always contested. Hokum Pocus The 1930 Defender column I referred to above, which cries out for “men who have established themselves as doers and thinkers,” cites a modern, and modernist, black leadership anxiety that had been in the making over the preceding fifty years, since the end of Reconstruction. In the first half of the twentieth century, the longing for race men as charismatic leaders given by God, who would be the race’s “spokesmen—its representatives at the round table of world affairs”96—solidified as a cultural value even as it found its earnest contestations in the realm of African American letters. In the plot of Du Bois’s Dark Princess, the birth of the messiah, Madhu, answers the plea for black leadership; he is the deus ex machina that saves Matthew and Kautilya’s dream of a united front of “colored peoples” against oppression. Matthew and Kautilya’s program in Dark Princess is a salvation plan whose promise of fulfillment climaxes with the arrival of the baby—a living embodiment of the protagonist’s (and author’s) highest ideals of black giftedness and interracial cooperation. Divine intervention saves the day. In literary terms, the charismatic leader himself can be seen as a kind of deus ex machina, a divine help who appears at the precise moment of narrative crisis; he comes promising salvation from a hopeless situation, decisively changing the course of his people’s (hi)story. In fact, no single occurrence in the novel “departs more extravagantly from formulating a pragmatic response to racism,” Claudia Tate writes, “than the spectacular messianic masque that closes the work.”97 Madhu is a literary materialization of the charismatic leader. By virtue of his singular gift of grace, he promises to save both the world and Du Bois’s flawed narrative.

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In Schuyler’s serial novel, Black Empire, on the other hand, the charismatic leader is undone as the divine savior and narrative help. “The plots of these serials are ‘set-ups,’” John Williams points out, “with dei ex machina occurring at exactly the right times, and many displays of bravery and intelligence and romance that leap out of the popular imagination of the day.”98 But in Black Empire, Schuyler’s satire will remove the leader’s body from his schema of political authority so that the deus ex machina is not a newborn messiah but rather the technological genius of newfangled machinery. The inert machine, not the desired and desiring man, functions as the engine of historical change. In changing the terms of black racial salvation in his interwar satire, Schuyler restages the charismatic scenario of black leadership as hokum and contests charisma as a structuring fiction of black political modernity. Black Empire tells a story of the founding of a pan-African black empire masterminded by Dr. Henry Belsidus, a “bloodthirsty, fanatical revolutionist.”99 Belsidus robs and murders whites to finance his empire, a technocracy masterminded by black scientists. His “Temples of Love,” as “center[s] of propaganda” (37), offer churchgoers “a better show” (100) than the established churches and help Belsidus garner a devoted following. Inventing war machines, stratosphere airplanes, solar engines, and grandiose robots that stand in as God and demand obedience in the Temples of Love, Belsidus’s army establishes a fantastical black empire that spans all of Africa. The story is narrated by the protagonist, Carl Slater, an antihero uncannily similar to Du Bois’s Matthew Towns. Entering the novel with no politics or dreams of his own, Carl, a journalist, is mugged by Belsidus and brought into the madman’s movement against his will. His journalistic skepticism and objectivity give way to devotion to Belsidus, and Carl becomes Belsidus’s first lieutenant and, in the process of revolution building, falls in love with Patricia Givens, the empire’s air commander. The story’s parallels to Dark Princess are most apparent in the romance between Carl and Patricia: as in Du Bois’s novel, the romantic desire between the two characters is the impetus for their politics in Black Empire. But Black Empire departs significantly from the protest melodrama of Dark Princess’s form in its squarely satirical perspective on romanticized panAfricanism and charismatic leadership.100 Schuyler’s satire builds its momentum through the device of reductio ad absurdam, following a thought or object to its logical, if ridiculous, end point. (I discuss The White Boy Shuffle’s use of reductio ad absurdam to contest post–civil rights notions of black leadership at length in chapter 5.) The author’s mastery of the reductio ad

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absurdam technique becomes most evident in the novel’s visual construction of Belsidus’s leadership scenario. The novel satirizes what Schuyler’s “Reflections” calls, in the very same historical moment, the weird and colorful nostrums that adorn a black leadership scenario that, for all its splendor, remains empty of sociopolitical value. The picture that the novel renders of Belsidus’s leadership is one full of ornate art objects that are deliberately arranged to produce the doctor’s charismatic movement. After being kidnapped by Dr. Belsidus, Carl wakes up from a drug-induced stupor in a “mysterious mansion” (12) surrounded by “blackness, silent, awesome blackness. Horrible blackness” (7). After his blackout, which lands the protagonist in the Black Internationale’s world of black supremacy, Carl awakes, wearing silk pajamas, to the overstated elegance of the Internationale’s headquarters in Belsidus’s home. Velvet drapes, an ebony and ivory bed, black and aluminum walls, and the luxurious linens of his bedroom give way to a dining room where Carl is stunned by the red, green, and gold decor. An elaborate dining scene, complete with gold dishes monogrammed with a “B” topped by a crown, is the stage for Carl’s first meeting with Belsidus about the Black Internationale. “With a golden spoon,” Belsidus “traced geometric designs on the green linen cloth as he outlined the most amazing conspiracy in history” (12). The fancy spoon serves a greater purpose than mere pointer: Belsidus reveals to the sequestered protagonist that the gold items are the remnants of stolen jewelry that he has melted and transformed to produce precious items that finance the Black Internationale. Carl is again left “breathless” when Belsidus shows him his store of precious metallic things (12). But the objects are not to be admired for their own sake; they are only valuable insofar as they can be scientifically altered for exchange. Belsidus’s chemist, Sam Hamilton, melts stolen jewelry down and pours the gold into clay molds to produce objects for resale. Belsidus’s attitude toward art mirrors Schuyler’s antiaesthetics; for the doctor, art has no inherent value. It is only made valuable by expert science and market exchange. The alchemy that Sam Hamilton uses to produce the material means for the revolution is like the chemistry that the Black Internationale uses to convert spiritual experience into political capital. The Internationale’s Temples of Love use art to convert followers. Belsidus recruits a minister, Samson Binks, to lead the spiritual effort and to spearhead the Internationale’s plan to build temples in black communities all over the world. The temples are meant to offer a new religion and to build a social movement through missionary evangelism. Belsidus explains to Carl that “people cannot be held

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merely by education. It is necessary to reach them through their emotions. Therefore we must have a new religion” (36). The built environment of the temples aids the purpose of conversion. When Carl attends the opening of the first Temple of Love in Harlem, he notices that it is “a huge building closely resembling an Egyptian temple, and in the form of a truncated pyramid” (57). The temple is constructed with stained glass windows, an alabaster fountain, a “massive door that was the only entrance and exit,” and tiled walls with “great candles . . . in huge candlesticks” (58). The worship service makes use of golden artifacts in the same way as the movement at large: there are “Negroes with flowing golden garments and golden ribbons about their heads and black and gold sandals on their feet. They bore long, highly polished brass trumpets that almost reached their shoulders from the floor” (59). The built space, the visual accoutrements, and the music contribute to the production of charisma as both phenomenological experience and structure of authority. It is machines, though, that finally create the Internationale’s converts. An automated ascending platform and a robotic idol complete the conversion architecture. The moving platform, carrying the golden-garbed musicians and fifty dancing women, “almost leaped out” at the worshippers (60). The worship scene here is completely fabricated by the Internationale’s science. The congregation is commanded to worship a fifty-foot-tall statue of a nude black man by a voice that booms, “Rise and worship the God of Love, Ruler of black men and women. Rise to greet Him!” (61). The worshippers are drawn into a visual economy of human/pseudodivine encounter: “Gaze upon him!” the voice instructs (61). The idol begins to show signs of life, becoming more than mere statue: Now the great arms which had been folded slowly unfolded and stretched out full length. The great breast began to rise and fall. The huge eyes became luminous and the great head began slowly to nod up and down. It was awesome indeed. The singing ended. The eyes continued to blaze. The great head moved up and down. (61)

The response of the congregation is nothing less than ecstatic conversion. Worshippers scream in agony and pleasure, and a body falls to the floor. Carl confesses to the reader that he “knew it was hokum” (61). His conversion is scientifically fabricated but is nevertheless characteristic of the psychological processes of conversion that James describes. “I knew Binks had rigged up this robot,” he says, “and I knew approximately just how it worked, and yet for the life of me I could not but enter into the spirit of the thing and obey the commands of the voice” (61). The worship service draws to a climax

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when, in a communion-like moment, the congregation is forced to drink a mood-altering solution from small vials. The effect of the drug is an erotic frenzy. Carl narrates: “Dance! Dance! Dance for Love!” commanded the voice. The eyes of the image again grew luminous. They held on with hypnotic intensity. . . . Gone was all restraint, gone all inhibitions as the throbbing drums and sensuous, pulsating music tore asunder and subjugated our conscious beings. The inner man, the subconscious mind, the primeval urges born in the Mesozoic ooze, completely controlled us, dominated us, motivated us. (62)

In the midst of the worship orgy, under the huge robot’s scrutiny, Carl is emptied of rationality, and the entire congregation is ushered into premodern (“Mesozoic”) mysticism. It is hokum. The story’s satirical portrait of pseudomystical leadership is the narrative incarnation of the leadership critique that Schuyler articulates in his “Reflections on Negro Leadership” and “Separate State Hokum.” He renders the spectacle of black revolution making absurd. When Schuyler sketched his plot outline for what would eventually become Black Empire, he brainstormed names for the fanatical black protagonist who would lead the fictional revolution. Schuyler’s monikers—“Black Savior,” “Dr. Beast of Harlem,” “Sweet Papa Love,” and “Daddy Love”—name a “combination of ‘Garvey–Christ–Gandhi,’” a combination that can be used to describe the character that Schuyler finally decides to name Dr. Henry Belsidus (326). He is a figure who in Schuyler’s notes is a “bitter Negrophile like Du Bois with visions of destroying white imperialism” (327). Clearly signifying on Du Bois’s idealism, Schuyler thinks of calling the story “Black Utopia” and “Millennium in the Black Belt” (326). Du Bois’s high-art sentimentalism has no serious place in Schuyler’s antiaesthetics; and Dr. Belsidus, whom Schuyler imagines as a “radical atheist artist who stages things” in Black Empire’s Temples of Love, plays the part of director in the caricaturized pageant of black leadership hokum (327). Black Empire’s depiction of a kind of conversion that is mass produced for the revolution, then exported to Temples of Love all over the United States and Africa, turns the charismatic scenario into a show of charlatanism. The engineered spectacle of charismatic authority, in which a great voice commands followers who respond “like zombies . . . knowing nothing except to obey,” renders the lines between aesthetic production, erotic love, and political inspiration unintelligible (62). Carl and the Internationale’s flight commander, Patricia Givens, are at the mercy of the conversion spectacle:

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“As the music screamed louder . . . I seized Pat and we whirled madly, insanely, drunkenly . . . in lunatic, erotic, passionate, frenzied embrace, as the women of the chorus and the beautiful ballet girls joined the shameless orgy” (62). So begins the two characters’ romance and Belsidus’s revolutionary program. The Internationale’s “new religion” shows how charismatic leadership, rather than expressing itself as a “natural” form of black religiosity and political consciousness, actually produces itself through self-conscious performances of authority. The worship scene makes the beautiful machine the link between person-to-person erotics and Belsidus’s political program. The idol stands before the congregation “with legs apart, gazing sardonically downward with arms crossed,” and “every part of the body was clearly depicted” (58). The literally larger than life animated nude statue is a kind of technologized aesthetic device that, more than an eroticized scopophilic object, functions to draw the worshiping subjects into a totalitarian charismatic sociality. As Thompson explains, “Carl and all those who are present enter into the spirit, one that contains, or fabricates, a fascistic communal bond of race, blood, and self-sacrifice.”101 The visual technologies of the scenario structure the social relation around a peculiarly beautiful male presence fabricated by Belsidus’s scientists. The authority here issues from a robot idol positioned at the front of the sanctuary staring “sardonically downward” (58) to the people below. Its authoritative stance—legs apart, arms crossed—and gaze mimic the way Belsidus’s own authority functions by way of his penetrating stare and his physical appearance. Belsidus’s eyes are “smoldering with hatred” (14); he looks at the world with “penetrating scrutiny” (29). His “diabolical” (240) and “sardonic smile” (29) complete a visage boasting eyes that “shin[e] fanatically” (31) and “glow ominously” (68). The idol in the Temple of Love is a bigger, better version of Belsidus himself. That Belsidus is made in the idol’s likeness—and vice versa—is reinforced by the machine’s Belsidus-like blazing eyes and Belsidus’s robotic persona. Belsidus, Carl notes, was “not quite human. Rather, he was a cold, cruel, fanatically determined machine” (39). The idol is the art object that converts ecstasy into the raw political material for revolution; its sublime presence teaches worshiping subjects to equate jouissance with obedience to singular rule. Belsidus in turn builds a charismatic movement that converts that raw material—bodies willing to obey—into an actual political movement. When the “rather Garveyistic” Internationale conquers Africa and holds a world conference in Liberia to celebrate the black empire, Carl notes the similarities between the celebratory fanfare and the Internationale’s species of worship service (10). Hundreds

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of delegates from all over the world march rank and file into a majestic dining room, at the center of which sits a chair for Dr. Belsidus. As in the worship service, the room darkens, and a chorus of trumpets sounds. Belsidus finally arrives as if by magic as the crowd waits: “There was awed whispering. Then the chorus of trumpets flourished . . . and the lights came on slowly,” and the crowd “instinctively looked toward the chair of Dr. Belsidus. He was seated there, expressionless” (140). Carl identifies the mystical appearance of Belsidus in the scene as paradigmatic of the Internationale’s political style. “I recognized the stunt,” he says, “as excellent theatre, a characteristic Belsidus gesture” (140). Black Empire tells the story of a black revolution produced by expert science that masks itself as mysticism. The satirical tale of scientifically produced leadership exposes Schuyler’s view of the charismatic scenario as a travesty that amounts to little more than hokum. The novel reduces what it figures as the fanciful dream of pan-Africanism to what Schuyler sees as its most absurd possibility: a black empire founded on massive violence and false consciousness. Reason’s Return At the end of the Temple of Love service that functions as the reader’s immersion into the Internationale’s charismatic scenario, “the great ebony image of the God of Love had disappeared” and “reason returned” to Carl. “Reason” also “returned” to Patricia, and like Eve covering herself after the Fall, Patricia fixes her clothes. Both characters note the success of the leadership hokum and agree that Binks “really put it on strong” (63). The reader learns that the empire is not maintained by nonrational desire, but rather by the return of reason: scientific intelligence, invention, and organization. Where the first part of Black Empire, “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius against the World,” is a comical tale of leadership hokum, the second part, “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa,” reads like science fantasy. The theater and intrigue of the first part are replaced in the second part by the writer’s focus on the literal nuts and bolts of empire building: the machines, the military maneuvers, the careful organization of a technocratic society. In this second part, the performances of the miraculous necessary to continually produce the leader’s charisma are replaced by attention to the way that political authority is routinized in the new pan-African empire. In the novel’s latter pages, Belsidus retreats from the text, and the empire goes about solidifying itself by the innovations of “black brains”—the revolutionary scientists (11).

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The “Black Empire” section reads more like fantasy than the satire of the first half of the serial. In that regard, it is useful to consider Hill and Rasmussen’s point that Schuyler’s politics surrounding the issue of African empire shifted often during the 1930s: “Although his thinking sometimes veered dramatically in the direction of race pride . . . especially in response to the Ethiopian crisis, Schuyler always maintained a strategic two-sidedness.”102 Given this ambivalence, are critics right to suggest that Black Empire represents Schuyler’s fantasy of race revolution rather than a bitter satire, or must we take Schuyler’s word that the serial novel is hokum and pure hack work? I want to suggest that both readings of the novel are plausible: Black Empire is, finally, both satirical hokum and science fantasy. The serial form, in fact, lends itself to such genre shifting. “Schuyler’s attitude toward his serial fiction seems to have ranged between enjoyment and downright disdain,” Hill and Rasmussen note.103 Could Schuyler be voicing fatigue with his own leadership hokum when his Dr. Belsidus tells compatriots, “I would fain give up my leadership. For twenty years I have struggled and striven to free Africa, and I am tired, very tired” (141)? Indeed, the personality-driven first half of the serial is succeeded by Belsidus’s waning energy and disappearance in the second. The Internationale is no longer a product of the doctor’s “great magnetism” and “great skill” (15) or even the devotion of his “loyal followers” (16). Instead, Dr. Matson, the empire’s surgeon general, explains health policy in detail; Carl meets dietitians who explain the benefits of a raw food diet; the protagonist is given a tour of the empire’s futuristic radio and television station; the reader learns about the empire’s pre–fax machine era device that uses “a photoelectric cell” to transmit “impulses similar to those that make possible the sending of dots and dashes of the Morse code” (163); and Patricia leads an air fleet of stratosphere planes that fly at 50,000 feet. When the empire faces attack by British and French military forces, the army unveils “a great infernal machine” that, at five million volts, makes enemy planes fall from the sky and that defuses opponents’ bombs in a single minute. This “atom smasher” epitomizes Black Empire’s disappearance of inspirational leadership in the latter half of the text. The machine functions “without the touch of human hand” (243). Where charisma promises “a better show” (100) than the boring stuff of machine building, technology promises a better future—and captures the writerly imagination—in the end. The machine, not the miracle, secures the empire’s world power, and black liberation is achieved by the gift of science, not the gift of grace. When reason returns in the second half of Black Empire, the maniacal genius, Belsidus, and the spectacles of the Temples of Love

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retreat to the background of the narrative. The temples are to become, in the established empire, the seat of community building in Belsidus’s reinvented, rational black empire. “The whole plan of African life of the future will center around the temple,” Belsidus tells Carl. “We are building a rational society” (155). The church will become the educational and health center of the new world. The fifty-foot-tall God of Love has disappeared; in his place will be teachers, raw foodists, and doctors. Williams marvels at Black Empire’s technological innovation: We began to hear about underground aircraft facilities when the Gulf War began early in 1991. The Saudi Arabians had them and it was believed the Iraqis did, too. But we find them in Black Empire over a half century earlier. Schuyler’s heroes . . . developed the fax machine, skipping over the telecopier that actually preceded the development of the fax. Television, in its swaddling clothes at the time Schuyler wrote the serials, is fully developed here and used in the closed-circuit mode.104

Why does the novel write the charismatic leader out of the narrative of revolution once the Internationale establishes technocracy in Africa? Is Schuyler content, having turned the charismatic scenario into an antimystical machina ex machina hokum, to abandon the reductio ad absurdam political commen tary against charisma so he can lay out a semiserious technophilic vision for the future that can be accomplished by machines that can function without even the touch of the human hand? If Du Bois’s novel produces a sentimental pageant in which human– divine–human erotic love produces a chosen messiah who promises to save the world from an ugly march toward progress—that is to say, a tale that makes sensuous desire produced by aesthetic appreciation the very foundation of world revolution—Schuyler satirizes the place of the body and its desires in the leadership scenario. His antiaesthetic of leadership reduces a highly stylized, highly romanticized charismatic scenario to the absurd: it instead privileges a hyperrational “mechanical civilization” that rises to its height when reason returns to save the day from charismatic leadership (35). Schuyler’s deconstruction of black leadership makes charisma the object of ridicule and scorn. While Thompson reads Black Empire as a “revenge fantasy aimed at Italian aggression against Ethiopia” that “radicaliz[es] Garveyism to an almost absurd degree” and so “engages with, and finds positive use for, fascist ideology,” I suggest that the shift in genre, from satire to techno philic science fantasy, well suits the contradictions in Schuyler’s empirebuilding imaginary.105 If Schuyler, along with many thousands of other

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African Americans, felt solidarity with Ethiopia and “espoused a genuine and virulent anti-Italian rhetoric during and after the 1935–1936 ItaloEthiopian War,” it is not true that his solidarity with Ethiopia led him to singularly embrace the fascist dictatorship of a Garveylike fictional character as its answer to Mussolini. His “Dr. Beast of Harlem,” “Sweet Papa Love,” “Black Savior,” Dr. Belsidus, has to be read as a satirical play on Garvey, and indeed black charismatic leadership in general.106 The technocratic routinization of charisma in the second half of the serial, along with Belsidus’s disappearance, certainly suggest that Schuyler’s dreams of African empire building were at least somewhat earnest. Yet it is only in the textual erasure of the fascist, charismatic dictator that Schuyler’s text can fully realize its dreams of a new society. Nonrational Knowledges and the Charismatic Experience The charismatic leader in these two interwar narratives, Dark Princess and Black Empire, is a figure who serves to ground the texts’ anxieties about black political modernity as it corresponds to the discourses of rationality. While Schuyler’s futurism is an answer to what he sees as a problem of irrational eros as the basis for political engagement, Du Bois mobilizes romantic desire in a narrative that too easily accomplishes world revolution through an eroticized messianic vision centering around a single male figure who serves as divine help. Where charisma, imagined in both novels as eroticized bond of duty to the leader, amounts to charlatan shamanism for the former, it finally animates the latter. If we read these two novels together, Schuyler and Du Bois back us into a cul-de-sac of politics in which either the nonrational, in Du Bois’s case, or the hyperrational, in Schuyler’s, serves as the basis for a new social formation. In both cases, rationalism constructs the terms of order on which black leadership is constructed. If we reject the rationality/irrationality dichotomy as the principal axis of political value, we may come to a fuller appreciation of how contemporary African American narrative restages black politics and reimagines how political knowledge circulates. It is in the effort to reposition the history of rationalization as it has conscripted the study of African American politics, then, that I want to clarify my terms. As the cultural regime of rationality in U.S. history is “sketch[ed] against a discursively manufactured African American Other,” “irrational” names how the reification of reason in Western modernity rendered black subjects “illegitimate rational subjects from the start” because black subjects “have historically been located outside the idealized and normative properties of rationality.”107 I use the terms erotic and

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nonrational to refer to the kinds of social, political, and personal knowledges that emerge from loci that have historically been considered outside of, if not contrary to, reason in Western epistemologies. These loci include the body, the spirit, the ancestral, the sexual, the collective, the kinesthetic, the emotional, the ecstatic, the mystical, the oral, and the aural. If Du Bois and Schuyler construct charismatic leadership in the anxious field between rationality and political eros, reason and emotionalism, so do classical studies of charisma. “Rationalization and rational organization revolutionize ‘from the outside,’” Max Weber writes, “whereas charisma . . . manifests its revolutionary power from within, from a central metanoia [change] of the followers’ attitudes.” Charisma, then, “disrupts rational rule altogether.”108 The charismatic leader converts “irrational” energy into productive, material social activity. Canonical studies of irrationality—from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, to Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, to Weber’s writings on charismatic leadership in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization and Economy and Society—apprehend the leadership phenomenon as itself a manifestation of premodern abnormality. By representing the charismatic leadership event “as a deviance, an irrationality, or the outgrowth of a subculture, subset, or subsociety,” studies of mass psychology “contribute little beyond suggesting the nature of the truer task” of studying leadership, which, according to Cedric Robinson, “is to discover and identify the terms within which the event takes place or a people know it.”109 That is, to fully understand cha risma as a phenomenology of social and political movements is to take seriously the nonrational knowledge produced by the expression of collective desire without dismissing the charismatic experience as premodern, prescientific, primitive, and deviantly miraculous. In the sociology of black religion and culture that emerged during World War II, the “official” knowledge of the academy would idealize rationality and construct irrationality as a category that reproduced canonical sociology’s link between racial difference and deviance. In Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, for example, “the persistence of emotionalism” in black religious expression “suggests that blacks are not progressing toward some developmental ideal symbolized by rationalized—and therefore, nondemonstrative—worship forms.”110 As such, the connection that sociology made between African American religious ecstasy and sexual deviance, Roderick Ferguson argues, “located Afri can Americans within a premodern time, placing them within the time of unregulated sexuality, before the emergence of modern rationalities.”111

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As interwar African American literature restages the erotics of the modern black leadership scenario, the post-Enlightenment understanding of nonrational knowledges as premodern and psychopathological is registered in the narrative placement or displacement of the charismatic figure. The ecstasy of charisma is a necessary eruption on the trajectory toward Schuyler’s properly rational black politics on one hand and the erotic excess of a cold, modern rationality that forms the landscape of Du Bois’s fantasy on the other.112 In both cases, the regulation of black political desire is made complete precisely through the positing of the leader as the primary locus of citation or scapegoat for primordial collective desires. The leader embodies the nonrational desires of the masses and is either disappeared, as in Schuyler’s case, or hailed as savior, as in Du Bois’s. To problematize charisma as an explanatory device—or, as I have conceived it, a narrative and performative regime that works to discipline even as it enables social change—is not to maintain a scientific suspicion of the nonrational or to agree to the terms of political value with which Dark Princess and Black Empire leave us. It is rather to insist that the charismatic event as existential experience is neither trivial nor a manifestation of false consciousness, to propose that “it is real but that it has had a character which has largely been ignored or muted in scientific thought.”113 We might agree that the charismatic event in African American culture disseminates political knowledge in nonrational ways that are often liberatory rather than psychopathological. At the same time, we might maintain a sober critique of how the existential experience of charisma has been scripted into a portable performative and discursive structure that enthrones intraracial hierarchies of class, gender, and sexuality. The reification of the political conversion experience in biblical myth, in story, and in popular history repackages the mechanisms of prophetic collectivity of the charismatic event—the nonrational knowledges produced by body, spirit, dance, song, ancestors, voice, collective—and reframes social movement as individual genius, as virtuosity, as spectacular singular leadership. Black political modernity trained the eye toward the black charismatic leader’s form, the ear toward his spectacular oratory, and movements for social change toward his directives. As the black man during the first half of the twentieth century was presented and represented as a symbol both in history and out of history, both urbane and primitive, both vicious and docile, his image offered, as Carby argues, an ideal of nobility and spiritual beauty, a “possibility of unity for a fractious age.”114 The iconic presence of the black male charismatic leader on the innumerable stages of twentieth-century

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black politics—the street corner, the auditorium, the pulpit, the battlefield, the front guard of a parade—fashioned the charismatic scenario as the defining mode of modern black political engagement. Black political modernity was thus constituted by a dynamic interplay of spectacular presence and absence; the contradictions of charisma as a modern form of political authority gave rise to a host of problems, or violences, in black political culture and black political history. All of these violences—historical silencing, gender hierarchy, and the retreat of democracy—are bolstered by the appeal to rationality as the basis for modern politics, which determines history, authority, and political power all to be the domain of priestly men. The nonrational need not be—as in Black Empire—expunged altogether in order to counter the charismatic scenario with a vision of some participatory, democratic alternative. At the same time I want to insist—and I will return to this idea in the next chapter—that we be wary of a narrative of charisma that, like Dark Princess, tells a romantic story of triumph by erotic faithfulness to a single divinely gifted and/or extraordinarily talented figure. Throughout the twentieth century, African American narrative has animated embodied, sensuous knowledge for a radical politics that restages what Audre Lorde calls the “same weary drama” of the contemporary sociopolitical situation.115 Against Schuyler’s rationalizations and against Du Bois’s heteronormative revolutionary romance, black writers like Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison encourage us to “risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge” while resisting being made simple objects of desire.116 In part 2, I turn to these contestations in post– World War II African American literature, paying particular attention to how the restagings of the charismatic scenario in the decades before and during the civil rights movement allow us to enlarge our thinking about black leadership’s relationship to desire, gendered violence, resistance, and the history of antiracist struggle.

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Part II

Contestations

You and Joshua is everything and me and Aaron ain’t nothing. And we’re the very ones that got this thing together and kept it together all down the line. —Miriam to Moses, Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

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Chapter 3

Moses, Monster of the Mountain Gendered Violence in Zora Neale Hurston’s Gothic

ONE OF THE MOST COMPELLING FICTIONS of twentieth-century black political culture is the fantasy of charismatic leadership, the idea that political advancement is best achieved under the direction of a single male leader believed to be gifted with a privileged connection to the divine. When leadership is structured around a charismatic aesthetic, it is often a male presence that bears—or at least is believed ought to bear—the single gift of grace. In that scenario, political desire that runs counter to the passage of authority from God to a masculine presence to followers is rendered abject, dangerous, and murderous and thus is often violently squelched. As I have suggested, African American narrative fiction and film have comprised an archive of contestation that restages the charismatic scenario, a set of narrative and performative prescriptions for black politics, to call attention to the potential violences of charisma. Literary restagings of the charismatic scenario place the ideals of black leadership forged over the course of the twentieth century in dialogic tension with gender critique, historical revision, and a radical reconceptualization of black politics. One of these restagings, in which women’s erotic power confronts the masculinist strictures of charismatic authority by repeatedly interrupting the charismatic relationship between leader and people—even at the risk of violent reprisal—is Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. The novel rewrites the biblical Exodus story, which Hurston defines as a generative myth of the mystical foundations of political authority in the African diasporic world. “Wherever the children of Africa have been scattered by slavery,” she writes, “there is the acceptance of Moses as the foundation of mystic powers.”1 Moses is the character who, for Hurston, provides the paradigmatic instance of charisma, a type of authority legitimated by a leader’s being “treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.”2 The story that follows the author’s anthropological 77

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introductory note is, on the surface, a translation of the biblical language of Exodus into Southern African American vernacular. If read closely, the story offers a critical deconstruction of the political model that the Exodus mythology constructs around the powerful body of Moses and on a people weakened first by slavery and subsequently by the paradoxical tyranny of charismatic authority in a nominally free nation. Hurston’s revision of Exodus is not a simple translation; rather, it is a genre-shifting narrative that rewrites the political romance of Exodus as a horror fiction, a satirical cautionary tale about the gendered logic of black charismatic leadership, and, finally, a gothic tale rather than a national romance. Moses is Hurston’s black leadership gothic, a novel that scripts the black leader as a tyrant who uses his singular authority to determine national identity and destiny while policing nonnormative gender and sexuality through violent proofs of his power. By restaging black leadership as a horror fiction and giving life to the biblical character, Miriam, as both the voice of leadership critique and the target of intraracial political violence, the novel animates black women’s nonrational political knowledge and critical self-expression as sites of redress and discursive contestation. Studies of modern black political cultures have been ambivalent about how to theorize nonrational aspects of political performance and political subject formation. If political science has conceded that charisma is a premodern holdover, a “rational version of the messiah,” the tension created by the perception of its anachronicity in the modern world has indeed troubled perceptions of black political culture—which values charismatic political formation while eschewing pure emotionalism as primitive—and the study of it over the last decades.3 Hence a number of anti–black leadership monographs in recent years have attacked black male leaders for being power-hungry showmen while maintaining black male leadership as a sign structured in a gendered hierarchy bolstered by appeals to the rational.4 Even important critiques of black leadership are limited by the convention of associating nonrational knowledge with deviance and pathology. Treatments of Martin Luther King Jr. have been most symptomatic of this problem. Nathan Irvin Huggins attempts to recuperate and rehabilitate the nonrational aspects of black political culture when he suggests that King’s social gospel challenges critics “to look deeper into the nonrational and spiritual dimensions of the man and the movement. Sadly, however we have few scholarly examples to show us the way.”5 Meanwhile, excited by “the possibilities of structurally and affectively forming [Jürgen Habermas’s] founding notion of the bourgeois public sphere into an expressive and empowering

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self-fashioning,” Houston Baker presents King as “King of the Black Public Sphere,” a drum major who ushers in a new form of black publicity.6 Accepting the valuing of rationality at the core of the Habermasian public sphere, he insists that blacks are “fully rational human beings with abundant cultural resources” who “have always situated their unique forms of expressive publicity in a complex set of relationships to other forms of American publicity.”7 Baker goes on to offer an apologia for King’s spirituality, rescuing it from associations with nonrational mysticism or “clownish performance.”8 In this light, King’s own spiritual conversion is part of the “performative occasion” that was his charismatic leadership.9 Baker converts what others might read as existential experiences of ecstasy into the rational executions of a master drum major: King does not experience the “shout,” or spiritual frenzy, as an authentic affective experience but rather induces shouting for the undifferentiated black masses. King’s performative frenzies are, in Baker’s hands, even more than rhetorical strategy; they represent aesthetic mastery, virtuosity. The classed construction of emotionalism scripts the story of King’s leadership as Baker’s King promises a way out of the irrational connotations of the black church shout while capitalizing on that very shout for new public sphere leadership strategy. Baker thus registers a veiled bourgeois suspicion of nonrational knowledge that must treat the charismatic leader as uncontaminated by the ecstasy of his own charisma. On the other hand, as I mentioned in chapter 2, George Schuyler’s King, a “sable Typhoid Mary,” is responsible for spreading ecstasy like a disease. Where Baker’s King redeems black irrationality by creating a new, rational form of black publicity and leading his people, Joshua-like, in an antiracist crusade, Schuyler’s King is infected by an irrationality that contaminates innocent victims. Both assessments finally privilege rational organization over affect, ecstasy, spirit, body, and eros. I want to suggest, against Baker and Schuyler, that, following Huggins’s challenge to scholars of twentieth-century black politics, the nonrational has neither to be redeemed by a thinking man nor done away with by expert science in order for political community formation to be successful. But how can the nonrational serve as a basis for political engagement without positioning subjects at the mercy of a male-centered, mysticized charismatic authority? To address this question, I want to turn briefly to Audre Lorde’s classic black feminist reading of erotic power in “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which puts the phenomenological experience of desire at the beginning of a radical political subject and collectivity formation without scripting gifted leadership as the precondition for ecstatic experience. Lorde’s

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1984 “Uses” notes that “it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical” but challenges her readers to consider that the “dichotomy between the spiritual and political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge.”10 Lorde explains the devaluation of the erotic in contemporary American society as a result of gender oppression, such that irrationality is assumed to rightly belong to women, while at the same time, spiritual knowledge is assumed to be the priestly domain of men. This leaves women always already eroticized and locked out of authentic erotic power, what Lorde refers to as “a resource within each of us” that is “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”11 If Lorde’s erotic is meant to negate canonical, or professional, knowledge’s spiritual–material dichotomy and men’s monopoly on spiritual power, her own work, as Roderick Ferguson suggests, might be understood as an effort to “resuscitat[e] nonormative difference as the horizon of epistemological critique, aesthetic innovation, and political practice,” to in effect “express alternatives to existing social movements” precisely at the site of the literary text.12 If patriarchal society’s insistence on the value of rationality and positioning of women as nonthinking objects of thinking men’s desire makes everyday political labor—particularly that undertaken by working-class collectives and women—invisible in the official story of twentieth-century black politics, erotic power potentially recuperates nonrational knowledge for an antisexist, antiheteronormative political perspective that keeps us from “settling for the shift of characters” who have populated our culturally mediated and contested political scenarios.13 African American narrative, particularly black women’s fiction, has persistently negated rationality/nonrationality as the very terms of order for gauging political value. Black culture producers have often performed the productive tension that arises from the devaluing of the erotic and the valuing of ecstatic political expression in charismatic social and political movements. Black women performers, in particular, on all kinds of modern stages—the street, the variety stage, the pulpit, the podium, and the political stage, as well as the literary stage of African American narrative—have contested the central paradox of black political modernity: that political authority inheres in the nonrational while constantly disavowing the nonrational as a source of power. Black women’s uncontainable “improvisatory disobedience” in popular dance forms14; their raucous antilynching campaigns15; their quotidian, in-the-body ways of resisting race and gender oppression in central sites of black political community formation like the Baptist Church and their appropriations of

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traditionally male, or mannish, genres like the sermon and testimony16; their use of the song as an embodied vehicle of resistance to white supremacy17; and, most importantly here, their attempts to critically reformulate classic myths, or fictions, of black political leadership in fiction itself all point to how the making of black political modernity was constantly contested by black culture producers who retained ambivalent relationship to black male charismatic leadership and who valued the body as a site of knowledge production and political value. Hurston’s Moses In an unpublished 1925 satire that preceded both a short story about Moses, “The Fire and the Cloud,” and the Moses novel, Hurston writes a mock encomium for Marcus Garvey, who had recently been deported to Jamaica after being charged with mail fraud.18 “Modest and reserved himself,” Hurston writes of the former United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) president-general, “he loved these qualities in others. He was most severe with those who endeavored in one way or another to thrust themselves into prominence unduly.” Hurston’s spoof of Garvey presents the leader as a selfaggrandizing charlatan who is rightly charged with fraud: “But why the cry of fraud? He had taken the people’s money and he was keeping it. That was how he had become the greatest man of his race.” Both in “Emperor” and in the Moses novel, Hurston uses the literary text to critique commonsense notions of modern black leadership—to contest charisma as a structuring paradigm for black politics—showing the production of charismatic authority to be a spectacle (complete here with “brass bands blar[ing] away down Lenox Avenue” and fifty thousand people watching Garvey “file past . . . behind numerous banners of red, green, and black”) that ends not in a celebratory march to freedom but rather in shame and deceit.19 While Moses, Man of the Mountain lacks the bitter sting of “The Emperor Effaces Himself,” it presents readers with a similar critique of the cultural logic of black leadership. Using humor to expose the dangers of charismatic authority, Hurston rewrites the Exodus myth to expose the gendered violence that undergirds Moses’s claim to the leadership mantle. If Egypt served throughout the nineteenth century as a sign of “a great civilization or a land built on the backs of the oppressed, or both,” it mirrored “an overall and widespread instability in American racial and national identity,” according to Scott Trafton. The reverberations of the lore and lure of Egypt in the black cultural–political imaginary throughout the twentieth century underscore how the mythos of charismatic leadership continued,

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after the heights of American Egyptomania and Egyptology, to circulate images and notions of the ancient civilization as “fiercely contested sites for the expression of widespread anxieties relating to issues of social control.”20 The mythologized exodus out of Egypt, one of the founding myths of black leadership in twentieth-century America, narrates the formation of charismatic authority through the conventions of romance. There is wooing: Moses spends forty years in Midian pining after Israel, preparing to save a nation that is lost without a leading man, before returning to Goshen to prove his suitability for leadership by valiantly defeating the Egyptian pharaoh with the plagues. There is the suspense that accompanies an against-all-odds romantic plot: Moses escapes with Israel, fearing capture by the Egyptian army, and miraculously parts the Red Sea with his powerful rod, proving his singular gift of grace or charisma. There is the splendid eros of consummation: led by Moses, Israel penetrates the Red Sea and, arriving on the opposite shore, celebrates the union of leader and people. As the myth continues to unfold, the union between Moses and Israel is tested, challenged, and punctuated by disagreements ending in dire consequences for infidels. It is only the symbiotic bond of charisma—the duty linking the leader and the led together in an affair that is destined by a higher power—that impels Israel to obey a leader whose power it often resents. Driven by the momentum of a romantic fiction, the charismatic scenario must silence or erase, deny, or disavow any challenges to the divinely sanctioned authority of the leader figure. Moses, in the mythical story of political revolution and national founding, is definitive of charisma. It is Moses’s charismatic authority that, in Weberian terms, “is self-determined and sets its own limits”; it is Moses whose magical rod marks the leader’s divine calling; it is Moses who “seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey or follow him by virtue of his mission.”21 Moses is the center of authority in Israel because he claims privileged access to a God who demands devotion to the one chosen to usher in a new political order. And the Israelites are bound to follow Moses because “it is their duty to recognize his charisma.”22 The myth of Moses is one of the driving plots of what I have called the fiction of charismatic leadership. It is a political fantasy featuring a leader who, like Israel’s leader and national founder, offers an escape from a brutalizing political structure by parting the seas of chaos and providing a straight path to a new order. Throughout the twentieth century, public statements of the desire for singular leadership have betrayed an idealized vision of political authority that posits a black male figure as a benevolent, heroic emancipator and lawgiver. While African American writers and filmmakers have

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wrestled against the charismatic model of politics, few have subjected the romantic investment in a salvific narrative of black male political heroism to substantive critique. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois’s messiah is born with a mission to redeem the darker races of the world in the closing pages of the 1928 romance Dark Princess; and, ten years later, George Schuyler’s conniving Dr. Belsidus in the 1937 serial novel Black Empire satirizes charisma in a way that allows a scientific male rationalism to triumph over the insincere political performance of charlatan preachers and fraudulent race men. Moreover, late twentieth-century texts such as Paul Beatty’s 1996 The White Boy Shuffle and the 2002 and 2004 Barbershop films manage to satirize singular, charismatic political authority while maintaining the position of black male heroes at the center of the drama of African American liberation. Many fictional restagings of charisma, in sum, have only timidly approached the decentering of the black man as the primary heroic subject in the struggle to secure freedom and equality for Americans. Where charisma fails to seduce the cultural–political imagination, a black male hero who singularly preserves his people prevails. The male hero depicted in many texts as the antagonist to the charismatic leader—posed, in other words, as the real hero who exposes the fraudulence of political perpetrators—obscures the most persistent problem posed by African American idealizations of charismatic authority: the conflating of political authority with idealized masculinity. Charisma is a particularly masculinized structure of authority in the African American cultural imagination, and the alternative political models offered in the texts I have analyzed so far, while dispensing with charismatic authority, fail to do away with the investment in a political heroism that is gendered male both in fiction and in the history of black political and social movements.23 It is this gendered violence that Hurston contests in Moses, writing the story as a gothic tale that exposes black leadership’s gothic potentials. The story of Exodus provides a valuable case study for the way scholarship has ignored the male-centered heroism that has historically formed the moral basis of black political leadership. Eddie Glaude’s influential Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, for example, shows the biblical narrative to have provided the “nation language” with which black Americans first began to speak of themselves as a people in the first half of the nineteenth century. By analogizing their “experiences to biblical drama,” Glaude writes, blacks “articulated their own sense of peoplehood and secured for themselves a common history and destiny.”24 Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution, in a similar analytical move, connects the

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black social gospel of the 1960s to the story of Exodus as the author relates his personal experience in a small Baptist church in 1960 in Montgomery, Alabama: I listened to the most extraordinary sermon that I have ever heard—on the book of Exodus and the political struggle of southern blacks. There on his pulpit, the preacher . . . acted out the “going out” from Egypt and expounded its contemporary analogues: he cringed under the lash, challenged the pharaoh, hesitated fearfully at the sea, accepted the covenant and the law at the foot of the mountain.25

Walzer is led to propose that “wherever people know the Bible, and experience oppression, the Exodus has sustained their spirits and (sometimes) inspired their resistance.”26 Houston Baker, as I noted above, makes the same connection between the African American freedom movement of the latter half of the twentieth century and the ancient biblical story when he gestures to King as a modern successor of Moses, a “Joshua,” a “drum major for justice” who “led his followers in the brilliant . . . sounds of struggle that tumbled the walls of injustice—like the walls of Jericho—and drove the wicked from their seats of power.”27 And Theophus Smith, with a grand gesture paralleling Walzer’s and Baker’s, suggests that “all corporate liberation efforts” in African American history “can be configured, in the manner of ritual performances, as dramatic reenactments of Exodus, and their leaders envisioned as approximate types of Moses.”28 These studies have neglected to note how the circulation of the mythologized Exodus as a founding myth of nationhood has framed black political desire in menacing—though not entirely unproductive—ways throughout the twentieth century. Often, lurking within Exodus-inspired dreams of liberation and democracy is a masculinist vision of leadership that threatens women’s autonomy and stifles the radical democratic impulse, the drive to create a political system in which citizens have equal access to influence outcomes. While historians have painstakingly mapped the emplotment of the Exodus myth in American blacks’ earliest understandings of nationhood and analyzed the mediating factors in modern black leadership formation, they have often been reluctant to consider charisma a cultural myth that both allows for the formation of a collective identity and limits African Americans’ attempts at egalitarianism. Missing from Glaude’s invaluable history, for example, is attention to the narrative of Exodus itself and its inscription of a male-centered model of politics. If the biblical myth supplied blacks with a “nation language,” a lexicon of hope, and “a sense of possibility in the face of

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insurmountable evil,” it also inscribed vocabularies of singular authority and male dominance that go unread in Glaude’s account.29 Exodus provided not only a language for imagining the nation, but also a script for performing it. Written into this script are hierarchicalized gender roles, national chauvinism, and a heroic narrative of masculine ideality that has historically carried over into practice. The ways that the myth expanded early notions of freedom and its ability to incorporate female heroes notwithstanding, the narrative of Exodus is dangerous for egalitarian notions of gender and peoplehood.30 The masculinist dimensions of charismatic authority in Exodus are palpable. The story is of a clash between fathers: the Hebrew God, Yahve, promises to free his sons from Pharaoh’s sons. Moses’s phallically symbolic shepherding rod solidifies God’s authority as supreme Father and Deity. Moses steps into the biblical myth as the supermasculine translator of God’s authority; the “proofs” confirming his appointment as charismatic leader all issue from his potent rod. For Ilona Rashkow, “The fundamental themes of Oedipal conflict . . . characterize the relationship of Moses and God’s rod. [The Egyptian fertility goddess] Isis has been displaced by God’s rod; the Egyptian sacralization of female sexuality has been displaced by Israelite male sexuality.”31 In the power struggle over worship and devotion, Moses is the figure who interprets divine words for human hearing, a Jahvemarionette, or puppet of God. Readings of Exodus that position the myth as an unflawed narrative foundation for black nationhood, ignoring or explaining away its overt masculinism, are romantic fictions that compel readers to identify with a malecentered fantasy of political revolution. For this reason, Exodus constitutes an ideal site for a feminist deconstruction of charisma, a political model that has worked powerfully as a cultural force in contemporary black life. Moses is a prototypical figure of romanticized charisma. Yet if read closely, the charismatic exemplar of Exodus defies simple generic categorization: depending on the reader’s position, the protagonist of the ancient myth may be read as benevolent hero, monstrous authoritarian, or both. To be sure, the story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery, as historians like Glaude, Smith, and Walzer have shown, helped form blacks’ critiques of slavery and visions of a new social order. However, the liberationist reading of Exodus as a straightforward “story of radical hope” and social reordering presents a narrowed, idealistic interpretation that overlooks the violent power relations concealed within the myth and simplifies Moses’s ambiguous, ambivalent role as hero, villain, liberator, and/or murderer.32 Resisting the production of charisma as a romantic fiction that ends in a celebratory march into the promised land, black women intellectuals and

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writers have filtered the myth through a hermeneutic of suspicion, challenging the epic story of freedom to encompass their own liberation from masculinist visions of identity and political authority. If Renita Weems is correct that “the emotional, psychological, and religious health of African American women has been directly related to their refusal to hear the Bible uncritically and their insistence upon applying . . . an ‘aural hermeneutic,’” black women’s restagings of the ancient drama might be seen as the narrative ground for feminist critique of charisma as a political epistemology, as a structure of political knowing.33 Black women, after all, “have consistently called attention to [biblical] texts where individuals (both male and female) are slaughtered, subjugated, silenced, or isolated as a result of their identity.”34 They have drawn readers’ eyes to Exodus’s gothic potential. As African Americans spoke their peoplehood through the biblical figuralism of Exodus, black women contested and revised the political ideals imposed by the biblical myth in cautious—even gothic—ways. The political romance of Exodus has produced at least one gothic restaging: Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. Moses as Black Leadership Gothic While Exodus and other stories about national formation in which foreigners play the role of founder have tended toward romance, novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain read such national allegories, in Bonnie Honig’s words, “gothically instead of romantically”; that is, they, like the protagonists of female gothic novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian-era Jane Eyre or Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, published just one year before Moses, maintain a “perpetual uncertainty about the law and their relation to it” and “know that we may passionately support certain heroes (or principles or institutions) in political life while also knowing that we ought not take our eyes off them for fear of what they might do to us if we did.”35 Conventional romances track the transformation from fear to love in the female protagonist’s feelings toward the male hero. In the gothic romance, the trajectory of emotion is opposite: the heroine’s paranoia grows as the story progresses. Honig’s reading of “foreign-founder texts” attempts to forge a connection between the gothic heroine’s fear of the male hero and the productive paranoia that citizens of a democratic collectivity ought to cultivate: Rather than return home to the nation and love it (or its idealization) fully and completely, democratic actors . . . would do well to nurture some ambivalence regarding their principles, their leaders, and their neighbors and to put that ambivalence to good political use.39

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The female gothic can be a political instrument that instructs readers to use “gothic lenses” to “be wary of authorities and powers that seek to govern us, claiming to know what is in our best interests.” From female gothics, “we get a valuable exhortation to take matters into our own hands.”37 Hurston does not simply take the matters of the Exodus myth into her own hands. She takes it into her own ears—hearing, as Renita Weems suggests, “without allegiance to any official text”—and into her own words, “putting her mouth on the myth,” as Deborah E. McDowell writes in her introduction to Moses, Man of the Mountain.38 Hurston’s Exodus reproduces the ancient myth with gothic irony: it is gothic because Moses is a dark, undecidable figure who presumes the leadership of a people that, like the gothic heroine, has “ended up with a man who might still be a murderer”; it is ironic because, as McDowell asserts, “every attempt to penetrate to some essential, extractable political position or source is concealed behind some mélange of humor, conjure stories, folktales, and braided historical narratives.”39 If the reader cannot be sure whether Moses is hero or villain, neither can she be sure that the novel intends readerly clarity, for the author “offers no easy pieties” or “tidy solutions,” and Hurston “seems loath . . . to use her fiction to ‘lead’ her readers toward any pat solution to the continuing problem of racism and oppression.”40 “If there was meant to be a lesson for the black leadership of Hurston’s day in Moses,” Blyden Jackson writes, “it is difficult to say of what that lesson was intended to consist.”41 Hurston’s use of gothic irony undoes heroic notions of both political and authorial leadership; neither Moses nor Hurston can be trusted to deliver clear, expected outcomes. In this sense, Moses can be said to prefigure the critiques of charismatic black leadership that follow the World War II era in African American literature, as the scene of contestation becomes, over and over again, an empty field, a puzzle, a disappearance, a palette of curiosities. Hurston’s Moses, the “finest hoodoo man in the world,”42 is a syncretic assemblage of fictional characters, mythical deities, and historical personages. Critics interpret him variably as a conjurer,43 a Negro leader,44 a Machiavellian prince,45 and a Hitlerian führer46 converging around one grand name. Hurston’s infinitely powerful and frightening Moses stands, rod in hand, at the center of a gothic restaging of Exodus in which charismatic authority acts as a monstrous sociopolitical paradigm that crushes women’s desires and buries them under a stifling, male-originating logos. In Moses, Man of the Mountain, a novel that Barbara Johnson has argued “radically defamiliariz[es] . . . a foundational legend” and “rewrit[es] . . . leadership as alterity and erasure,” the violent ramifications of Moses’s

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positioning as prime author and protagonist, whose rod both writes the story and propels its action forward by its many shows of power, are visited upon the character of Miriam, who is displaced as author-protagonist in the novel’s opening pages.47 Miriam’s mother charges her with placing her newborn brother, Moses, in a basket on the Nile River so that he may escape the pharaoh’s decree of murder. Miriam, charged with the responsibility of watching the basket to “see what happen[s] to the child,” is an inattentive spectator in Moses’s story (25). “Her eyes wandered from the particular spot among the bulrushes to bulrushes in general,” the narrator tells us. “Then she regarded the river and the activities on the river. . . . Then Miriam went to sleep” (26). While the narrator tells readers that Miriam “woke up with a guilty start and looked for the little ark on the river which contained her baby brother,” it seems that the girl is still dreaming, for, mourning the missing basket containing her brother only for a moment, Miriam is drawn to “a glorious sight,” a “large party of young women dressed in rich clothing” (27). Miriam, caught guilty of homoerotic scopophilia, watches the “marvelous scene” of women bathing and is “uplifted from gazing on it” (27). Moses’s life as a member of the Egyptian court begins here, in Miriam’s fantasy. Centering her I and her “eye-looks” in the beginning of Hurston’s novel, Miriam gazes on the princess and her female servants as they bathe, dress, and dance. In depicting this scene of female–female pleasuring in its fifth chapter, the novel seduces the reader’s imagination away from its dark opening chapters in which Hebrew women under Pharaoh’s death decree “hid[e] in caves and rocks,” stifle their cries, and “[shudder] with terror at the indifference of their wombs to Egyptian law” (1). Here, in Miriam’s half-awake fantasy, the young girl lures the readers away from the life of brutal confinement in Goshen to the Edenic scene among the palm trees at the Nile. This early chapter in the novel writes the homoerotic fantasy of a young girl into the story of Moses’s adoption by the Egyptian court. It is only when Miriam’s mother asks her daughter what has happened to Moses that Miriam, facing punishment for inserting herself so boldly into this story about Moses, “came back to herself from her dreams of the palace” (29). To appease her mother, she haphazardly composes the story of the princess’s drawing Moses out of the water before quickly returning to the narrative of her own fantasy: “I love the princess, mama. I wish she could take me to the palace too” (30). Miriam weaves together stories of Moses’s fate that position her as central in the drama. Her father hears her outside the family’s hut “telling and retelling her story” (33). As the people of Goshen pass the story on, they increase Miriam’s storytelling pleasure:

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Miriam told her story again and again to more believing ears. It grew with being handled until it was a history of the Hebrew in the palace, no less. Men claimed to have seen signs at the birth of the child, and Miriam came to believe every detail of it as she added them and retold them time and time again. Others conceived and added details at their pleasure and the legends grew like grass. (35)

Miriam’s story is heteroglossic; it is a dynamic, moving narrative that merges her fantasy, the people’s knowledge, and the community’s desire for an insider in the palace. Miriam’s status in Hurston’s story within a myth shifts from minor character in the preceding four chapters to protagonist at the beginning of this chapter, and, finally, to primary narrator. By the beginning of the following chapter, however, she has become invisible. This is a textual burial that is critical in Hurston’s black leadership gothic; by calling attention to the misogynist violence needed to tell the story of black liberation in the plot and mirroring that violence in the very structure of the novel, Hurston allegorizes black charismatic leadership not as a natural phenomenon, but rather as a seductive tropology of black political modernity. The novel makes a space for Miriam to dream before burying her underneath Moses’s story. Miriam’s story is expelled from the novel when her fantasy of a female-centered courtly life in close proximity to the princess is pushed out of the text by a nightmare that establishes the Hebrew God’s favoring of her brother as Israel’s charismatic leader. Miriam’s voice, revealing her desire for intimacy with the princess royal, is silenced when the text’s narrator tells readers, “Inside the royal palace affairs went on unconscious of the legends of Goshen. The Pharaoh had his programs, national and international” (36). The demands of the Egyptian empire render the young girl’s storied dreams irrelevant, and the text shifts perspective to find the adopted Moses “inside the palace walls,” now “second in line for the throne of Egypt” (37). Hurston’s Moses, in the chapters following Miriam’s brief term as protagonistnarrator, buries the woman under its stories of Moses’s coming of age in the palace, his military feats, the revelation of his possible Hebrew origins, his murder of an Egyptian overseer and his subsequent flight to Midian, his spiritual education by his later father-in-law, Jethro, his marriage to Zipporah, his calling by the God of Mount Sinai, and his return to Egypt as emancipator. The textual burial of Miriam in Moses, Man of the Mountain underscores the narrative draw of male-centered charismatic heroism. Charismatic authority works culturally as a romantic fiction precisely because of its ability to seduce readers toward an emancipatory telos. The linear progression of the narrative is irresistible. The seduction of linearity, for Glaude, accounts

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in part for the power of Exodus as a narrative base for ideas of freedom and nationhood: “The journey forward—the promise that where we are going is radically different from where we are—marks the transformative aspect of the narrative,” he writes. The “narrative structure of Exodus describes a progression, the transformation of people as they journey forward to a promised land. . . . Once the Israelites leave, there is no turning back.”48 Carried forward like a marcher in a political spectacle, the reader here follows Moses as he comes of age and grows into his role as charismatic leader. Yet instead of leading its readers toward a celebratory release at the novel’s close, charisma in Hurston’s novel rears its ugly head: it exposes its own power to discipline and murder as well as free. Monster of the Mountain The gothic literary tradition, more than a “set of literary conventions,” involves “a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into the present.” It is “the perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away.”49 Contemporary fictions that allude to or incorporate gothic elements—a deteriorating place of ruin, ghosts, dreams, nightmares, unnatural silences, tremulous female characters, and madwomen—produce fear within the text in order to index a relationship of horror to the frightening past or the historical present. The sense of the unheimlich—the uncanny—within texts indexes, in some cases, the text’s frightening sense of alienated familiarity to some real or imagined past outside of it.50 Hurston’s text imports gothic elements such as the femme fatale/madwoman figure and the tyrannical monster to communicate its characters’ fear and desire in relation to the charismatic leader as well as to speak its own sense of uncanniness in relation to the history of dominating male charisma. Black women’s gothics, in particular, give narrative life to intersectional critiques of power. As Evie Shockley explains, the trope of “gothic homelessness” in novels such as Ann Petry’s 1946 The Street ex presses “the frightening uncertainty of the domestic boundaries that are supposed to safeguard those within its walls” or represents “the horrifying exclusion (or potential exclusion) from membership in one’s would-be ‘family.’”51 The gothic genre depicts black heroines’ terror in the face of existing interracial and intraracial hierarchies, their exclusion from familial networks both at home and in the public sphere. If Hurston’s novel defamiliarizes black leadership as a representational complex of black political modernity, the form of its defamiliarization makes

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it itself an unhomely presence within twentieth-century African American letters. Hurston’s text has been labeled by critics an “enigma”52 and a “badly flawed novel”53 in the tradition of African American folklore fiction. Perhaps the novel has been understudied because, as Darryl Dickson-Carr suggests, it “flits between the satiric mode, folklore, romance, and the picaresque” in its genre-defying prose.54 While Dickson-Carr’s analysis of Moses rightly places the novel in the tradition of African American satire, his catalog of the novel’s generic elements—satire, folklore, romance, and picaresque—misses at least one vital set of tropes: those belonging to gothic or horror fiction. This oversight is consistent with Shockley’s assessment that the “deeply woven threads of gothic and other fantastic elements go largely overlooked” in African American literature.55 Hurston’s novel employs various gothic conventions to produce a haunting reading of the dangerous relationship between a people and a national leader or founder. There are no cavernous castles or frighteningly silent convents in Hurston’s story. Rather, the place of ruin common to the gothic novel is Exodus, a sacred scripture hiding a madwoman in its textual attic and exposing in its lower floors a tyrannical monster who stalks its pages, threatening to consume Israel, a composite character that, like Honig’s gothic heroine, is unafraid to wrestle democratic power away from its tyrant. Moses is a kind of trickster figure whose selfquestioning two-headedness produces Hurston’s ironic critique of black political leadership.56 He is also a type of Frankensteinian monster, created for good but trapped in evil.57 Moses’s story, in Hurston’s revision, is a Promethean tale in which Moses is a man-made tyrant. After learning of his possible Hebrew origin, identifying with the slaves, and murdering an Egyptian overseer, Moses strips himself of his power in the Egyptian court and departs for a foreign land, “seeing visions of a nation he had never heard of where there would be more equality of opportunity and less difference between top and bottom” (75). Moses, prince of Egypt, wades across the Red Sea and emerges on the other side a newborn character: Moses had crossed over. He was not in Egypt. He had crossed over and now he was not an Egyptian. He had crossed over. . . . He had crossed over. . . . He had crossed over so he was not of the house of Pharaoh. He did not own a palace because he had crossed over. . . . He was subject to no law except the laws of tooth and talon. . . . He had crossed over. He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he had once been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over. (78)

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This crossing over into a new state of consciousness is an emptying moment in which Moses discards the ideas of imperial power and rule by force. Barbara Johnson labels this moment “a cancellation of all [Moses] signifies. The crossing over is also a crossing out. He has become as empty as a hole.”58 While in this incubatory state of consciousness, Moses first encounters the sublime Mount Sinai: “He saw the great mountain at a distance lifting its rocky crown above the world and he was dumbstruck with awe. . . . It was near; it was far. It called. It forbade. It was all things to his inner consciousness” (84). Responding to Sinai’s beckoning, Moses is led to Midian, where he is adopted and recreated by his father-in-law. The character of Jethro is like the mythical Prometheus who creates a being after the shape of the gods. When Jethro and Moses meet, they are connected, it seems, mystically. Moses “felt [Jethro’s] personality before he spoke,” and Jethro knows Moses’s name without asking (87). He tells Moses he knows his name because “that is what you were thinking when you came up” (87). Jethro’s symbolic naming of Moses marks himself as Father in the new relationship: Moses remarks, “You have the advantage of me now, because you know my name, but I don’t know yours” (87). The family relation is made complete as the story progresses: Jethro asks Moses to remain in Midian with his family, and Moses promises that he will, telling Jethro, “You are my father from now on” (94). Jethro responds, “Thank you. It’s grand to have a son even though my wife didn’t bear you” (94). Jethro, like Victor Frankenstein creating his monster, fathers Moses in the absence of women. Moses’s new father creates the character that will become the monstrous charismatic figure who threatens Israel’s national security and who destroys the female character who is, for now, buried in the text. While Miriam remains invisible in Goshen, Jethro is in Midian “making of Moses what he himself wanted to be—a great priest” (112). Moses, Jethro thinks, can be molded into a human representative of God: Moses had the genius for leadership which he lacked. Moses had comparative youth and he had fire. Moses had education and Moses had soul in soul. All he needed to do was to point the direction and Moses passed him in accomplishment with a leap. Here was the man of science such as the world had never seen. But his beloved son-in-law had a serous failing. He had no mission in life except to study. (112)

Moses, a masterpiece near completion, is missing charisma’s requisite ingredient: a mission. Jethro’s recreated Moses has retained the aversion to law and force that was implanted in his crossing over from Egypt into new

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consciousness, so Jethro must use “hoodoo” to convince his son of his mission to build a new nation. After Moses’s repeated refusals to lead Israel out of Egypt, Jethro tells Zipporah, Moses’s wife, “Well, he might think I’m through with the thing, but first and last he’s going to find out different. . . . Maybe there is still something about snakes that he can learn. The backside of that mountain may get too hot to hold him yet” (124). The novel’s implication that Jethro conjures the burning bush and converts Moses’s walking stick into a snake undermines the Bible’s rendering of Moses’s calling by Yahve. It is Jethro, finally, who may be the “finest hoodoo man in the world,” for it is he who fashions Moses as a charismatic leader gifted with a privileged connection to God and burdened with a mission to save God’s chosen people (114). Jethro’s remade Moses is the monstrous lawgiver who returns to Goshen as a feared and revered father figure for the Hebrew nation. Hurston’s Moses emerges from the shadows of Midian as a Jekyll and Hyde figure caught between his utopian vision of a democratic country free from force and the distinctly undemocratic violence required to authorize his charismatic position. Now a foreigner to the Hebrews, Moses returns to Goshen, the site of his sister’s buried dream and disappeared story. His hoodoo powers punctuate his calling as liberator as well as his murderous tendencies. Moses releases plagues on Egypt to prove, first, the ultimate power of his “rod of God” (225), and, second, his mission and calling. These charismatic proofs grow progressively horrific: he turns all of the water in Egypt to blood; he sends a plague of frogs and “saw piles and furrows of dead frogs as he made his way to the palace through a terrified populace” (155); he pronounces a curse of lice; he sends flies to torment Egypt, creating a “public panic” (163); he kills all of the cattle in Egypt; he makes all of the living animals in Egypt break out in boils; he devastates Egypt with a hailstorm and a swarm of locusts that consume Egypt until it is “eaten bare” (170); and finally, he releases a “living, crawling darkness that had a life of its own” (174). This darkness murders Egypt’s firstborn sons, taking on monstrous, tyrannical characteristics. It “balanced up on midnight looking both ways for day. Then the great cry arose from Egypt. They cried and died in Egypt” (177). Mark Thompson designates Hurston’s Moses a Hitlerian figure who embodies charisma in its most violent, monstrous form, arguing, “The basis of Moses’s new nation will be a religious principle more powerful than the one upon which Pharaoh established his fascist State. Indeed, as the charismatic leader, Moses demands submission to his right hand not only from the Egyptians, but from the Hebrews as well.”59 Charisma, in Hurston’s revision of Exodus, devolves

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into a gruesome totalitarianism that requires total obedience to a leader whose rod gives him the power to free and to maim. Moses, here, is not designated foreign simply as a result of his dubious origins; he is foreign because he is “the great law-giver,” the one character in the story who “brought the laws down from Sinai.”60 Moses is revered because his divinely written law guards Israel against the divisiveness that results from idol worship; he is feared because the power to impose law on a newly freed people is a singular gift of the charismatic leader that marks him as extraordinary—foreign. Israel, therefore, maintains its suspicion of the dark figure who releases the horrific plagues upon Egypt. The people ask, “He ain’t in the notion of putting out no plagues [on us] . . . is he?” and wonder, “How about that thing he calls a cloud that moves in front of us in the daytime and that fiery thing at night—you reckon it’s harmful?” (197). The Israelites’ suspicions become murderous after they witness Moses’s wrath against their idol worship. As Moses sees the people worshiping a golden calf at the bottom of Mount Sinai, the Israelites are positioned as the leader’s new enemies. Alluding to God’s earlier commission of Moses on Sinai, God tells the leader, “Go down, Moses, and halt them in their headlong flight” (235). Moses walks “down the mountain like God descending into Eden” and condemns the fallen people in an act that recalls his earlier shows of power against the Egyptians (235). Moses uses the tablets of the law to smash the golden calf, and, renewing an old battle, that of Egypt against Sinai, “Moses made a decision. He straightened his shoulders and marched to the gate of the camp and lifted both hands in the air. People saw Moses standing like a crucifix and came” (238). Moses stands, godlike, and tells the people to slay those guilty of idol worship. In a scene recalling the death of Egypt’s firstborn sons, the narrator tells readers, “For hours there was fleeing and screaming and hiding and bloody swords. Then there was quiet again in the camp. It only remained to bury the dead” (239). Israel now understands that Moses’s monstrous power to maim and kill will be brought to bear on any transgressors of the new law. And now, “everybody was afraid. Would he lift his rod against them? Would he raise that right hand? As Moses went the people stood in their tent doors and watched him pass. And every eye in Israel watched him in fear” (240). Moses creeps through Israel’s camp, inspiring fear and awe. Whereas in a romantic rendering of the charismatic scenario the leader is the center of a spectacle of goodness and moral uprightness, here all eyes follow the charismatic leader because the nation fears the monstrous authority and murderous potential of its founder and leader. Pleasurable gazing turns into fearful watchfulness when Israel discovers that they ought not take

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their eyes off Moses for fear of what he might do. While a romantic reading of Exodus posits Moses as a leader who is presumed to know intuitively when the nation has reached maturity and to make his timely departure when the nation no longer has need of him, a gothic reading might emphasize how in the biblical story and in Moses, Israel eventually rebels against the founder who may not have foreign origins but who is nevertheless designated foreign when he imposes a law that is monstrously Other to the infant or adolescent democracy. After recognizing the monstrosity of Moses’s “power to command God,”61 the Israelites begin to resist the presence of the monster among them and prepare to expunge from their nation the violence of its founding. Thus, rebelling against Moses’s proposal to go into the promised land of Canaan and fight its inhabitants, the Israelites urge each other, “Let’s go on back to Egypt where we belong. But first thing let’s kill him for bringing us off” (257). When the people Moses has been leading begin to turn against him—to scapegoat him—he leads them to the Tabernacle of the Congregation, for “he was in great danger of being taken for a mere man” among the dwelling tents (257). There he shows the people just how monstrous he can be: lying on his face to pray, he takes on the image of the rod/snake that has so frightened his enemies: A great gasp went up from the Princes and the people outside crowded back from the door in some nameless fear. The figure of Moses on the ground did not look helpless somehow. It inspired more terror than it would have even with the uplifted hand. Everybody shrunk away as far as they could. (258)

Jethro’s creation has, like the monster in Shelley’s gothic novel, become a threat to the nation. It is for this reason that the Israelites in Hurston’s novel can be read as “gothic subjects” who “experience the law,” and the lawgiver, “as a horizon of promise but also as an alien and impositional thing.”62 For Hurston’s Hebrews, Moses is more than man; he is monster. Miriam’s Returns Miriam’s textual returns illustrate the way that the failure to obey the charismatic leader who has become a monster is punished by atrocious force. Miriam makes her first return to the narrative as a “two-headed woman of power” (135). Whereas before Moses’s usurping of the story Miriam possesses the freedom to tell and retell her story, she is now muted; her only vehicle for self-expression is ventriloquism. Miriam now has to speak through Aaron, and for this reason, her power has two heads—one that reasons, thinks, and

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feels, and another that speaks. In the charismatic schema, authority requires a single source of logos. Reason and judgment are passed from a single divine entity through a single bearer along to a social body. Moses has to silence any voices clamoring to be heard alongside his own. Thus when Moses returns to Goshen from Midian and calls a meeting with the Hebrew elders, he is angered by the presence of his sister, a known prophet in Goshen. Aaron, Miriam’s brother and alter ego, presents Miriam as a person of “influence” who should introduce Moses to the Hebrews, introducing her as “a great prophetess” and encouraging Moses to “let her speak before everybody” for him (135). Moses dismisses the notion, telling Aaron, “This is not the time I have appointed for speech-making,” and asking, “What makes you so sure she could do all this speaking and influencing if you have never seen her do it?” (135). Moses’s refusal to allow Miriam to speak and his appointing of Aaron as a legitimate actor in the divine–human verbal relay solidifies Miriam’s role as silenced ventriloquist and confines her to using Aaron’s mouth to speak. Miriam’s muted critique of Moses’s leadership is almost always expressed through Aaron, and Aaron’s words thinly veil their source. Challenging Moses, he says, “I don’t see how come she, that is, both of us, can’t get credit for what we got to do in saving Israel” (136). It is Aaron who gives voice to Miriam’s attempts to reinsert herself as a character in the Exodus story. He tells Moses, “We ain’t being treated right, Miriam and me. Ain’t no ifs and ands about it. We just done had the hog run over us, that’s all” (213). Moses, exasperated by the two-headed Aaron/Miriam voice, says to Miriam, “I’m not surprised at either one of you talking like you do, but I wish you would tell me why you do” (213). Authorized to speak, Miriam makes an argument for inclusion in Moses’s heroic narrative: Here we done whipped old Pharaoh down and took this nation of people away from him and brought ’em safe across the Red Sea and done I don’t know what in all these three months, let alone whipping them Amalekites and here you don’t give us no credit at all. You and Joshua is everything and me and Aaron ain’t nothing. And we’re the very ones that got this thing together and kept it together all down the line. (213)

Moses ends the discussion by deferring to the charismatic structure of authority, which posits leadership as a by-product of one man’s exceptional status before God: “The Lord usually gives a man what he is worth. . . . Well goodbye, see you after Sinai” (213). Moses’s emphasis on manly value here dismisses Miriam from the narrative and buries her once again within his own story.

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Miriam is dangerous to Moses because she interferes in the patriarchal line of charismatic authority. The authority is passed down vertically from one generation to the next—from Moses to his sonlike servant, Joshua— rather than diffused horizontally among Moses, Miriam, and Aaron. It is for this reason that Miriam’s insightful remark to Moses—“You and Joshua is everything and me and Aaron ain’t nothing”—is correct in its analysis of the way the social structure erases, disappears, and buries her until she is a cipher, a nothing. When Joshua complains that Miriam has ordered him to stay out of her way and “quit talking so much out of [his] mouth,” Moses tells his “adopted son” (203), “Don’t let Miss Miriam worry you. . . . Let her head work for the present. You won’t lose nothing in the long run. I don’t forget a thing” (162). This statement is an ominous foreshadowing of Moses’s eventual punishment for Miriam’s interference in the story and in the patriarchal line of authority. The battle for space in the heroic narrative of Exodus and in the leadership over Israel comes to a climax when Moses’s wife, Zipporah, joins the Hebrews’ camp. Here, as in the classic 1847 female gothic novel by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, the text erects a dichotomy between the gothic femme fatale and the ideal woman. Susanne Becker writes of the clash between Bertha Mason-Rochester, the madwoman in the attic in Brontë’s text, and the novel’s heroine: The “madwoman in the attic” is seen as a “clothed hyena,” crazy, imprisoned— and voiceless. . . . The figure of Bertha Mason has thus become a prototype of the sexual woman in the feminine gothic: affirmative femininity turned into the monstrous—or, in narratological terms, into a voiceless textual object, controlled by the male gaze. This imprisoned position of the sexual woman figure has become one of the most powerful horrors that shape feminine gothic texts.63

Miriam, resembling the tragic figure of the gothic femme fatale, is locked away in the novel’s attic and then gazed on as a tragic example of the consequences of women’s attempts to step outside of their predetermined roles in the heroic narrative. Zipporah, Moses’s wife, is a spectacle of passive femininity, and Miriam is a spectacle of abjection. When Moses takes Zipporah into battle with him, he tells Jethro that he does not want her to fight, but rather only needs her “to stand at my back with an extra spear and sword in her hands” (93). Zipporah is an image emptied of subjectivity and function; to her husband, she is reduced to “pictures that went with Moses all day long as he herded Jethro’s sheep” (102); and when she reunites with Moses as the

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people of Israel are assembled at Mount Sinai, she has “not a finger nor a toe left uncovered” by jewelry (216). Buried underneath her hyperfeminine image (Jethro says, “If all them necklaces she got on don’t choke her to death, I’d sure like to know the reason why’” [216]), Zipporah mirrors Miriam’s metaphysical state. The reader, of course, knows that Miriam has been nearly suffocated and muted by the text since her fatal mistake as a young girl-dreamer in Goshen. Miriam’s romantic dream of courtly life and her subsequent insistence on telling and retelling her story marks her as the text’s monstrous female character. When the women of Israel gather around Zipporah to admire her, the text recalls the scene in Goshen and punishes Miriam for her earlier femalecentered fantasy. Zipporah points to Moses’s sister and asks, “Isn’t that Miriam—that bitter-looking old woman?” (217). Zipporah goes on to highlight Miriam’s failure to conform to the heterosexual romantic imaginary when she says, “Oh, she just has the look of never having been loved. She has that terrible look of never having been nuded by a man” (217). Pointing further to Miriam’s inability to perform normative heterosexual femininity by deploying fashion, Zipporah continues, “I don’t want her near me if I can help it. What on earth is all that she’s got on?” (218). Miriam here is dismissed as a joke with “no talent for leadership,” and Moses and Zipporah attempt to solidify their othering of Miriam by consummating their heterosexual love bond (218). However, while making their way to Moses’s “tent of the leader,” they are interrupted by another return of the repressed (218). Miriam attempts to redirect the women’s eye-looks and to restore her place in Israel’s story. She “elbowed her way through the crowd to glare at [Zipporah]”; she “burst through the crowd and just stood there staring and glaring” (218). Miriam recognizes she is being marked in contradistinction to Zipporah and is “very unhappy at the sight of Zipporah” (218). Whereas her gazing on the princess earlier in the novel elevates Miriam’s self-image, her gazing here causes her to “[look] at her own rough clothing . . . then [turn] her eyes away from the fine raiment of the woman on the camel. She looked again and saw well-cared-for hands and feet of Zipporah, and looked at her own gnarled fists and her square feet all twisted and coarsened by slavery, and almost snarled out loud” (219). Miriam’s femininity, “twisted,” “gnarled,” and “coarsened,” is, like the racialized femme fatale’s, a marker of madness and subhumanity. As Bertha Mason “snatch[es] and growl[s] like some strange wild animal,” Miriam nearly “snarl[s] out loud,” then “snarled and said things to the women about” Zipporah (219).64

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In this climactic return-of-the-repressed scene, Miriam remembers, as the reader does, her dream in Goshen: “The sight of the daughter of Jethro in her finery carried Miriam back to that morning long ago when she had seen the daughter of Pharaoh bathing in the Nile” (218). Miriam rebels against her own and the other women’s scopophilic pleasure in this revision of the text’s earlier moment. Miriam “had had so little in her life and now this place she had won by hard work and chance was being taken from her by the looks of a Prince’s daughter who hadn’t done anything but deck herself to come here and bewitch the eyes of foolish women!” (219). Miriam has returned to the text to voice that which the Exodus story has locked away. Her speech here attempts to reinsert her fantasy of heroic protagonism and narration into what has now become a nightmarish tale of violent leadership. Her attempt to reinstate herself as a primary, heroic character in the narrative, however, is thwarted. As the other women are bewitched, Miriam “turned and spat at” one of Zipporah’s admirers but “felt uttlerly helpless in the presence” of the idealized, “proper” feminine (218). Miriam’s attempt to liberate herself and the other women from Zipporah’s bewitching finds her “carried forward against her will by the slow wave of women that crept behind Moses and Zipporah as they walked” (219). Miriam’s hushed voice haunts the narrative throughout the text, returning to express a progressively expanding notion of freedom. In a later scene of return, Miriam becomes frustrated with Aaron’s political performance and takes her own voice back: “Don’t let him holler you down, Aaron,” Miriam jumped in. “The Lord did call us just as much as He did Moses and it’s about time we took our stand in front of the people. I was a prophetess in Israel while he was herding sheep in Midian. And that woman he done brought here to lord it over us, that black Mrs. Pharaoh got to leave here right now.” (245)

Moses’s response attempts to mark Miriam as a subhuman monstrous female once more, telling her, “The trouble with you is that nobody ever married you. And when a woman ain’t got no man to look after her, she takes on the world in place of the man she missed” (245). In her venomous anger, Miriam “lifted up her voice so all the women on the outside” of Moses’s tent “could hear what she said” (245). “Who you talking to Moses?” she shouts. “The Lord don’t speak through your mouth alone. He speaks through my mouth and Aaron’s mouth just as much as He speaks through yours” (246). This outburst ends Miriam’s final attempt to reinsert herself in the nation’s story as a heroic character and as a speaking agent in the charismatic relay of

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authority. Moses challenges Aaron and Miriam to follow him to the Tent of Testimony, where they will “settle this thing in front of everybody once and for all” (246). This duel defines Moses’s authority once and for all. When the charismatic leader “comes into conflict with the competing authority of another who claims charismatic sanction,” authority must be established “by magical means or even an actual physical battle of the leaders. In principle, only one side can be right in such a conflict; the other must be guilty of a wrong which has to be expiated.”65 In the Tent of Testimony, “the Voice spoke out of the cloud and was angry with Miriam and Aaron. Then the cloud lifted and everybody saw that Miriam was a leper. . . . Miriam was a horrible sight in her leprous whiteness! Everybody shrank away from her in terror and disgust. So Moses put her outside of the camp as unclean for seven days” (246). Moses’s horrific attack on Miriam irrevocably expels her interrogating voice from the narrative, and for “All the rest of her days, Miriam was very silent” (246). Punished for her transgressions of gendered notions of propriety and her violations of the structure of charismatic authority in which one male voice speaks for the Voice, Miriam is sentenced to a life covered by “a veil between her and the world which never lifted” (246). For Hurston’s violently marred gothic femme fatale, “Whole days passed by . . . in which she never uttered a word. . . . Now and then she would whisper to whoever happened to be close around. ‘He lifted his right hand. I saw him do it. He lifted his right hand and the thing come upon me. I felt it when it come. His right hand was clothed in light’” (246). Hurston’s novel, uncovering the hidden horrors in the Moses myth, portrays the charismatic leader as a monster that scares desiring, thinking, speaking women away from power. Moses’s rod of God has abundant power to free; it also buries nonrational political knowledge that refuses to conform to normative gender hierarchy and normative modes of political expression. A Grain of Sand against a Mountain The desire for charismatic leadership is a romantic longing that sometimes ignores the ugly underside of charismatic authority. Political scientists Ronald Walters and Robert Smith explain that the “wish for ‘pure Black leadership’ is reminiscent of the wish fulfillment or hopes that Blacks in slavery had for a deliverer . . . who was unspoiled, incorruptible, and strong.”66 Many scholarly studies of charisma filter the form of authority through the romantic lenses of wish fulfillment described by Walters and Smith; these studies treat charismatic leadership as a revolutionary force and the leader as a hero who saves a people from old, sedimented forms of authority and discipline. In

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Weber’s sociology, for example, charisma “must be used in a completely value-free sense”; and the authority of a leader—whether a Nordic berserker in a “bloodthirsty frenzy” or Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism— might be akin to “rank swindle,” but nevertheless in a scientific study must be treated as a creative force that carries revolutionary potential unavailable to bureaucratic or traditional authority.67 Charisma here names the blissful union between leader, followers, and circumstance—a union that ends in the birthing of a new social order. However, Weber’s is a love story that ends in the people’s being wooed away from the charismatic hero. Revolutionary charisma cannot maintain itself in the face of the disciplining structures of bureaucracy and everyday life; it is, he argues, “the fate of charisma to recede before the powers of tradition or of rational association after it has entered the permanent structures of social action.” Charisma is a sudden upsurge of political eros that is ultimately defeated by “the most irresistible force [of] rational discipline.”68 Like political theorists who “read democratic theory according to the genre conventions of a popular or modern romance, as a happy-ending love story” that ends in “the happy marriage” between “a people and its law, a state and its institutions,” political historians and theorists of African American culture search for felicitous union between a language and a politics or a leader and his people.69 Glaude’s account of a scattered African American populace maturing into nationhood and manhood as a collective body through the language of Exodus; Walzer’s insistence on reading the revolutionary narrative within Exodus while bracketing the pernicious employments of the story; Theophus Smith’s explication of the biblical myth as a tale of conjure, of creative possibility; and Baker’s poetic treatment of King as a modern-day son of Moses all employ a romantic reading practice vis-à-vis Exodus that must necessarily ignore the murder, the gore, and the monstrosity of the tale. Miriam’s returns in Hurston’s Exodus narrative disrupt a romantic reading of Exodus’s structure of charismatic authority. Miriam’s intervention does not lead to a happy ending but rather to a tragic end. The story of Moses’s sister, buried beneath the drama of the charismatic leader’s saga, surfaces here and there as the tragedy of a woman who dares to probe the depths of liberation and lay bare charisma’s violences of gender. Miriam’s last statements in the novel beg for a final dismissal from the narrative. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Miriam appears crushed under the weight of Moses’s reign as leader and heroic protagonist. She comes to Moses to ask for permission to die. Clinging to a utopian vision of a freedom not determined by a man’s authority, she tells Moses, “This freedom is more than a notion,

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Moses. It’s a good thing. It’s bound to be a good thing ’cause everybody wants it. But maybe I didn’t know what to do with it, ’cause I ain’t been so happy” (262). Miriam recognizes that Israel’s freedom from Egyptian slavery does not encompass her own self-expression. In the end, Miriam gives up the fight to tell her own story. She tells Moses, “I want to die. I done tackled something too big for me and it done throwed me like a bucking horse. I been through living for years. I just ain’t dead yet” (262). She begs Moses for freedom in death: I made up my mind to fight your power with mine. But I found out I was no more against you than a grain of sand against a mountain, because you beat me and then you bottled me up inside of my own body and you been keeping me in jail inside myself ever since. Turn me loose, Moses, so I can go on and die. (264)

Miriam’s story in Moses, Man of the Mountain is a story of a martyr whose exposure of the masculinist bias of the charismatic model of leadership is punished by death. Miriam’s death marks a turning point for Hurston’s Exodus. Thinking about his sister, Moses wonders “if the Exodus would have taken place at all” without her (265). Without a woman’s silenced power present to legitimate his own speaking power, Moses’s idea of himself as leader begins to unravel. The Moses who “led and . . . led and . . . led” (198) the Israelites out of Egypt decides at the end of the novel that “he didn’t want to rule that way. He wanted freedom” (285). Instead of instructing or giving laws, Moses “wanted to ask God and nature questions” (285). Miriam’s voice, muted during her life, haunts Moses, whose questioning of freedom expresses an ironic suspicion of the charismatic paradigm that persists even after the primary source of that suspicion exits the text. Moses, by the end of the novel, is “weaken[ing] under the strain of power”; he “love[s] freedom and justice with a fierce love and he want[s] Israel to be free and just” (268). Miriam’s haunting satirical view of leadership closes the novel, as “Everything ended in riddles” (283). Moses, now facing violent murder by a people who have come to see him as an obstacle to their total freedom, relinquishes leadership over them. Withdrawing his voice and his powerful rod from the nation he has led, Moses allows Israel’s voices, rather than God’s, to determine their future. He “give[s] Israel back the notes to songs. The words would be according to their own dreams, but they would sing. They had songs and singers” (283). In this final textual nod to the biblical Miriam, who plays the tambourine for dancing, worshiping women and who leads the people of Israel in song, the novel disappears Moses, leaving the Israelites to their songs

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and dreams.70 Moses vanishes in a cacophony of thunder, leaving “Israel at the Jordan in every way” (284). Miriam’s returns in Moses, Man of the Mountain represent charisma as a stifling force that gets in the way of African Americans’ most earnest attempts at freedom and democracy. Moses does what other fictional texts and social theorists have been loath to do: read charisma gothically and “challenge the total paradigmatic construction of leadership as basis for social order.”71 Her story is a gothic tale of black leadership, a critical, dystopian restaging of the Exodus myth that forges a break with commonsense ideologies of black political leadership during the World War II era. In the next chapter, I discuss retreat rather than return, arguing that the former movement also represents a critical disruptive maneuver in the twentieth-century archive of contestation around the problem of black leadership.

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Chapter 4

Disappearing the Leader The Vanishing Spectacle in Civil Rights Fiction

IN A CHILLING SCENE at the end of William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 novel, A Different Drummer, a slick Northern preacher is forced to sing and dance for a mob of white men who have decided that the black residents of their Southern town who have followed the silent, puzzling actions of a quiet, boyish twenty-two-year-old and left the town empty of its black labor force were unduly influenced by the outside agitating preacher. Deciding that Reverend Bradshaw must pay the price for the blacks’ resistance by acting out a spectacle of minstrelsy for their viewing pleasure, the mob goes on to lynch the Northern leader, who “knew now and could understand why the Negroes had left without waiting or needing any organizations or leadership.”1 If the white townsmen’s violent act of coercing black performance before lynching the novel’s race man betrays a fear of charismatic leadership that demands his domestication—much like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decadeslong reign of terror in the black community testified to J. Edgar Hoover’s fear of “the rise of a black messiah”—it also exposes a fascination with charismatic leadership and charisma’s explanatory potential to make sense of what would otherwise, to the white audience within the novel, remain incomprehensible: African American resistance to the conditions of terror under which they live and the concerted movement of a mass of black subjects to permanently transform a racially polarized rural American South. This double affect regarding black leadership—it is the white characters’ worst nightmare and their preferred model for making sense of their social reality—shows us how vexed a position charisma occupies in the American cultural imaginary and, more importantly, in the twentieth-century archive of African American cultural production. The fascination with charisma as an epistemology and the fear of its phenomenological, political effects speak to a larger anxiety about black male representivity and visibility that motivates the white characters of Kelley’s novel as overwhelmingly as it does the 105

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“black and blue” protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man, who slips into an underground hole while “that great leader,” Ras the Exhorter, seeks his destruction.2 (Given both Ellison’s and Kelley’s preoccupations with spectacles of race leadership, public political performance, and the anxieties of manhood, the two novels might be read as companion texts.) In A Different Drummer, the vanishing spectacle of civil rights leadership scripts the story of mass movement and the sometimes silent, sometimes shrill, altogether unattractive and antiheroic presence of its protagonist/leader provides a political counteraesthetic of black protest history that intervenes in the ideological production of civil rights as a narrative of charismatic leadership. Throughout the twentieth century, African American literature posited the dilemma of black leadership as a problem of a simultaneously magnetizing and dangerous spectacle of black male visibility. Zora Neale Hurston’s final erasure of Moses from Israel’s story of nationhood in the closing pages of Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), for example, privileges the cultural work of the legendary character’s sister over his own spectacle of divinely sanctioned leading. Disappearing from the narrative, Moses leaves Israel to its “songs and singers” and departs from its history in solitude, closing Hurston’s allegory of black leadership with his enigmatic departure and his sister Miriam’s move from the margin to the center of the freedom story. As in other twentieth-century African American literary texts, self-disappearance is the symbolic strategy through which Hurston contests the paradigmatic fiction of twentieth-century black political cultures: that political advancement is best achieved within the confines of charismatic authority. The trope of self-disappearance by which Hurston offers a gothic revision of the Exodus narrative found earlier voice in Schuyler’s Black Empire and, no doubt, finds later expression in the fiction of the civil rights era and the decades that followed. Kelley’s A Different Drummer stages an alternative leadership model framed by disappearance and silence rather than visibility and spectacle; this is a kind of restaging, I argue, that social and cultural histories of the black freedom struggle have worked to produce in their own accounts of invisible political and cultural–political labor during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. While the novel tells the story of an exodus of black residents out of a segregated Southern town, it refuses to offer the reader the perspective of its “leader,” Tucker Caliban. Instead, it disappears Tucker from the story, leaving town residents to puzzle over why the novel’s absent protagonist has poured salt on his sharecropping field, burned down his house, slaughtered his livestock, and left town, inspiring others to do the same. The silent disappearance of the

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other black characters in the novel suggests the visibility of civil rights spectacle as a central theoretical problem for contemporary African American history and social movements—a theoretical problem voiced as much by Kelley’s novel as it was during the modern civil rights movement by activists like Ella Baker and as it is now by generations of post–civil rights youth who reject post–World War II protest methods. The Black Freedom Struggle at the Vanishing Point If the vanishing point marks the spot at which an object that has been growing smaller or more distant actually disappears, it serves as a fitting metaphor for the black freedom struggle during the years after World War II, when a series of public performances, or “declarations,” testified to a “hidden transcript” of resistance that had been in the making since the arrival of Africans to the New World.3 The vanishing point is the threshold between the seen and the unseen; it constitutes the necessary background of a dominant image; it is the nearly visible stuff that allows the foreground—the seen, the named, the commanding subjects of dominant narratives—to be articulated. If the public transcript “compris[es] a domain of material appropriation” or a “domain of public mastery,” the hidden transcript—the log of movements, practices, performances, ideologies, and discourses that are the “offstage responses and rejoinders to that public transcript”—might be imagined as the necessary vanishing point of the commonsense history of civil rights. It is, as James Scott suggests, “the portion of an acrimonious dialogue that domination has driven off center stage.”4 Yet if the vanishing point marks the site of disappearance and forgetting, it also marks a convergence: in portraits in linear perspective, for example, the vanishing point is the point at which receding parallel lines appear to coincide. I use the vanishing point as a metaphor for the political practices and radical convergences that—even after the revisionist histories of civil rights historians such as Charles Payne, John Dittmer, Barbara Ransby, Danielle McGuire, Leigh Raiford, and Belinda Robnett have debunked the Great Man narratives of the civil rights era— remains in the background, behind the charismatic leaders, of dominant narratives of the black freedom struggle. A Different Drummer holds black activism at the vanishing point of its fictional Southern history, disappearing public declarations of rights by black leaders from the foreground of the story and instead representing silent subaltern collectivity as the epicenter of radical black resistance. The novel centers around the spectacle of blackness disappearing before the eyes of its white characters. Opening with an almanac’s entry about the fictional town

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of Sutton in a fictional no-place “bounded on the north by Tennessee; east by Alabama; south by the Gulf of Mexico; west by Mississippi” and called simply “The State,” the novel begins by relating that in June 1957, the town witnesses an exodus of its black residents. “Today,” the 1961 Thumb-Nail Almanac writes, “it is unique in being the only state in the Union that cannot count even one member of the Negro race among its citizens.”5 The scenes of black disappearance in the novel that follow the almanac entry highlight the novel’s fantastic vanishing of, first, black protest spectacle, and, second, blackness itself. One of the vanishing characters, Elton, narrates, “All of us black folk is moving out. We all leaving, all over the state we just a-rising up and going away” (132). Tucker, the supposed leader of the movement out of The State, appears in Elton’s story of the exodus only in the distance, through hearsay, as an anonymous, almost mythical voice. Elton tells two other characters, He, Hilton that is, he says that there was this colored man up in Sutton who told the Negroes all about it, all about history and all that stuff, and that he said besides that the only way for things to be better was for all the colored folks to move out, to turn their backs on everything we knowed and start new. (132)

The novel’s way of telling the story of the movement through what Trudier Harris calls “distancing narration” establishes the link between the leader, Tucker Caliban (and indeed all of the black characters abandoning The State), and his Shakespearean namesake: colonial subjects within the Jim Crow political economy, Tucker and the others “know how to curse” in the language of the colonial regime—the language of property—but unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, they rarely do so aloud.6 Civil rights fiction such as Kelley’s constructs a counterarchive of the post–World War II freedom struggle, composing scenes of disappearance that confront the official story of the civil rights movement as it was constructed, first by televisual and print media in the 1950s and 1960s and by popular history in the years that followed. By civil rights fiction, I refer to both the narratives written during the black freedom struggle of the post– World War II era, including Ellison’s Invisible Man and Kelley’s A Different Drummer, and the many post–civil rights narratives about the civil rights era, including Alice Walker’s 1976 Meridian, Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 The Salt Eaters, Ntozake Shange’s 1985 Betsey Brown, Thulani Davis’s 1992 1959, and Charles Johnson’s 1998 Dreamer. What these narratives have in common, in addition to the Southernscapes and the depictions of black political agents confronting vicious white supremacy, is the tendency to disappear the

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public declarations of the movement and to focus on scenes of disappearance and silent political labor so as to call attention to the dangerous and debilitating effects of charismatic leadership on the leader, on followers, and on history itself. In Ellison’s Invisible Man, the protagonist lingers underground while a street-corner preacher only ever fails to represent the need for liberation and other antiracist spokesmen—white liberals and black antiracist activists alike—die trying to put into words what the invisible man himself can only settle on as an interrogative: “But what did I do to be so blue?”7 In A Different Drummer, the would-be protest leader, Bennett Bradshaw, becomes a scandalizing preacher who meets his vicious end as a minstrel performer while the antihero of the novel “leads” the town’s black residents in silent protest without ever saying a word. In Alice Walker’s Meridian, the protagonist, who “seemed to contain the essence of silence,” stages a protest at a Mississippi town’s carnival amid “deep silence”: “though the streets were lined with people, no one was saying anything.” An onlooker expecting a civil rights spectacle surmises of Meridian and the children she leads in protest, “‘Now they will burst into song’ . . . but they did not.”8 In Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, the narration of a single act—the healing of the protagonist-activist, Velma Henry, in the hands of a spiritual healer and in the faithful presence the residents of the novel’s Southern town—makes the organic wellness of the collectivity more significant than individual activist labor or reward. In Thulani Davis’s 1959, schoolchildren desegregate a local drugstore while “leaders seemed remote” and the protests in the novel remain secondary to the myth of the ancestral spirit who guides the young woman protagonist through the coming-of-political-age story.9 Finally, Charles Johnson’s Dreamer tells the story of Martin Luther King’s 1966 Chicago campaign through the perspective of a reticent Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staffer whose “job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity—particularly what took place in the interstices.”10 Civil rights fiction thus lingers at the vanishing point, in the offstage pockets of black collective resistance where people remake their social reality in the absence of charismatic authority. However, the disappearance of spectacle does not signal silent suffering or martyrdom as the center of a liberal rights struggle. Instead, silence marks a radical withdrawal, an anarchic exit, a refusal to consent to the terms of order. This body of work—what we might consider a collection of microfictions—interrupts the macrofiction of the era: that history was made by charismatic race men and maternal race women. If Kathryn Nasstrom is right that the challenge of contesting that macrofiction lies not only in documenting women’s

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activism but also in reorienting epistemologies of activism, civil rights fiction occupies a crucial site of discursive contestation where the dominant narratives of civil rights struggle are called into question.11 As the introduction of television sets to American living rooms and the cultural phenomenon of the evening news coincided with black collective efforts to end segregation in the 1950s, the black freedom struggle went live, remaking a complex network of relationships between mediatization and social movements, mainstream information dissemination and hidden subaltern knowledges, racial difference and national belonging, and information and entertainment. In this process, television news and modern black social protest were cocreative: Telejournalism, obviously, needed vivid pictures and clear-cut stories; less obviously, it also sought political and cultural gravitas. For its part, the civil rights movement staked the moral authority of Christian nonviolence and the rhetoric of American democracy to make a new national culture; to succeed, it need to have its picture taken and its stories told.12

For Sasha Torres, these needs to publicize the struggle would converge, and the two formations—television news and the Southern civil rights movement—“formed powerful allies for each other during this period.”13 Still, given the heterogeneity of perspectives, persons, and geographies that constituted the postwar freedom struggle—the fact that the movement wasn’t only Southern, wasn’t only Christian, wasn’t only nonviolent, wasn’t only clergy-led, and wasn’t only optimistic about the “rhetoric of American democracy”—the putatively symbiotic relationship between the young televisual news media and the maturing black freedom struggle registered a number of objections from various quarters. These objections would come to highlight the problem of the politics of visibility as they related to black protest in the post–World War II United States. Mississippi organizer Ella Baker was one of the most vocal opponents to charismatic leadership as an organizing paradigm for social movement and media accounts of social movement during the 1950s. As Barbara Ransby explains, Baker resigned from the SCLC staff in 1960, by which time she had grown to suspect that “the SCLC’s increasing reliance on King’s celebrity and charisma had all sorts of hidden dangers,” and maintained that instead of relying on singular leadership, “you could develop individuals who were bound together by a concept that benefited the larger number of individuals and provided an opportunity for them to grow into being responsible for carrying out a program.” Several years earlier, Ransby notes, Baker had

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contended that “the Negro must quit looking for a savior and work to save himself.”14 As Charles Payne’s sweeping history of the Mississippi movement argues, the intergenerational relationships and social networks forged in local organizing efforts during the decades before and after World War II made the movement more complex, more diverse, and more ordinary than the spectacular accounts of race men making speeches on the evening news were willing to allow. For her part, Baker was acutely aware of how the movement exceeded, rather than simply needed, charismatic leaders and the media’s love affair with them.15 In the decade that followed television’s coming of age, charismatic leadership would continue to provide the script for broadcast accounts of the freedom movement. It was during these years that Malcolm X was imagined as Judas to King’s Jesus, a hate-mongering public enemy. That the media chose the caricatured ideological differences of these two charismatic leaders as the most useful frame for the story of the freedom struggle is hardly surprising given that “coverage of the civil rights movement often played like the westerns on offer in the cinemas of the period, in which the distinctions between good and evil were sharply drawn” and that the King–Malcolm dichotomy is one that sustained the news’s focus on what Torres calls “the civil rights subject” and “the subject of civil rights undone” as two sides of the same tropological coin.16 When Malcolm X signified on this dichotomy in his own political performances, he followed Ella Baker in decrying King’s darling status as charismatic exemplar in the emerging master narrative of the freedom struggle and objecting to the power that clergy-led Southern organizations held in determining how a grassroots movement would both proceed and be narrativized. When he delivered his “A Message to the Grass Roots” speech to a crowd in Detroit just three months after the 1963 March on Washington, he offered an early local history of the civil rights movement that contested the live coverage playing out on the nation’s television sets even as he was being pulled into what would eventually become a master narrative of charismatic leadership. Making race leadership the product of crisis management in the Oval Office, Malcolm called the March on Washington “a sellout,” a “takeover,” a “circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do, the performance of the year.”17 The public, televisual presence of the black freedom struggle posed a unique set of problems for activists even as photography allowed for the movement’s radical intervention into how political engagement itself would be represented and understood.18 First, the traveling news corps that was cutting its teeth on the drama of the rights struggle preferred sensational

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stories, and often stories of sensational singular leadership, to community organizing and grassroots resistance. Network television—and mainstream newspapers for that matter—were reluctant to report on the more banal processes of movement building. For this reason, Leigh Raiford argues, organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) used their own media to “tell a story of gradual and procedural change, the hard work of consensus building, the development of collective leadership and leadership from below, community organizing, and the possibility of a better society.”19 If the freedom struggle in the 1960s depended on an ambivalent relationship to the emerging technologies of publicity, it registered the double power of cinematic reality itself. As Kara Keeling points out, cinematic perception structures reality such that “our senses are conditioned to accommodate oppression and exploitation, even our own,” but moving images work both to produce common sense and to “manifest an alternate perceptual schema that could perfect a different social reality.” If decolonization, the making of a different social reality, depends on the social reality that makes colonization common sense, liberation is only “possible in the interval as a present impossibility, an expansion that explodes even in the interval in which we wait.”20 Baker’s critique of leadership and Malcolm’s restaging the March on Washington as a circus expose how the governing apparatuses of the state, including and especially the mainstream news media, attempted to coopt, infiltrate, dilute, misrepresent, and dismantle black antiracist social movements precisely at the sites of performance and cultural production. One of the ways that state power redirects black insurgence is to constantly demand black sociopolitical labor as entertainment. Civil rights fiction narrativizes the state’s exchange of radical political performance for the shuck and jive when, in Drummer, as I will discuss later, the white supremacist protectors of The State demand that the novel’s race man perform a rendition of “CurlyHeaded Pickaninny Boy” to defuse their anger at the black labor force’s sudden disappearance. If the mediatization of the black freedom struggle has been doomed to fail to capture the black freedom struggle precisely, as Keeling hints, because liberation shatters the representational frame and can only exist in the meantime, in the interval, then the decolonizing impulse might be understood, in Fred Moten’s terms, as an “arching”; a “lingering in the cut” or in the “break”; the “echo of Aunt Hester’s scream”; the drive for which there is no representation.21 We might understand what I call the vanishing spectacle in civil rights fiction as a narrative scene of black radicalism, in which the

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charismata (the gifting of the many) overtakes charisma (the gifting of the one) and in which the nature of the black radical tradition—which Cedric Robinson argues has historically tended to be more surreal than real, more sensual and spectral than material, and, most importantly, “more charismatic than political”22—is narrativized as silence and disappearance. The decolonization impulse cannot be represented in either sense of the word—“spoken for” or “illustrated.” Rather, it appears as an expression of what Lindon Barrett calls a “sly alterity,”23 an otherness or something-else-ness that exchanges the liberal notion of freedom (liberty based in the sovereignty of the individual subject who bears property and voice) for a more radical political aesthetics of an “insistent previousness.”24 In A Different Drummer, the black residents who depopulate their segregated town are political agents arching toward something else in the interval between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the here and the there, the shouted and the hushed. The Vanishing Spectacle in A Different Drummer A Different Drummer tells the story of what one of the white characters calls “strategic withdrawal,” which is when “you got thirty men and the other side got thirty thousand and you turn and run saying to yourself ‘Shucks, ain’t no use in being brave and getting ourselves killed. We’ll back up a ways and maybe fight some tomorrow’” (60). While this character reads the exodus as akin to military retreat—“I reckon them Negroes is backing up all the way”—the novel also allows a reading of the movement as a disruption of the public transcript of the post–World War II black freedom struggle that restages social movement through the motif of silence (60). The story is presented as a third-person narrative interspersed by a series of journal entries and interior monologues by white townspeople: Harry Leland, one of the porch men and local working-class whites; Harry’s son, Mister Leland; David Willson, the heir to the Willson estate, which has been passed down from Confederate general Dewey Willson; David’s wife, Camille; and David’s daughter and son, Dymphna and Dewey III. Drummer tells the story of the Calibans’ long history of servitude to the Willsons, Tucker’s childhood friendship with Dewey Willson III, Tucker’s marriage to Bethrah, the Willsons’ maid, and the quiet outrage that grows until Tucker salts his field, slaughters his livestock, burns his estate, and becomes the first of the black characters to abandon The State. The novel renders its black characters mute as the white characters attempt to tell the story of their disappearance over the scenes of blacks’ vanishing from vision and sound. As Dewey III, a young white Harvard student,

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arrives home in Sutton after the end of his term, he listens as “an outgoing train was announced, it would be heading North. After a few seconds, Negroes began to stream through the main doors, marching toward the next track” (88). While the white characters within the novel are “so dull as to ask” repeatedly “why the Negroes were leaving (which they should have known) and where they were going (which did not matter and could not be answered),” the reader is made to ponder and puzzle until the end of the novel (58). On the way home from the train station, Dewey notices that there are “a great many more Negroes than usual downtown, all, it seemed, carrying suitcases, wearing dark clothes” (90), and that the black neighborhood, the Northside, is cloaked in quiet and the “deathlike completeness” of blackness’s disappearance (56): “The entire Northside seemed strangely silent for a Saturday afternoon” (90). Throughout the novel, blackness is imagined as a somber scene of legerdemain: now you see it, now you don’t. A few blacks “sang hymns and spirituals, but most stood quietly, inching forward, thoughtful, triumphant, knowing they couldn’t be stopped” (130); the town is left “littered with the bits and scraps of a vacated, discarded life: worn-out clothing, mattresses, broken toys, picture frames, chipped furniture, all the things Negroes could not carry in their satchels or on their backs” (130); and the “quiet, steady moving crowd of dark faces” (132) makes its way toward the bus stop or train station, until finally there “were no Negroes at all” (188). Here, the empty picture frame and the quieting of singing symbolize the vanishing of protest spectacle from the pages of Kelley’s narrative. Too, the vanishing black folks appear as not fully visible apparitions. One woman “was a pale gray color, though she should have been very dark, and looked like she hadn’t been out in the sunlight in many years” (130), and the thousands on the move “shuffle,” like “ghosts” (36), “steadily forward, gazing ahead and slightly upward at the depot building” (130). As a silent spectral collective, they defy the police’s roadblock and leave the town desolate. In the novel’s series of white-narrated episodes, the reader only sees Tucker’s leadership from the perspective of the puzzled white townspeople and the Willsons, and the porch of the general store is a site of privileged visual reception. A young Harry Leland “look[s] up and down the street, then toward the Ridge where something seem[s] to arrest his attention. He [takes] one more look and [runs] furiously across the street and [hops] on the porch” and tells his father about the salt delivery truck on its way to the Caliban farm. The porch is both raised and depressed: from it, one can attain a full view of the ridge that leads to the city of New Marsails—over which any

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traffic coming into the city or leaving the city must travel—as well as see street-level activity from its raised platform. It is a place that demands performance from the men who populate it as well as those from whom the men demand entertainment. Still, the view from the porch disallows a look behind what Du Bois would call “the veil”; throughout the novel, the white onlookers puzzle over the blacks’ resistance, beginning with the scene of the salt truck’s amble over the ridge and through town: Harry turned back to the storekeeper: “Wonder what [Tucker] wants all that salt for?” Thomason poured two drinks and shrugged. “Damned if I know.” (32)

And later: “Papa, why’d Tucker buy all that salt? You know?” “No, son. . . . Tucker’s strange, ain’t he?” (35)

When a man races to the porch later, frantically—“as though being chased by ghosts or a thousand angry Negroes”—with news of Tucker’s salting his field, the men rush from the porch to Tucker’s farm for an even better view of what is quickly becoming a nonspectacle of Tucker’s not-so-public intentions; in a sense, it is a spectacle that refuses spectacle (36). The townsfolk, white and black, “gape as at a Confederate Day Parade” and gaze “mesmerized at Mister Harper,” who has begun walking, after thirty years of sitting in a wheelchair, to lead the parade of puzzled onlookers (38). Here the reader sees Tucker for the first time, and the narrative offers a full view of its protagonist before disappearing him in the pages that follow. The reader, and the novel’s characters, watch a “boy-sized” Tucker at work: Across the field Harry could see him, one small speck of a white shirt; he wore black pants and was himself black and barely discernible against the darkness of the trees enclosing the farm. Harry watched as Tucker ran out of salt and came slowly toward the house and mound, stepping high over the furrows. Then he was close by, his head lowered, and Harry could see the small features seeming lost on the large head, the steel-rimmed spectacles on his flat nose. If he had gone insane, was running wild . . . he did not show it. (41)

The salting scene spans three unassuming pages as Tucker makes “trip after trip,” literally at the vanishing point of Harry’s visual frame, to the salt mound in “the silence of the late afternoon” (41). Here the reader apprehends Tucker’s leadership as silent, deliberate labor, not as spectacle. Indeed,

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as David Bradley suggests, Tucker’s leadership in the novel differs significantly from the civil rights spectacles that, by the time of the novel’s publication, had become staple media fodder: “In 1962 blacks were not only protesting but protesting loudly; speeches and singing were as much a hallmark of mass marches as was marching itself. But Tucker makes no sound— makes not even a public statement.”25 The only explanation that the novel offers of Tucker’s motivations is in fact packaged in a violent interruption of ordered speech. After Tucker’s grandfather, John Caliban, dies on the literal color line, Tucker objects to his postmortem characterization as docile in the face of white supremacy. When the elder Caliban dies, the Willsons accompany Tucker and Bethrah to pick him up at the bus station where he lay. They notice “the pearl-colored [chauffeur’s] hat in his lap, the round patch of bristling white hair leaning heavily on the chrome-plated cross bar that separated the back of the bus from the front” (121). Afterward, John is remembered as the stereotypical Uncle Tom who consented to the Jim Crow regime happily, spiritedly: Dewey “could only remember him singing and laughing” (121); the eulogist remarks, “We’ll all remember John because when he come into our lives he was always smiling and happy and made us feel good just to look at him,” and “John Caliban was the kind of man would always sacrifice hisself to help others” (122–23). During the eulogist’s pause, Dewey hears “a high male voice say in disbelief: ‘Sacrifice? Is THAT all? Is that really all? Sacrifice be damned!” (123). Tucker, recognizable here only by his “high male voice,” retreats back into silence after his outburst. Dewey recognizes “the thin black-coated figure, the shortcropped hair on the large head, the steel-rimmed glasses” and sees “the arm raised and brought down in a motion of disgust, as if to wipe away the words,” as Tucker storms out of the funeral (123, emphasis added). Tucker’s outburst interrupts the characterization of John Caliban as a stereotypical “happy darky” and stifles the eulogy altogether. After he leaves with “his mouth clamped shut, his eyes blank and hard,” the eulogist “finished, stumbling over his words” (123). Here, Kelley offers Tucker’s objection to material and representational subjection at the funeral as the catalyst for the later scene of destruction at the Willson plantation. Both scenes, that is, represent the wiping away of words. After the funeral, Tucker tells Dewey obliquely, “Not another time. This is the end of it.” Dewey notes, “Two months later he bought the farm, a piece of land at the southwestern corner of what had been Dewitt Willson’s plantation, on which Tucker’s people had worked as slaves and then employees” (124). It is after the eruption and disruption of speech at the funeral,

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then, that Tucker retreats into the silence within which he begins the march to the vanishing point. If, as I argue, civil rights fiction narrativizes the vanishing spectacle—the vanishing of spectacle and vanishing as spectacle—to highlight the debilitating effects of charismatic leadership on leaders, on activists, and on history itself, it follows social movements in mobilizing silence as an important modality of resistance to both statist forms of oppression and the “revolutionary regimes of subjection” within resistance movements themselves, particularly after World War II.26 Radical silence in this case differs from the passive silence of assent or fear, what Audre Lorde referred to in 1977 as the “tyrannies of silence” or the systematic processes by which racism, sexism, and heterosexism produce a fear for self-expression, a “wait[ing] for someone else to speak.”27 In the context of leadership critique, radical silence performs—not through speech but through the withholding of speech—a challenge to the Cold War ideologies of development that redefined how charismatic leadership was constitutive of modern masculinity. The presumption that charismatic leadership would be necessary for African American advancement had no doubt been cultivated over the first half of the twentieth century, as I have discussed above. By the end of the Cold War, the ideologies of subjection that underpinned the political economy of development, or global capital, circulated within developmentalist regimes and revolutionary anti-imperialist writings, with both state tracts and political autobiographies voicing “a call to a vanguard leadership predicated on a binary division between a mass of prodigal men in need of reformation and an elite of productive men at the ready to implement reform.” As Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo elaborates, the legacy of World War II and the ensuing divvying up of the undeveloped world by the global north is “a particular rendition of fully modern masculinity as the basis for full citizenship in either a developed or a revolutionary society.”28 Silence would eventually become a primary modality for challenging developmentalist ideology—the idea that societies are bound to progress teleologically through the stages of development and that such progress or development depends on each member of society becoming “free, mature, fully conscious”—in its statist and extra- or antistatist forms. If subaltern silence highlights the limits of Western knowledge, performative silence might both mark a “point of dis-identification” for the Western reader or ethnographer and stage “multiple identifications” for outsiders.29 Performative political silence both withholds and creates social knowledge: it disables the predatory consumption of racialized difference vis-à-vis

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the ethnographic encounter or the mediatization of freedom struggles for mainstream news audiences as well as enables participatory formations of radical democracy across diverse constituencies. That is, silence, rather than the suppression of difference, is “the sensual alertness that allows differences to emerge. Silence is the clearing that makes speech possible . . . because it is in the fullness of silence where differences take shape. . . . Silence is the noise of democracy.”30 Silence counters the demands of both the state and many nationalist movements that progress be dependent on, and led by, vociferous men. How does the literary text bear witness to black protest at the very moments when the echo of Aunt Hester’s scream is muted? The Charismata and the Black Radical Tradition The silencing of the characters in Drummer writes the scene of black radicalism as a fugitivity, an erasure, an escape from the scriptural order of racialized capital, a retreat to what Moten calls the “zone of unattainability.”31 The movement away from representation vis-à-vis both speech and vision aligns the movement within the novel with the black radical tradition outside of it, which, as Cedric Robinson argues in his now classic Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, has often directed anticolonial violence inward rather than outward and has often, as Moten suggests, held its tongue in order to elude epistemological and physical capture.32 What is important to us is the claim that Robinson makes about African captives’ reactions to enslavement in the New World: while Africans often attempted escape to Africa or to maroon communities, their attempts to flee cannot be understood as simple reactions to plantation servitude. Rather, they have to be understood as complete rejections of their lot. It was simply to “reconstitute the community” that “Black radicals took to the bush, to the mountains, to the interior.”33 Robinson’s speculative theses on the black radical tradition—which rest on the definition of radicalism as retreat—are worth quoting at length: Such was the stuff from which legends were made among the Africans. Where to deny one’s self the eating of salt (the “ocean-sea”?) was a guarantee of the retention of the power to fly, really fly, home. All of it was part of a tradition that was considerably different from what was made of the individualistic and often spontaneous motives that energized the runaway, the arsonist, the poisoner. It more easily sustained suicide than assault, and its ideological, psycho-social, cultural, and historical tendencies were more charismatic than political. When it was frustrated, it became obeah, voodoo, myalism, pocomania. . . . When it was realized, it could become Palmares, the Bush Negro settlements, and, at its

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heights, Haiti. But always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.34

In the history of black radicalism, as Robinson suggests elsewhere, the charismatic leader might be understood as “the responsive instrument of ” rather than leader of “a people,” and “contrary to Weber’s view that charismatic authority is the most total dominance of a people by a single individual, it becomes the most pure form of a people’s authority over themselves.” In Robinson’s formulation, the charismatic relationship—echoing the Pauline delineation of the charismata in 1 Corinthians as the gifts bestowed upon the commons rather than upon the one—“becomes the vehicle of a collective, and thus embodied, identity.” If charisma, in Robinson’s work, names the embodied, ecstatic experience of collective formation that produces (rather than is produced by) a leader, then “the charismatic phenomenon is, at base, one of liberation rather than one of totalitarianism”; indeed, it is the phenomenon that forms the basis of the black radical tradition.35 My purpose in distinguishing between the singular and the plural here— the charism and the charismata—is to oppose two possible ways of understanding charisma as social structure: Weber’s notion of charisma as domination of the many by the one, and Robinson’s notion of charisma as radical collectivity. Further, I would argue that in choosing the former over the latter— that is, by positing the black freedom struggle as a liberal rights struggle produced by gifted leadership rather than as a series of collective attempts to remake the world that ranged from the liberal rights struggle to the radical attempts to preserve an alternative mode of being—the official narratives of the civil rights movement mistake the very nature of black resistance in the Americas. Civil rights fiction, in contrast, depicts the leader as the more radical, Robinsonian embodiment of charisma, and in so doing, it forges a significant contestation to the very concept of charisma as sociology, political science, and social psychology have conceived of it. In Kelley’s A Different Drummer, the protagonist follows his ancestral African and Robinson’s black radicals in preserving a historical sense of collective being over property and in breaking with liberal epistemologies of order and resistance. As one of the novel’s critics suggests, Drummer “deals with the disintegration, rather than the construction, of a social order. The apparent departure from order, manifest in the exodus, demands explanation, which Kelley [only] provides obliquely.”36 But this retreat from order is not so much a refusal of utopia as it is a refusal to be trapped within existing frames of representation. That the central movement of the novel—the

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exodus of black residents out of their Southern town—is neither wholly visible nor premised on the reconstitution, or even rearrangement, of the existing social order emphasizes the novel’s investment in the charismata of the radical collective going elsewhere rather than the intelligible, rhetorically gifted singular leadership of a leader. The “appearance of social disintegration” in Drummer “implies an order higher than the social.”37 In what follows the brief almanac entry that I referred to above, the reader learns that over the course of two days, a group of white men who spend their days on the porch of a general store “had watched the Negroes of Sutton, with suitcases or empty-handed, waiting at the end of the porch for the hourly bus which would carry them up Eastern Ridge, through Harmon’s Draw, to New Marsails and the Municipal Railroad Depot” (6). The men had “seen pictures of the depot jammed with black people” and “had watched the line of cars crammed with Negroes and enough belongings to convince the men that the Negroes had not gone to all this trouble to move a mere hundred miles or so” (6). After opening with a brief historical record and the scene of evacuation, the novel begins at the end of the black townsfolk’s resistance—“It was over now”—and only concerns itself with the psychic and material consequences of their flight on the white characters of the novel (6). The characters might guess or wonder about the exodus, but the novel offers no reliable or coherent narrative of it and thus insists on a certain opacity of the black freedom struggle. This withholding of the narrative of black resistance is critical to this white life novel’s constitution; rather than a capitulation to the “allure of universality,” we might read Kelley’s centering of white characters as a refusal to offer a co-optable, commodifiable scene of blackness.38 Mister Harper, the elder statesmen of the porch men, offers the first fantastic guess about the black disappearance, blaming it on Tucker’s inheritance, his African blood. He tells the men, “I don’t take to accounts of ghosts and such. But the way I see it, it’s pure genetics: something special in his blood” (8). He goes on to tell a story of a super-strong, menacing African captive who Dewitt Willson, the original patriarch of the town, purchased from a slave trader. The African escaped from the auction block, freed Willson’s Negroes, and “led them off into the dark of the woods” (19). Finally betrayed by another captive, the African was killed by Willson, Harper tells his men, but he left behind a son who fathered the Caliban clan: so “the African’s blood is running in Tucker Caliban’s veins” (25). Offering the history of Tucker’s ancestor as something of a ghost story, Harper “spoke in almost a whisper: I can see whatever was in his blood just a-laying there sleeping, waiting, and

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then one day waking up, making Tucker do what he did. We never had no trouble with him, nor him with us. But all at once his blood started to itch in his veins, and he started this here . . . this here revolution” (8). The myth of black rage and superhuman resistance, of black male super-singularity, explains the protest at the center of the narrative. Tucker’s silent actions render him wholly opaque to his onlookers, much like the African’s “gibberish” renders him unrepresentable within the white supremacist frames of knowledge and political order (16). With italic text used to communicate the white characters’ interior monologues, the novel always disallows black interiority, especially Tucker’s: the white characters, and finally the reader, find “only a reflection of their own dismay, tempered perhaps with tolerance” (41), and, as the white men think, “It’s like he’s an Egyptian,” as indecipherable to the eye trained on the U.S. Southern landscape as a hieroglyph (41). Even Tucker’s cow “wears the quizzical expression of a woman who has just been slapped for no apparent reason” when Tucker slaughters her (43). Tucker’s opacity in the novel—prefigured, again, by the African’s “speaking gibberish,” his “mumbling,” and his literally opaque, “glistening” black skin—does not simply show how the African’s “charismatic effect is now manifested in Tucker.”39 More importantly, Tucker’s distance from the reader underscores Robinson’s theses about the black radical tradition—which reposition charismatic leadership as spectral collectivity rather than singular heroism—as it is narrativized as the vanishing spectacle in the novel. That is, the scene of salting and burning disappears the spectacle of civil rights protest before disappearing the protagonist himself. In doing so, it offers only a tableau of the methodical, laborious sowing of nothing and echoes Robinson’s suspicion that black radicalism often turns inward, prompting the destruction of the passive by the active, the killing of a crop or livestock, as a way of rejecting a whole way of being. Bradley notices about Tucker, as Robinson notes about the black radical tradition, that Kelley’s protagonist “destroys no white property, defies no white man, is ‘fresh’ to no white woman. And so he walks.”40 Tucker’s opacity, which I argue might be read as a narrative scene of fugitive silence, is achieved by the structure of the novel itself, which presents eight journal-like entries in the voices of its white characters bookended by an almanac entry and two chapters in the voice of an omniscient thirdperson narrator. Trudier Harris laments Tucker’s disappearance from the narrative landscape, reading the absent protagonist as responsible for the novel’s failure to engage with the South:

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Kelley is fascinated by but is sometimes adrift in his assessments of southern life and culture. By filtering his story through many characters in A Different Drummer, he remains separate from them all, especially separate from Tucker Caliban. With more focused development, especially with some interior reflection, Tucker might have appeared to be a much saner and more revolutionary character than the distancing narration reveals.41

Still, Tucker’s vanishing disables the predatory consumption of racialized difference—which ultimately leads to the murder of the race man, Bennett Bradshaw, by the porch men at the end of the novel after a coerced minstrel show—while inviting participation in the silent grassroots movement by a diverse set of constituents. If Tucker can be said to lead, he leads by silent invitation, not exhortation. Hence while the porch men mumble, “Well, ain’t that a bitch!” and throughout the novel attempt explanations of the salting and the exodus until they encounter a scapegoat in Bennett Bradshaw, the black townsfolk begin making their way toward a new social reality that is literally outside of The State (46). One of the black residents who follows Tucker out of town walks toward the men on the porch “wearing his white coat and a good pair of pants of thin material that rustled in the breeze of his stride. He carried an old cardboard suitcase, and upon arriving at the porch, only nodded, saying nothing, and set down the suitcase beside the BUS STOP sign, at the end of the porch away from the men” (55). His face does not show a smile but rather communicates a “deathlike completeness” (56) as he boards the bus with seven other black characters who wait while “[saying] nothing to each other” and who stand “patiently, self-engrossed, as if the white men did not exist” (57). Afterward, “at least ten Negroes were waiting, silently, patiently, each hour, as if enclosed in invisible coffins, no longer having the power of communication or even possessing anything to communicate to the world around them, or each other” (57). The references to death here intimate the death of representation, in at least two of its forms—as spoken-for-ness within the public sphere (Vertretung) and as tropology or capture in discourse (Darstellung). The black characters’ retreat from representation is, in Moten’s terms, “an anarchic irruption and interruption of grammar”42 that shatters the terms of subjection upon which white supremacist identification is structured, such that without the blacks’ speech making, none of the porch men “was able to think it through. It was like attempting to picture nothing, something no one had ever considered. None of them had a reference point on which to fix the concept of a Negro-less world” (188). Without the spectacle of race protest centering around the charismatic leader, the explanatory

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mechanisms that have allowed the white men to construct a worldview from the porch dissolve, as do readerly expectations of “saner” and “more revolutionary” leadership. Minstrel Exorcisms and the Gender of Civil Rights Struggle While the complete absence of black interiority in Drummer leaves the novel vulnerable to the suggestion that it only bolsters a white supremacist construction of black irrationality, the disappearing of black interiority is the very ground of the novel’s critique of white supremacy. By showing how white spectators can only apprehend black collective resistance through the leadership frame and trading a spectacular scenario of leadership for a laborious, quiet, anticlimactic scene of disappearance—thereby refusing to authorize the explanatory device of charismatic leadership—the novel finally renders the white characters, rather than the black characters, dumbly powerless, if only theoretically. The porch men, as I have noted above, grow “quietly fighting mad” as the “concept of a Negro-less world” confounds them; and when the threat of blackness’s final disappearance leaves them feeling “like a bride left at the church” (189), they react by lynching the man they come to see as the “last nigger, ever”: Bennett Bradshaw (199). Bennett Bradshaw is a foil to Tucker Caliban: while Bennett works for the National Society for Colored Affairs before going on to found the Resurrected Church of the Black Jesus Christ of America, Inc., Tucker declines to participate in racial uplift organizations. One of the white narrators imagines Tucker telling an officer of the National Society of Colored Affairs, “Ain’t nobody working for my rights; I wouldn’t let them. . . . Ain’t none of my battles being fought in no courts” (111). While Bennett is known to captivate audiences with his voice—in his college classmate David Willson’s memory, his voice is “resonant and eloquent, like he was addressing a thousand people” (167)—Tucker either remains silent or speaks in a “really high voice” whose nasal tone assaults the other characters’ ears (103). While Bennett is large and “paunchy around the waist” (66), Tucker’s body is “spindly” (119) and “boy-sized” (41). While Tucker wears clear spectacles that exaggerate “hard brown eyes, with more in them than should be there,” Bennett wears dark glasses that hide his eyes altogether (119). While Bennett “declare[s] war on the white man” (178) in what can best be described as a militant black church, Tucker disidentifies with The State and performs radicalism—“a general critique of the proper”43—through the destruction not only of his property but of property’s hold on the self vis-à-vis propriety, ownership, and racial difference. Most importantly, while Bennett does not imagine that the

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anticolonial struggle “could be started from within, could be started at the grass roots, through spontaneous combustion” and can only understand the exodus as “truly remarkable, a miracle,” Tucker refuses to count on leadership—even his own—for social change (128). Through David Willson, Bennett Bradshaw’s college roommate, the reader learns of the race man’s college education and his later career as public spokesperson and rabble-rouser. When they meet at Harvard in the early 1930s, Bennett tells David that his people “need something new, something vital. In [his] opinion, their leadership has followed in the footsteps of the negro overseers of plantation times. Each is out for himself and money is the thing” (157). Bennett muses on “a new kind” of socialism while David is captivated by his British accent and erudition (157). The two become roommates and “talk always of politics, theories of government, communism vs. capitalism, the race problem,” planning to work for social change after graduation until Bennett’s mother dies at thirty-eight (from “hard work”), forcing him to leave school and work full time before graduating (159). He works for the very National Society for Colored Affairs that Tucker later denounces. Some fourteen years later in 1954, David finds an article about Bennett in a national publication. Here Bennett appears as a caricature of his earlier character. No longer working for the NSCA—“he was purged from that organization in 1950 when his communist affiliations hustled him before various congressional committees”—Bennett has founded a charismatic cult of Black Jesuits and is exhorting “his flock in a not quite legitimate English accent: ‘We have declared war on the white man!’” (178). By the time Bennett travels south in 1957, following Tucker’s disappearance, he has come to embody the kind of leadership he once despised. Bennett arrives in Sutton bejeweled and chauffeured by a black man in a new, expensive, shiny black limousine. Thanks to his showy brand of leadership—he arrives asking and answering questions about the blacks’ depopulation—he becomes the easy solution to the white supremacist cognitive dissonance that results from the blacks’ disappearance. Dewey, for example, wonders why Tucker might have destroyed his possessions and vanished, but “before [he] could think about that,” he “heard the sound of an engine coming over the hill” and he “could see the elegantly dressed Negro waiting in the back, behind the green glass” (125). Interrogating Dewey about “Tucker’s nose-thumbing at the world,” encountering the roadblock that fails to constrain the thousands, and hearing Elton’s account of Tucker’s silent leadership, Bennett concludes that the blacks leaving The State have made him “obsolete” (134). “Did you ever think that a person like myself, a so-called

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religious leader,” he asks Dewey, “needs the Tuckers to justify his existence? The day is fast coming, Mister Willson, when people will realize there isn’t any need for me and people like me. . . . Your Tuckers will get up and say: I can do anything I want; I don’t need to wait for someone to GIVE me freedom; I can take it myself. I don’t need Mister Leader, Mister Boss, Mister President, Mister Priest, or Mister Minister, or Reverend Bradshaw” (134). Understanding for the first time that grassroots movement is possible in the absence of top-down leadership, Bennett arrives at the same cognitive dissonance and malaise of the novel’s white characters. Further, by casting himself as “Mister Leader,” Bennett implicates himself in black leadership’s structure of subjection and its use as a form of entertainment akin to the minstrel show. As Trudier Harris points out, the minstrel tropes of the harmless darky and the Northern dandy are often linked to the trope of the black leader in contemporary African American literature: The image of the harmless darky came to epitomize the black man who was socially and psychologically emasculated. . . . Another side of this emasculation was manifested as the stereotype of the black male who, though as immaculately dressed as his slave existence would allow, nonetheless gave up his manhood by identification with whites, or in return for the little goods whites allowed. This character would continue into twentieth century literature in the form of various black ‘leaders’ who traded their community’s best interests for the material goods they were allowed to own within the black communities.44

Bennett, self-consciously now, performs the postminstrel trope of the Northern dandy cum black leader. Like Malcolm’s “Message to the Grass Roots,” Kelley’s black characters disidentify with formal black leadership, calling it out as inauthentic circus sideshow featuring a shady cast of “misters.” Drummer’s linking of formal black leadership to the minstrel cast reaches its apotheosis in the climactic lynching scene that I referred to earlier, in which Bennett is forced to embody the harmless darky minstrel type. In the final chapter, “The Men on the Porch,” the porch men who have puzzled over the vanishing spectacle of black withdrawal from The State grow angry as they explore the “Negro section” of Sutton after the exodus (188). On the Northside: They had found nothing, no houses lit; the Negroes had felt no need even to set lights in the windows as people do to keep burglars away, for they had taken anything they really valued, had left the rest for burglars, making it easy for them by leaving the doors swung open. Some had even left keys in the locks, an invitation to anyone who might want to occupy the house for good. The men

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from the porch could not bring themselves to enter the houses, retained that respect for house and property that is southern, that kept them from setting foot on Tucker Caliban’s land on Thursday, but they did peer over the thresholds into the darkness. . . . If the men had gone inside, they would have found the dustless rectangles where, only a few days before, suitcases had rested. There were no Negroes at all. (188)

In this penultimate scene of disappearance, the blacks’ contempt for and retreat from order clashes with the white men’s “respect for house and property,” and the porch men’s peering “into the darkness” only enrages them as they try “to picture nothing.” Returning to the porch—what has functioned as the platform of white supremacist vision in the novel—the men begin getting drunk; casting about for an explanation for the disappearance of the black labor force, they decide on Bennett Bradshaw as a scapegoat for black radical withdrawal. An angry Bobby-Joe works up the narrative: “That nigger preacher come driving by here and we just sat here watching him like he was the President. . . . We could-a stopped him; that was like having a naked girl in arm’s reach and not doing nothing about it but blush” (191). The scapegoating of Bennett depends on what Michel-Rolph Trouillot signals as the unthinkability of black yearnings for self-determination.45 Bobby-Joe convinces the other men that “it was that northern nigger” that “came down here, him in that big black car, and got all the niggers to move off, go somewhere else instead of staying here where they belongs” (192). Charismatic leadership is more thinkable to the porch men than the specter of “thousands of angry blacks” or the possibility of collective grassroots black resistance to the terrors of The State. If charisma serves as the explanatory fiction here—Bobby-Joe fabricates the narrative of Bennett’s outside agitating and the other porch men consume it—then it also is a more entertaining show to them than the boring affair of Tucker’s salting and burning and the unthinkable proceedings of the exodus. The sexualization of Bobby-Joe’s wish—the missed opportunity to apprehend him the day before “was like having a naked girl in arm’s reach”—eroticizes the men’s desire for a single leader and target for their rage. Just as they consume Bobby-Joe’s tale of black leadership, Bennett, Dewey, and the chauffeur pass the porch in Bennett’s limousine, and the men apprehend them. While Dewey tries to convince the mob that the black movement has been “spontaneous,” the men literally cannot comprehend it: “What’s spon-TAN-eous mean?” Bobby-Joe asks (196). For his part, Bennett is now silent. He “wishes he could say he had been the instigator, wishes he could say he planned it by himself. . . . But he could not” (197). As Bennett

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denies having led the movement, the men “solidify into an instant of violence” and begin to beat Bennett (198). The men now demand his performance. As the lynch mob realizes that this is their “last nigger, ever,” Bobby-Joe incites them by reminding them that the disappearance of blackness will disallow their predatory consumption of racial difference vis-à-vis the live minstrel show. “The only niggers we’ll ever see,” he says, “will be on television and they don’t sing none of the old songs, or do the old dances no more. They’s high class niggers with white wives and big cars. I been thinking that while we still got one, we ought to get him to do one of the old songs for us” (199). They command Bennett to sing “Curly-Headed Pickaninny Boy” (200). Bennett “knew now and could understand why the Negroes had left without waiting or needing any organizations or leadership” (201). He “sang softly in an off-key, near monotone. . . . It was a fast song, with a cakewalk beat, and sounded strange coming from Bradshaw because, with his British accent, he pronounced all the words correctly without a trace of a Negro accent.” (201). After being commanded, Bennett hones the coerced performance, “this time hopping comically from one foot to the other, his stomach jouncing” (202). The porch men take Bennett in his own limousine to Tucker’s farm, where Bennett is made to literally take the place of the disappeared masses and their (non)leader at the vanishing point. There is one last scene of black disappearance as Dewey sees a black family drive by: the car “reached the outskirts of town and then was gone” (203). The lynching satisfies the porch men’s need for black subjection as it makes Bennett an object of their masculinist violence. If Bennett is feminized—his body appears “soft and flabby like a fat woman’s” (69), and his “long hair almost obscur[es] his ears and [is] bundled at the back of his neck” (61)—Tucker is similarly feminized, imagined as a smallish nonleader who can only be seen as inspiring the exodus by “miracle” (128). The lynching follows up on the white men’s feminizations of black men throughout the novel. Lynching is a “symbolic transfer of sexual power”46; it seeks to destroy the phallic power suggested by the dehumanized image of the black sexual beast in such a way that “the white masculine reclaims the hypermasculinity that his own mythology of black sexual excess has denied him.”47 The white men thus preserve “hegemony over the entire field of masculine entitlements, while the black male is confined to the corporeal excess of racial feminization.”48 Here lynching functions both to narrativize the performative violence of black leadership—the processes by which black men are made to perform leadership in ways that serve the predatory appetites of The State—

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and to shore up the gendered ideologies that found that violence. The porch men, vigilante protectors of The State, neutralize the threat of black resistance by coercing a performance of gender subjection in which they themselves act out two forms of violence: the minstrel show and the lynching. By discussing the scene of violence between men in a male-authored novel, my aim is not to reinscribe the gender hierarchies of the civil rights movement but rather to engage gender hierarchy in a broader sense. As historians have argued, ideologies of the freedom struggle during the civil rights era produced a gender hierarchy within organizations and informal collectives that not only affected how black social movements functioned at the time, but also naturalized and spectacularized those gendered ideologies of leadership. Robnett points out that while women, “because of their gender, were often channeled away from formal leadership positions and confined to the informal level of leadership,” this exclusion served to make them “bridge leaders” who were indispensable to the movement. “Gender provided a construct of exclusion,” Robnett continues, “that helped to develop a strong grassroots tier of leadership that served as a critical bridge between the formal organization and adherents and potential constituents.”49 Yet even as revisionist histories have transformed the scholarship on the civil rights movement, the very definitions of leadership they set out to revise are only symptomatic of a larger problem of historical memory: “Scholarly redefinitions of leadership are important for the recovery of a lost political past,” Nasstrom writes, “but they raise other questions, particularly about the relationship between the past and the present.”50 The gendering of charismatic civil rights leadership as male cites a larger history of charisma as a cultural formation; further, that coding neither necessarily renders (only) women victims nor makes (only) men perpetrators of gendered violence. As Robnett is careful to point out, women “recruited men as formal leaders,” and “they and the movement’s followers extended and transformed the movement’s message so that conflict existed between their desires and that of the formal leaders. Bridge leaders . . . were not afraid to challenge the power of the formal leaders.”51 Simply put, women were not the victims or pawns of male leaders; they were the “geniuses of resistance” who built the relationships that enabled leaders to work in the service of the collective.52 If recent civil rights histories trouble simple conceptualizations of gender hierarchy in the movement, they also point to charismatic male leadership as both performative affect and debilitating effect.53 If charisma, as a mode of representation, is a figural process that works precisely as a masculinist mode

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of inscription and ascription—charismatic leadership is written violently on the masculine as much as it is represented against the feminine—then it is a regime of representation that transfers the struggle against coloniality onto the leader in a way that also must be understood as a gendered violence, a prescription for men as well as for women. (By prescription, I mean regulation, stipulation, and dictation; to prescribe is to freeze in representation.) In this sense, charisma—both in the Weberian sense (as the shape of authority) and in my sense (as the epistemology, or explanatory fiction, of twentieth-century black social movements)—can be understood as a form of gendered subjection that works to conceal and constrain what political theorist H. L. T. Quan calls the “gendered infrastructure of resistance”: the history of radical collectivity as a collection of communitarian, democratic practices at the center of which have been women. If racial capital is understood, first, as a gender script, and second, as the very script against which blackness strains, “resistance, in effect, manifests in gender, manifests as gender.”54 Hence we might read contemporary black social movements as the struggle to realize “the power of the ‘yes’ to the female within,” where female names neither a biological nor a normative gender assignment but rather a radical usurpation of the power to name, a supplanting of the Law of the Father.55 What the white narrators choose to see—what is presented in the foreground of the narrative within the white supremacist narrative frame—is a black masculinity that can only be imagined as denigrated femininity, as Bennett and Tucker are represented as grotesque disfigurations of American masculinity.56 On the other hand, women in Drummer are represented as dangerous to the liberation project: when Tucker and Bethrah disagree about Bethrah’s renewing her membership to the NSCA, Bethrah thinks “like a little coed” and has to learn to follow Tucker’s “different drum.” She tells Dymphna, “I think maybe, if I do whatever he tells me to do, and don’t think about it, well, for a while, I’ll be following him and something inside him, but I think some day I’ll be following something inside me that I don’t even know about yet” (114). When Elton drives his family out of Sutton, his wife begs him to reconsider, remarking, “I still thinks this is crazy, we packing up and going North. What’ll we do when we gets there?” Women’s submission to men, here as in the rest of the novel, must be enforced. Elton responds, “Quiet now, I told you we going because it’s right to go” and looks “at the woman menacingly” (131). Given the unreliability of the narration, though, the black men’s assertions of control must be understood as part of the larger structure of white supremacist epistemology in the novel. For example, Dymphna

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admits, when conjuring the scene of Tucker and Bethrah’s disagreement, that her story is a fabrication: As [Bethrah] told what happened, I could see the whole thing; she didn’t have to tell me how it happened, only what it was about. I could see them all sitting there, talking about things I guess college people talk about. I’d lived with Tucker long enough to know just what he’d say, just how he said it, and looked saying it. And that surprised me at the time because I never realized I knew so much about him. I never thought I paid much attention to him like Dewey does. But I knew. (109)

Here, again, the novel disallows the subaltern account and offers in its place an unreliable perspective that only pretends to know it all. Dymphna is deaf to Bethrah’s account and even insists that Bethrah’s experience is unnecessary, given her own knowledge of Tucker. This epistemological arrogance—the white characters’ claims to know blackness—casts doubt on the representation of intraracial gender relations among the black characters in Drummer. The unreliable public transcript of the blacks’ disappearance, from the almanac entry to Bobby-Joe’s mob tale, is scripted as a disfigured gendered hierarchy in which an antirevolutionary femininity, embodied by women, submits to an always already feminized black masculinity. Yet what can be glimpsed on the narrative horizon, in the background—indeed, at the vanishing point—is something else altogether: a fugitive movement/moment in which men and women work together toward the retreat from the existing social order. Hence when Dymphna asks Bethrah why she reconciles with Tucker after the blowup at the society meeting, Bethrah keeps the “secret” of black intimacy and black struggle. She retreats to the interior: “It’s so new and good I want to be selfish about it for a while. I’ll tell you one of these days. It’s better anyway if you figure it out yourself. Try” (112–13). When, as he destroys his estate, Tucker goes into his house to remove the grandfather clock that had traveled aboard the slave ship with the African and later been given as a gift to Tucker’s great-grandfather, a white spectator sees an invisible female force working with him: “He was pulling something heavy. A shove made him stumble back a step. Bethrah, his wife, must be behind, in the doorway” (44). Bethrah stands just outside of the frame, laboring, like Tucker, at the vanishing point, pictured here as a doorway or an entry point between the visible and the invisible. When she enters the visual field, she stands, “almost as tall” as the clock, “looking down at her tiny husband” (45). Here the novel offers a glimpse of what Quan calls the “gendered infrastructure of

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resistance” at the vanishing point before disappearing it behind white characters’ accounts of black women’s submission to black men. The retreats to the interior in the novel—Tucker’s, Bethrah’s, the whole black population’s—mirror the emplotment of the black radical tradition in the Robinsonian sense. More than admissions of defeat, black radicals’ taking to “the bush, to the mountains, to the interior” can be understood, again, as efforts to “reconstitute the community.”57 In this sense, the abandonment of The State in A Different Drummer holds the resistance of the black collective at the vanishing point of its narrative in a palette of radical silences, drawing its readers into the hidden transcript of the post–World War II black freedom struggle and restaging that era’s spectacular fictions of black leadership. Still, despite the efforts of contemporary culture producers, activists, and scholars to intervene in the top-down popular history of black social movements, the story of the post–World War II freedom struggle continues to be scripted as a story of charismatic men, a collection of Great Man biographies. In the next chapters, I outline the functions of humor and postmodern gothic surrealism in post–civil rights African American narrative to disrupt what remains, despite the counterstories offered by civil rights fiction, the “official story” of contemporary black struggles for self-determination. Turn-of-the-millennium black cultural production, which persistently engages critiques of black leadership through the formal innovations of fantasy, carnivalesque humor, and finally curiosity, might be read as one of the most fertile sites of contestation over the meaning, production, and circulation of charismatic black leadership as a cultural ideal in post–civil rights American culture.

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Part III

Curiosities

Race Leaders work best if they are already dead when appointed. —Adolph Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era

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Chapter 5

“Cyanide in the Kool-Aid” Black Politics and Popular Culture after Civil Rights

THE STORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN freedom struggle most often invoked in contemporary popular, mass-mediated accounts of the civil rights movement features a series of charismatic spectacles that build on the ancient symbology of the Exodus myth, the cultural repertoire of black political modernity, and the news reporting of post–World War II black protest. In these scenes, extraordinary and divinely ordained ministers and political spokesmen deliver rousing orations that inspire marchers to march and singers to sing, as well as moral, social, and political transformation to happen while followers, either silently, with shouts of assent, or with songs of protest, adhere to their directions. During the turn of the twenty-first century, American popular culture witnessed an explosion of millennial refashionings of these scenes of spectacular black political leadership even as postmodern black fiction and film contested the scenario of charismatic black political leadership as the primal and primary mode of political belonging and performance in the post–civil rights black cultural repertoire. Post–civil rights African American fiction and film have been in a large part constituted by the reconstitution of racial identity and racial hierarchy in American social and political life since the civil rights and Black Power movements, and contemporary black cultural production theorizes black politics and reimagines black political leadership in ways that illuminate how black charismatic leadership, as an always already ghostly figuration, functions as a cultural compact that both founds and confounds post-1965 black politics and popular culture. Hagiographic accounts of the civil rights movement and Black Power era center Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as moral exemplars and semidivine martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the future of the race. This public memory of the movement can be traced to both the seductive draw of charismatic black political leadership as a narrative technology and the sources by which historians, both academic and popular, access the history 135

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of the movement. In his historical analysis of the media’s ignorance of the political organizing process in the South during the 1960s, Charles Payne points out that “the frames used to cover the civil rights movement were multiple and shifting, but they were always such as to obscure the organizing process.” Linking this obfuscation of the organizing process to the dramatic appeal of charismatic leadership, he suggests that the press may have “found it hard to take seriously the idea that uneducated southern Blacks could be important political thinkers and actors” and argues, “The undervaluation of the leadership role played by ordinary people corresponded to an overconcentration on the role of national leaders, Dr. King in particular.”1 The fact that journalists covering the civil rights movement preferred to represent the movement as a spectacle of singular national leadership rather than to chronicle the unglamorous work of grassroots political organizing supports Toni Morrison’s claim that in the production of an official story, spectacle plays a central role.2 Charisma as an explanatory fiction and a performative political regime, as a story of black nationhood and a script for performing it, is the cultural material that authors and authorizes the official story of the civil rights movement through spectacle, providing images of its charismatic heroes that are frozen in time and space. This cultural regime insists that black struggle against domination is unthinkable in the absence of leading men, that gifted leadership makes history, and that the heterogeneity of black political subjectivity and movement can be reduced to hagiography. If, as I have argued in parts 1 and 2, twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury African American narrative has been a site of discursive struggle where ideals of black leadership have been both made and unmade, post– civil rights black fiction and film have often forged political contestation through the formal achievement of curiosity: a politics and aesthetics of serious interrogation, playful questioning, thoughtful puzzling, and/or fantastic reinvention. Fictional texts weave themselves in and out of the official story— what Morrison refers to as a “national narrative,” a “public truth” that delimits public vocabulary—of the civil rights movement by critically deconstructing and restaging the charismatic scenario of black political leadership.3 Curiosity names an aesthetics and a politics of endless asking that maintains a suspicion toward any authority figure offering final solutions. By depicting narrative curiosities on the black political scene—mysterious disappearances like those of William Melvin Kelley’s black thousands and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses as well as resurrections, unnerving presences, and revisionist histories that invite readers and audiences to question their leaders and interrogate their assumptions about black leadership—post–civil

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rights black cultural production centers a raucous participatory democracy rather than singular black leadership as its privileged imaginary of contemporary black politics. In the 2001 film Boycott, for example, the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott is “radically defamiliarized” through the aesthetics of curiosity.4 As Valerie Smith suggests, “even though Boycott clearly reenacts an historical event, it so frequently calls attention to its own status as a fiction” through subversive film conventions like the shaky handheld camera and direct address “that it prompts us to question the means by which truth effects are produced and the uses to which fiction may be put in the service of truth telling.”5 My aim in this chapter is to show precisely how curiosity, manifested in particular through parody, weds the conceptual work of contesting charisma to the playful questioning embedded in the formal workings of African American humor. If pre–civil rights–era satirical texts, like George Schuyler’s Black Empire, expose charismatic leadership as a ridiculous spectacle, making it absurdly visible, texts since the 1960s have been more preoccupied with what is unseen or obscured by the national narrative of African American politics. These more recent texts resurrect and shed light on what has been vanished by the charismatic scenario: everyday forms of resistance, the ordinary humanity of those leaders who have been assigned divine or semidivine status, and the way that the popular memory of African American leaders is put to use to short-circuit contemporary political desires. Paul Beatty’s 1996 novel The White Boy Shuffle and the controversial mainstream film Barbershop (MGM Pictures, 2002) are revisionist counterstories whose characters embrace an intuitive way of seeing that grapples with those “phantom subjects” of civil rights protest: both the leaders they lack and the players in the drama of black political history that the leadership spectacle necessarily pushes out of sight.6 In Memoriam To fully understand the aesthetic and political values of postmodern black cultural production, we must appreciate how the circulation of black leadership memorabilia and black nationalist ideologies in the 1990s marketplace provided the commercial complex that, along with social and cultural constellations such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the Million Man March, the mainstream circulation of hip-hop, and the success of the New Jack films of that decade, created the discursive world for African American literature and film at the end of the twentieth century. The phenomenal success of Spike Lee’s 1992 film Malcolm X (40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks)—accompanied by

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what cultural critics called “Malcomania,” a marketing and consuming blitz that turned what Ossie Davis referred to as Malcolm’s “living black manhood” into a “hot commodity”—cooperated with several other 1990s-era visual cultural artifacts that examined the lives of charismatic figures of the post–World War II black freedom movement to self-consciously produce a market for new black nationalist consumption.7 As such, the public crises of black masculinity that corresponded to the remaking of black American politics after the civil rights movement rearticulated the visual culture industry, creating an audience for the mass-market reproduction of a 1960s charismatic scenario featuring an alternatively virulent and redemptive black masculinity.8 From black college students reenacting the March 1964 meeting between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X on the NBC sitcom A Different World in 1993 to Apple Computer’s use of footage of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to brand its “Think Different” campaign in 1997, the eruptions of black protest history into post–social movement American visual culture, particularly through reenactment, replay, and eulogy, provided the terms by which postmodern black culture reimagined the relationship between masculinity, aesthetics, and politics after the Black Arts Movement.9 While the Black Arts Movement had its own investments in reinventing black political leadership, I am more interested in how African American cultural production has contested charisma in the context of “a radical reimagining of the contemporary African American experience”10 after deindustrialization, desegregation, the emergence of post–Black Arts Movement black popular culture, and what Stuart Hall signaled in 1992 as “the end of the innocent notion of an essential black subject.”11 The coproductive relationship between American commercial culture and the construction of civil rights and Black Power–era black political leadership in the 1990s changed the cultural landscape for African American fiction and film. As visual media reinvented civil rights and Black Power history to dramatize American progress and interracial cooperation on the one hand—in a film like The Long Walk Home (New Visions Pictures, 1990), for example—and black dissent on the other—in Malcolm X and Panther (Gramercy Pictures, 1995)—the citation of black charismatic leadership via the civil rights/Black Power memorial film both revived the specter of 1960s radicalism and too easily reified “a very complex and contradictory project that had emancipatory moments leading beyond itself.”12 The Malcolm X biopic grossed $9.1 million during its opening weekend in November 1992 and coincided with the decade’s trade in black protest paraphernalia, including the red, black, and green T-shirts like the one I used to wear that boasted,

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“Martin, Malcolm, Mandela, and Me!” and the iconic T-shirts and baseball caps that featured a single white or gray X stitched into a black background. These and other objects of memorialization—the historical reenactment, the civil rights museum, the fashion trend, the street name, the commercial advertisement—engaged American consumers in producing what Leigh Raiford and Renee Romano call a “consensus memory” of the movement— a public memory that circulated not only within African American culture but that was also “undertaken by multiple, far-reaching, and interrelated constituencies” nationally and abroad.13 The circulation of black leadership iconography in the 1990s and 2000s has obscured a history of radical organizing while domesticating the black freedom movement in the interest of the national narrative of American exceptionalism. As Nikhil Pal Singh argues, “The civil rights movement— with King frozen in time before the Lincoln Memorial—is represented as part of a national, political consensus, shattered only when blacks themselves abandoned the normative discourses of American politics.”14 The national narrative project of domesticating the post–World War II black freedom struggle depends on a number of historical elisions: It relies on an abbreviated periodization of the civil rights era, as well as fallacies about the South as an exception to national racial norms. It fails to recognize the historical depth and heterogeneity of black struggles against racism, narrowing the political scope of black agency and reinforcing a formal, legalistic view of black equality. It obscures a violent history of black opposition to white supremacy well underway in urban areas.15

These historical elisions serve the neoliberal logics of the post–civil rights era, logics that maintain an ideology of color blindness that only covers over and privatizes racial injury. The result of the national narrative of the rights struggle might thus be described as “kind of national schizophrenia in which racial difference is either shouted down in a chorus of national unanimity (color-blindness), or shunted into zones of institutionalized marginality— the ghetto, the prison, even the ethnic studies program.”16 The circulation of black leadership spectacle—on clothing, in biopics, in stock footage replay— renders invisible not only the enduring forms of racism and antiracism, but also the post-1968 realignment and restructuring of racial injury and racial preference through the management and policing of racialized surplus populations.17 In this way, the civil rights/Black Power memorial has become a principal genre for the remaking of both U.S. national politics and black protest politics

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after civil rights. As I conceive it, the civil rights/Black Power memorial is not simply a funeral for or commemoration of a slain leader or activist of the black freedom struggle. It is, more broadly, a conjurational and multifarious genre encompassing funerals, fiction, film, fashion, and a host of cultural texts in high and low places—street signs, spray-painted murals, bookstore displays, Black History Month programs, sermons, campaign speeches—that summon a collective memory of the 1960s to authorize claims to wholeness, blackness, goodness, righteousness, and Americanness in the present. In a contemporary American cultural scene that imagines itself beyond civil rights and even beyond race, the dominant image of charismatic black leadership so readily equated with the 1960s is conjured to keep black radical protest in motion and to domesticate that very history, to pay homage to black protest and to absolve the nation of its history of racialized terror, to raise the specter of 1960s rupture only to lay it to rest once and for all. In the rituals of public mourning for Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and other leaders, longing for the dead does the double work of restaging black protest history and reinstating the goodness of American history.18 Consider, for example, how the civil rights/Black Power memorial conjured national political authority while invoking a sentimental attachment to black protest history on the 2006–8 campaign trail. At the 2007 commemoration of Bloody Sunday, the day in March 1965, when civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, were attacked by police on Edmund Pettus Bridge, presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama took to pulpits three blocks apart in Selma, each to claim Joshualike authority after the passing of what Obama called “the Moses generation.” Obama pronounced, in a call-and-response sermonette laced with the dulcet tones of a Southern accent, “[We] are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses. We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on, people who battled, not just on behalf of African Americans but on behalf of all of America; that battled for America’s soul, that shed blood.” By asking the congregation to mourn the slain heroes of the civil rights generation by identifying with a romantic rendering of Exodus, Obama reproduced the gendered violence of the mythos of black leadership that I referred to in chapter 3 while narrating black protest history as an American tale of interracial consensus. Clinton, for her part, exhorted the congregation at First Baptist Church, “We have a march to finish. On this Lord’s day, let us say with one voice, the words of James Cleveland’s great freedom hymn, ‘I don’t feel no ways tired. I’ve come too far from where I’ve started from.’” Urging the congregation to “stay

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awake” and “march towards one America,” Clinton echoed Obama’s invocation of civil rights protest as both passed on and ever present. In both speeches, the conjurational work—the digging up and repurposing of civil rights remains—made symbolic use of the image of the bloodied march forward, and the image of the unfinished march was a reference point for the transfer of political authority from the beaten civil rights generation to the two candidates vying for national public office.19 In this way, the master narrative of the civil rights movement has normalized, through fantastic and phantasmic homage to a redemptive past, an image of a “morally responsive society” in which “militant response is hardly justified” and in which radicalism is “automatically marginalize[d].”20 In African American cultural production, the memorial impulse underlying the image of charismatic black leadership after civil rights gives rise to a culture of mourning and melancholia that both longs for and disposes of gifted singular leadership. When Adolph Reed observed in 1999 that black leaders “work best if they are already dead when appointed,” he signaled how deeply contemporary black political culture’s love affair with the dead is structured in a nostalgia that is expressed, in psychoanalytic terms, as both mourning and melancholia, often at the same time.21 For example, in an early scene in Spike Lee’s 1996 Get on the Bus (40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks), a narrative film that tracks a group of men making their way from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March, Ossie Davis eulogizes Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in what can be read as a citation, if not a near reprise, of his roles as eulogist for Malcolm in 1965 and as memorialist for King after his assassination in 1968. It was Davis who, on the occasion of Malcolm’s death, urged congregants to be “secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man, but a seed, which, after the winter of discontent, will come forth again to meet us,” suspending listeners in a messianic temporality between past and present, between Malcolm’s death and his return.22 Speaking at Central Park the day after King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, Davis told listeners, “My wife and I are looking forward to being in Memphis on Monday to carry forward the march that Dr. King was going to . . . I don’t know . . . Dr. King’s body is back in Atlanta. . . . I do know there will be a march, and I do know that I want to be in that number,” again citing the leader’s remains—even through the very ellipses in the speech here—as an absent presence constitutive of black collectivity.23 Now leading the group of men “getting ready to ride into history” in prayer before the bus in Lee’s film departs from South Central—in 1990s black culture, a central symbolic

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site for the recapitulation of postindustrial black discontent and dispossession—Davis’s character, Jeremiah Washington, implores heaven: We know that you was with Moses when he parted the Red Sea and freed the slaves from bondage. We know that you was with Noah when the rain came down 40 days and 40 nights. We know that you was with Malcolm when he went to Mecca, with Martin when he went to the mountaintop, and we’re asking you, Dear God, to be with us now on this historic journey to fellowship with one million black men.

The invocation in Get on the Bus captures two impulses that are central to how black political culture has been represented in black popular culture in the 1990s and 2000s. There is introjection, or the impulse to mourn: the prayer “reorganiz[es] libidinal energies” and turns them away from the lost objects—here, the leaders—essentially by releasing them and insisting that the responsibility for racial progress is now dispersed on the fellowship of the one million. The citation of the leadership void in the prayer’s rehearsal of black leadership history is, on one hand, drowned out by the exigency of the bus’s, and the men’s, forward movement. In fact, even as Jeremiah leads the men in prayer, a latecomer ambushes the bus and breaks into the solemnity of the moment: “Hot damn! Thought y’all was gonna jet without a brother but—hot damn!—my horoscope said the moon was aligned for me.” On the other hand, there is a kind of melancholic incorporation, or refusal to mourn. At the same time as it diverts desire away from the leaders the men now lack toward the future that is upon them, Jeremiah’s litany of leadership from Moses to Martin keeps “the lost object in a place,” sealed within the collective body of the one million, “as though it were a monument and memorial that preexisted every corporeal memory.”24 The naming ritual calls the leaders to the bus as if to disperse onto the one million not only the responsibility for racial redemption, but also the masculine power summoned by the leaderly invocation. In this case, Malcolm and Martin are not so much mourned as they are placed in the “living tomb” of the bus and carried on to Washington, where the men will, of course, gather around March organizer Louis Farrakhan.25 The longing for leadership is backward and forward oriented, and the postmortem charisma of Martin and Malcolm produces a kind of memorymemorial that is at once claimed and disavowed.26 The cultural production of black charismatic leadership as lack, particularly after Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for the presidency in 1984 and 1988, has only further entrenched black political culture in the affective structures of post–social movement loss and post–Reagan-era misery. Comedian Chris

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Rock lamented in his stand-up film, Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker (HBO, 1999): “I think we need a new leader. We ain’t had a black leader in a while. In a long time. Somebody that moves you. You know, we had Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and ever since then, a bunch of substitute teachers.” Dismissing Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Farrakhan as charlatans, he offers New York Knicks coach Pat Riley as a fit leader: “No man has led more black men to the promised land,” he jokes.27 Comedians like Rock were not alone in their assessments of post–civil rights black political leadership; American scholars and journalists also took to lambasting would-be black leaders by the end of the 1990s as they became increasingly critical of what Ralph Ellison called in 1964 “big shot word artists.”28 Political scientist Adolph Reed and journalists Norman Kelley and Juan Williams launched strident critiques of African American political leadership while waging an assault on black scholars; literary critic Kenneth Warren called attention to how African American studies, as a field, was deluded by fantasies of racial salvation and political efficacy; and Houston Baker cast a dazzling indictment of post–civil rights era black public intellectuals.29 While important critiques of black intellectual and political leadership emerged during what was proclaimed as a leadership crisis in the 1990s and early 2000s, several of them—particularly those analyses that were disconnected from feminist critique and the then emerging formation of black queer studies—have only reified charisma as a commonsense structure of black politics, at times even using scholarship as a stage for man-to-man, mano a mano challenges.30 Kelley, for example, focuses his argument on the “rise of ‘symbolic politicians’ . . . who aspire to the pretense of leadership without being accountable or presenting solutions” but neglects to investigate his own investment in the charismatic model. He writes, “Black politics and black political culture regressed during the age of Clinton. Once there was a King exhorting the nation to live up to its democratic precepts, a Malcolm X eviscerating America’s racial policies, an Adam Clayton Powell legislating an array of laws that affected American public policy.”31 Here, contemporary leadership is blamed for failing to live up to the charismatic ideal cited in memoriam of the civil rights era, but the ideal of charismatic leadership itself remains intact, shining more brightly as would-be leaders of the post–civil rights era stand in its dark shadow, marking its innate goodness by way of Manichean opposition. The cultural production of the leadership void in African American culture thus turns on a double haunting. As a loose script that simultaneously circulates loss (of past leaders), disappointment (with present leaders), and

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hope (for coming leaders), charisma exposes two fundamentally ghostly figurations: the messianic leader that the people do not yet have, and the leaders that it has once had and since lost. If the charismatic scenario performs the fantasy of the leader’s arrival, it also dramatizes the hauntology of his absence, and the fictions of absent presence and present absence that surround the public articulations of charismatic black leadership have come to mark the scene of post–civil rights black politics with the definitive tones of deferral, loss, and infinite lack. Charismatic leadership thus functions in contemporary African American culture as a spatiotemporal impossibility: caught between loss and promise, mourning and hope, yesterday and tomorrow, here and there, the charismatic leader can never actually exist in the present except as specter. This spectrality circumscribes what can now be called black political postmodernity. The leadership lack—cited as erstwhile loss and future promise— haunts every iteration of “the black agenda,” “the black community,” “the black church,” “black leaders,” “the black vote,” and indeed “black politics” as a whole scene since the introduction of what Cathy Cohen calls “crosscutting issues” into post–civil rights black politics.32 If the temporality of nostalgia is a suspension of the now in favor of the past and the temporality of the leadership wish is a suspension of the now in favor of the future, then the effect of charisma as structuring paradigm for black politics can be said to be the same as that of the classic charismatic leader. The leader delivers us from the “shell as hard as steel”—the rationalist order of capitalist modernity— and catapults us into eternal time through magic and/or other proofs of power, just as the charismatic scenario draws us into a suspended salvational structure of affect that mediates between a past that has been glorious and a future that promises to be more so.33 In the ideational and ideological complex of charismatic leadership, present time is marked with the affective longings of eternal political salvation, and the measure of effective charisma is now its ability to shatter chronological time in favor of the eternal. Charisma is a hauntological (im)possibility, as the charismatic leader is always already dead and gone and always already just about to appear in post–civil rights black political culture. The charismatic leader is, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, apparition and reapparition; “neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death.”34 This emergence of black leadership as a hauntology that has structured black political, religious, and intellectual masculinities—the fashioning of black manhood in various black public spheres through the performances of

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representationality—throughout the 1990s and 2000s has provided the context for the emergence of black feminist critiques of 1960s nostalgia and black feminist analyses of black charismatic intellectual leadership in the academy. The processes of official story making around charismatic leaders in the service of an American national self-narrative on one hand and in the service of post–civil rights black intellectual masculinity on the other, as black feminist discourse has shown, participate in the production of a gendered epistemology of political and social movement, as erasing women’s radical resistance from the national narrative only shores up the objectification and domestication of “women’s work” in freedom struggles and entangles charismatic leadership with the construction of post–civil rights public black masculinity. The work of historians and social theorists like Elsa Barkley Brown, Joy James, Bernice Reagon Johnson, Danielle McGuire, and Barbara Ransby has countered the tendency toward historical erasure by providing detailed accounts of the work of female activists like Ella Baker, Claudette Colvin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, and Jo Ann Robinson. Still, women are made objects for easy exchange in a political economy of historical imagery that empties female activism of its radical potential in the national narrative of the 1960s. Angela Davis suggests as much about the circulation of her own image in the contemporary moment in her well-known 1996 essay, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia,” in which she brings a Marxist/Jamesonian understanding of nostalgia to bear on a reading of consumer society’s investment in the fetishes of civil rights and Black Power. “It is both humiliating and humbling,” she writes, “to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.” Reading a Vibe Magazine fashion spread featuring a model dressed up like Davis and pictured in photographs that replicate the FBI’s pursuit of Davis, she points out, “Some of the photos . . . re-create photos taken at my arrest, during the trial, and after my release. Others can be characterized as pastiche, drawing elements, like leather-jacketed Black men, from contemporary stereotypes of the sixties–seventies era of Black militancy.”35 In the years after the FBI’s “cycle of terror” against her, Davis’s hairstyle and clothing have become commodity fetishes that present black radicalism as a series of exchangeable disarticulated moments that position male consumers as privileged buyers in a sellers’ market of black activist objects. The accoutrements of civil rights–era and Black Power–era black activism are circulated in an economy that turns freedom making into a simple process of buying and trading images and styles. We thus might invert Cedric Robinson’s assertion that the “market society informs the political

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authority of Western society. It is at its roots.”36 If market society gives rise to the need for political authority, the exchange of the commodity fetishes of black protest fuels the market’s need for political icons to stamp on T-shirts, magazines, and book jackets. If it is true that the spectacle of black charismatic political authority is mediated by a transnational market, which circulates commodity fetishes as proofs of otherworldy power, the gendering of those semisacred objects of black political material culture within the academic marketplace is worth noting. No one makes this point clearer than Hazel Carby, who points to Cornel West’s three-piece Victorian suit with a clock and chain as an attempt to embody Du Boisian “soul”: West’s claim is that moral and ethical values of intellectual practice are inscribed in the clothed body, and these clothes secure the status of the intellect within. The clothes can be read, unproblematically, as clear signs of intellectual worth.37

Pointing to the masculinist implications of West’s dress, Carby’s reading of Du Bois’s and West’s photographs explains the way that West’s appropriation of Du Boisian suit allows him to share in Du Bois’s self-fashioning as a race leader. “Carby warns that those who would require alterations to this costume should apply elsewhere,” Monica Miller writes, “as those who do not fit this ‘masculinist’ mold will be excluded from the intellectual family.”38 Carby exposes how the commodity fetish—here, the suit—serves as the gendered site of contact between the notions and performances of leadership past and present. The trade in twentieth-century black leadership iconography in the post–civil rights era circulates black political and intellectual histories as market objects and so marks the cultural text as a site of historiographical violence, a locus of exchange where heterogeneous activist and intellectual labors are at once reduced to tradeable objects and endowed with all of the mystical power of the commodity. It is the charismatic scenario, shaped at the nexus of public and private, religious and secular life in the postwar United States and circulated throughout the long twentieth century as both social-political process and iconographic object, that George Schuyler’s Dr. Belsidus and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, fictional characters blindly followed by devotees, satirize; it is this same scenario that is troubled by Toni Morrison’s Paradise and the two texts I discuss here, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and the 2002 film Barbershop. These two texts are exemplary of a shift in publicly expressed attitudes toward African American leadership, a shift that coincides with the speedup

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in market production of black leadership iconology that I have alluded to above. My point is to show how what Richard Iton calls “the black fantastic”—the moments and places at which black popular culture registers the blindness and silences of formal black politics—is articulated by black fiction and film of the late 1990s and early 2000s in ways that disrupt the post–civil rights market trend of commodifying charismatic leadership.39 African American popular culture in the post–civil rights era is an archive of the curious, a body of texts guided by an aesthetic logic that activates gaps, silences, and interrogations to register the exclusions of official history and canonical knowledge formations. Humorous texts in particular call into question the ideal of charismatic leadership and allow for new interpretations of the official story of the civil rights movement. These comic restagings of civil rights and Black Power defamiliarize charisma; instead of positing it as a golden standard by which to gauge contemporary political leaders, they often expose the absurdity of the charismatic ideal. The African American tradition of “signifying” has given comedians the tools to rewrite dominant narratives of historical charismatic figures, like Malcolm X and King, and to take a critical second look at the popular history of the movement. Post–civil rights African American humor explodes the genre of the civil rights/Black Power memorial to disarticulate notions of race, leadership, and masculinity. Cuttin’ Up Barbershop uses comic invention to expose charisma’s hold on public memory and everyday black talk. The plot of the film revolves around the internal struggle of Calvin Palmer, played by gangsta rapper turned black family film star Ice Cube, to maintain the barbershop that has belonged to his family for three generations. When the shop, named Calvin’s, faces bank foreclosure because of unpaid debt, Calvin sells the shop to Lester Wallace, a loan shark who, after giving Calvin the money, informs him that he plans to turn the shop into a strip club. The neo-uplift narrative tracks Calvin’s subsequent efforts to rescue the barbershop from the loan shark’s hands. While most of the action takes place in the barbershop, the film also follows the antics of J.D. and Billy, two characters who steal an automatic teller machine from the convenience store across the street from Calvin’s and spend the bulk of the film trying to break it open. When Calvin and one of the shop’s other barbers discover the stolen ATM, they collect the $50,000 reward, pay the loan shark and the shop’s debts, and save the barbershop from foreclosure. The end of the film pans a renamed barbershop, Calvin Jr.’s, filled with laughing barbers and patrons who have reconciled their various conflicts.

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The barbershop operates in the film in the same way that the barbershop has functioned historically in many African American communities: as one of the “formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere,” a site in which the community engages “in various modes of resistance, critique, [and] institution building,”40 and where African Americans develop political understandings and strategies through everyday talk.41 If everyday talk is one site where African American political ideologies are shaped and articulated, the barbershop is a critical public space for the making of contemporary black politics. Eddie, the oldest barber at Calvin’s, helps Calvin understand the shop’s significance in the community after Calvin tells him about the deal with Lester Wallace: “This ain’t no damn school for the blind, Calvin! This is the barbershop! The place where black men mean something. Cornerstone of the neighborhood! Our own country club!” If the “soul era,” the years of the 1960s and early 1970s, “challenged the prevailing logic of white supremacy” and was “premised on the construction of ‘positive’ black images,” the barbershop functions as an exclusive museum of soul—a members-only site where soul-era artifacts and values are preserved and put on display, where soul food is consumed, and where souls find meaning.42 Framed photographs on the wall behind Calvin’s chair feature black-and-white and color images of the March on Washington, Calvin and his father with bereted black men in leather jackets, a young Jesse Jackson, and other black Chicagoans from the 1960s and earlier twentieth century, while a painted mural on the opposite wall, the Wall of Fame, features a large portrait of Calvin’s father and other barbers, including younger representations of Eddie and Calvin. The sanctuary “where black men mean something” is symbolically protected by a plastic sign next to the framed photos reading, “ESTABLISHMENT: Do not disturb.” Central to Calvin’s man-against-self crisis is a struggle to tear himself from the shop’s communal legacy, which fails to account for his own desires. Wanting more to become rich renting out his basement music studio than to preserve the black men’s haven that displays the community’s glorious history, Calvin sells his father’s shop and its grasp on his vision of selfhood and autonomy. After a turning-point conversation with Eddie, Calvin discovers the mistake he has made in selling the shop to Wallace and begins taking steps to correct his error by returning the money to the loan shark. Calvin, first ready to throw away the barbershop—the place where soul is preserved—changes his mind. He saves the soul. Calvin functions at moments as the preserver of the civil rights movement’s official story. As a guardian of soul, he carefully polices the memory of the movement. In a pivotal scene, “The Truth According to Eddie,” one

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elderly barber goes about setting the historical record straight for the younger men in the shop who, like Calvin, cling to the official story. The scene begins with Calvin’s pronouncement: “The Panthers, you gotta give it up to them. You gotta give it up to Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and you gotta give it up to Rosa Parks, period. ’Cause they was deep, and they were on the front line in the 60s.” Eddie responds, “Who the hell is Rosa Parks?” and launches into a monologue that dismisses Calvin’s history of civil rights heroism. He says, “Man she [Rosa Parks] was tired. That’s what you do when you’re tired—you sit your ass down. . . . Rosa Parks ain’t do nothin but sit her black ass down.” He goes on to concede that Parks’s action of refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery in 1955 “led to the movement,” but he points out, “She damn sure ain’t special. Naw—it was a lot of black folk sat down on buses and they got thrown in jail, and they did it way before Rosa did.” Eddie’s narrative signifies on the charismatic hero of the official story in a subtle comic maneuver. His declaration that Parks “led to the movement” links her to the civil rights/Black Power memorial genre even if it declines to name her as a charismatic leader as such. Parks, ironically, is often imagined as the very antithesis to charisma: muttering only a few words, she is believed to have instigated the civil rights struggle in the absence of rousing speech or other miraculous “proof.”43 Taylor Branch describes Parks’s quiet resistance: “she spoke so softly” that the police officer ordering her out of her seat “would not have been able to hear her above the drone of normal bus noise. But the bus was silent.”44 Her barely audible action is written into the official story’s charismatic spectacle as a condition of possibility for Martin Luther King’s formation as a charismatic leader. As King made his first speech as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to guide the boycott spurred by Parks’s resistance and subsequent arrest, he began to build his skills and reputation as a charismatic political spokesperson. Branch describes the moment at which the crowd’s response to King, first reticent, grows to confirm his newly bestowed authority as leader in a loud roar: The giant cloud of noise shook the building and refused to go away. One sentence had set it loose somehow, pushing the call-and-response of the Negro church service past the din of a political rally and on to something else that King had never known before.45

When King finished the speech, punctuating his first appearance as public leader with the humble suggestion, “As we proceed with our program—let us think on these things,”

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The crowd retreated into stunned silence as he stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. . . . A few seconds passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. . . . In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets.46

In Branch’s telling, the beginning of the boycott triggered by Parks’s arrest marks the commencement of King’s career as charismatic leader. King is given a kind of authority he “had never known,” and the ordinary preacher dies and rises a prophet whose power of speech and “communion” propels him into an extraordinary, semidivine place in public memory. Scrupulous historians are careful to highlight the connection between the existing organizing networks in Montgomery, a history of quotidian resistance on public transportation in the city, and Parks’s catalytic action when narrating the events of the boycott and King’s charismatic birth47; these are links that the official story of the movement fails to recognize. The national narrative reads the boycott and King as mutually creative: the boycott produces King’s charismatic leadership, and conversely, King’s leadership brings into being the boycott that initiates the modern civil rights movement. In this cycle of creation, Parks figures peculiarly as the mother—or perhaps grandmother—of the movement. She gives birth to the movement that gives rise to King’s charisma. Eddie’s jokes about Rosa Parks can be read as jokes about charisma only if charisma is understood as a model for political transformation that depends as much on quiet female heroes as on divinely anointed male speakers. The African American charismatic ideal posits male orators as history’s heroic agents and self-sacrificing women as unselfish martyrs, heroic in their voluntary suffering. The idea that charisma has historically been a masculinist construction seems readily apparent; what scholars have neglected to document is the way that in the charismatic story, female characters are often narratively essential. Few note, for example, that many stories of male charismatic figures include feminine enablers who are central to the formation of revolutionary masculinity. In his analysis of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, however, Cedric Robinson writes about Louise Little, Malcolm X’s mother: “For Malcolm X she was an idealized figure heroic in her oppression (‘she was always standing over the stove . . . ’) but one for whom he felt much guilt . . . and ambivalence.” Robinson also points out, “The narrative of the Autobiography begins with the construction of the heroic image of a woman, Malcolm’s mother, and ironically, the last entry of intimacy in the narrative deals with a woman, ‘the little blond coed.’”48

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Madonna figures abound in narratives of charismatic formation. The Exodus myth, for instance, contains two mother figures whose unselfish giving allows for Moses’s reign as deliverer. Moses’s mother sacrifices her own motherhood in her son’s interest, placing him in a papyrus basket beside the river, and his surrogate mother, the pharaoh’s daughter, pities the child and raises him as her own. The two women, in their motherhood exchange, make possible Moses’s charismatic leadership. In the case of the civil rights movement, Parks is written into the official story as a mother figure that gives birth to the struggle. David J. Garrow’s biography of King begins with a simple gesture to Parks, who, like Moses’ mothers, nearly goes unnamed: “Thursday had been a busy and tiring day for Mrs. Raymond A. Parks.”49 As long as Parks’s action is cited as the natural or logical beginning of King’s tenure as a public servant and political leader, King’s initiation into the tradition of charismatic leadership as spokesperson and president of the Montgomery Improvement Association can be understood as enabled, paradoxically, by Parks’s near-silent resistance. Charisma as a spectacle of the hyperperformative masculine functions simultaneously here as a spectacle of the meek, self-sacrificing feminine. As Danielle McGuire is careful to point out, “Rosa Parks was a militant race woman, a sharp detective, and an antirape activist long before she became the patron saint of the bus boycott. . . . The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights movement, was in many ways the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect black women . . . from sexualized violence and rape.”50 To refuse the image of Parks as a silent martyr is to recognize how the historical record has been shaped by a profound blindness with respect to gendered violence, women’s activism, and the everyday work of black protest in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. To return to Barbershop, Eddie’s joke discredits the charismatic leader indirectly by calling attention to another heroic player in the drama of black political leadership: the mother of modern black charismatic leadership. It wrenches politics from Parks’s self-sacrificing quiet strength and returns it to the realm of everyday working-class life. Refusing to grant the Madonna figure exceptional status, Eddie says, “The [only] difference between [the other people who got thrown off of buses] and her is that she was secretary at the NAACCP [sic] and she knew Martin Luther King, and it got a lot of publicity.” He concludes the joke, “Black people need to stop lying. It’s three things that black people need to tell the truth about: 1) Rodney King shoulda got his ass beat for driving drunk and being grown in a Hyundai; 2) O.J. did it; and 3) Rosa Parks ain’t do nothing but sit her black ass down.” Later in the film,

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he says about King, “Martin Luther King was a ’ho—come Martin Luther King’s birthday, I want everybody to take the day off and go get your freak on.” When Checkers Fred, one of the shop’s elder patrons, admonishes Eddie, “You better not let Jesse Jackson hear you talking like that,” Eddie avers, “Man, fuck Jesse Jackson! Jesse, Randy, Tito, Freddie, Action—I’ll take ’em all on!” Eddie’s jokes lay bare the public truth of the movement and turn it into a joke. Eddie, played by “king of comedy” Cedric the Entertainer, functions paradoxically as the film’s primary comic performer and the carrier of serious historical knowledge. He schools the younger barbers, for example, on the history of the role of the barber in the South Side community: In my day, a barber was a counselor; he was a fashion expert; style coach; pimp; just general all around hustler. But the problem with y’all cats today is that you got no skill, no sense of history. And then, with a straight face, you got the nerve to want to be somebody, want somebody to respect you. But it take respect to get respect, you know what I’m saying? See, I’m old, but Lord willing, I’d be spared the sight of seeing everything we done workeded [sic] for flushed down the drain by someone who don’t know no better, or care.

Eddie’s lecture is interspersed with close-up shots of Calvin Sr.’s Wall of Fame portrait and of a pensive Calvin Jr., who contemplates the photographs on the wall. Checkers Fred smiles approvingly as Eddie educates the younger generation. Ironically, the older barber is the one who both imparts historical knowledge to give the younger men “a sense of history” and then undermines the power of that historical knowledge to determine resistance in the present. Eddie’s jokes have the primary effect of unmaking the untouchable heroism that surrounds Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King in the civil rights/Black Power memorial; they can be read as an effort to make both figures as ordinary as the people who populate the barbershop. Barbershop 2: Back in Business (MGM, 2004), a conversion narrative about blackness, nationalism, and family values that follows up on the first film’s poking fun at 1960s black social movements, explains Eddie’s position in the barbershop as unquestionable authority through the use of black-andwhite flashback.51 Running from white policemen after stealing meat from a butcher on July 4, 1967, Eddie rushes into the barbershop in the film’s opening scene. He confesses to stealing the meat to Calvin Sr.: “It’s the fourth of July, it’s the goddamn Fourth of July! Can’t a black man have a goddamn fourth of July too?” He is offered sanctuary in the shop, and Calvin’s father cuts off Eddie’s relaxed hair while the police watch suspiciously and

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then leave. Eddie’s subsequent flashbacks tell the story of his life as a young man: now wearing his hair in an Afro, he woos a woman, sings doo-wop on the El, and observes a Black Panther meeting in the barbershop. At the meeting, the Panthers’ spokesperson makes the organization appear aimlessly militant: That’s right! When the pigs show up, they gon’ show up with they guns, and we ain’t gon’ do nothin’ but show up with our guns. Then they gon’ start shootin’! Oh then we gon start shootin’! I’m telling you all of them, every last one of them, gon’ get shot! And all of us is gon’ get shot! All of us is gon die together! Black power!

Here Black Power, like civil rights in the first film, is a joke. Eddie locks the door after the Panthers leave and remarks to Calvin Sr., “Shit! Man, them fools crazy!” The film’s parody of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, similar to the 1995 action drama Panther, empties the party of its radical content, representing it as a ganglike group led by virile action heroes.52 The difference between the two representations, of course, is generic: while Panther’s representation of the Panthers, passing itself off as real and historical, unwittingly turns the party into a joke, the revision of the Black Panthers’ history in Barbershop 2 lines up with its self-conscious, comic look back at the 1960s. The Barbershop films’ humorous chronicle of the 1960s builds Eddie’s character as a reliable narrator of the past. When riots rage in the South Side in response to King’s assassination, Calvin Sr. tells Eddie “This ain’t right. We should be honoring the man’s memory; we shouldn’t be doing this!” Eddie stands at the door and wards off looters, earning himself a rentfree barber’s station from Calvin’s father. Eddie tells Calvin Jr. his conversion story: Yeah, so after all that quieted down, you know your daddy told me I ain’t never have to pay for my chair again. That’s the kind of man your father was. He was a man’s man. Used to always call me a hero. The funny thing is—is I never saw it that way. I didn’t save the shop Calvin—the shop saved me. . . . I ain’t have no life before this. No. As far as I’m concerned, my life began on July 4, 1967, when I came through that back door and your father gave my black ass a break.

Eddie locates the heroic in the communal space of the barbershop rather than in a single individual. The shop takes on a quasireligious character; it both saves and is saved by those who belong to it. The elder barber’s role as revisionist oral historian in the first Barbershop film is solidified by his

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experiential claims: “I was here in ’68 when they rioted, and they burned down everything around here but this barbershop. I was here in ’74 when desegregation started and they were bussing in white kids and bussing out little black kids like yourself. . . . And then I was here in ’77 . . . and there go the picture to prove it.” These claims are in turn shored up by the flashbacks in the film’s sequel. What the public has said about Barbershop and Eddie’s “truth” has been as revealing as the film in shedding light on popular notions of black political leadership and about the civil rights/Black Power memorial as a public genre. When the film was released in 2002, “a critical maelstrom of almost Color Purplesque proportions swirled across the African American cultural landscape,” as Vorris Nunley writes.53 Eddie’s jokes provoked an unfavorable reaction from Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and others, who embarked on a campaign to boycott the film and to have the “Truth According to Eddie” scene removed from the film. Jackson stated that the film’s poking fun at the legacy of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King “crossed the line between what’s sacred and serious and what’s funny.” He added, “I could dismiss the comments about me. . . . But Dr. King is dead, and Rosa Parks is an invalid. There are some heroes who are sacred to people, and these comments poisoned an otherwise funny film. Why put cyanide in the Kool-Aid?”54 Like Rosa Parks’s lawsuit against the rap group Outkast, who recorded a song named “Rosa Parks” in 1998, Jackson’s critique of Barbershop is, according to Mark Anthony Neal, “emblematic of a general feeling within the traditional civil rights leadership that the post-soul generation [is] unappreciative of that leadership’s sacrifices.”55 James Meeks, a Chicago pastor and Illinois state senator, said in response to the film’s jokes: “There are certain things we should choose not to joke about. . . . With a major film like that, there is an obligation to teach that everything is not funny. There will be many people who don’t know the story of Rosa Parks.”56 For Jackson and Meeks, the heroic triumphalism of the official story must be preserved in a way that is always sober. The two leaders are similar to those who protect the movement’s history in the film: like curators at a museum of soul, they are concerned with conserving the legacy of soul-era heroes and preserving modern civil rights history as an always serious and revered body of knowledge. But more than a simple attempt to discredit or disrespect the individuals targeted by the jokes, Eddie’s comments can be read as an effort to suspend the social norms that govern black resistance and as an attempt to undermine the preservatory impulse of the guardians of the official story. Eddie’s comic authority and the barbershop’s sanctuary status work together

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to protect the film against allegations of slander by gatekeepers of the civil rights/Black Power both inside and outside of the film. The film constructs in the barbershop a culture of folk carnival humor. As formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, “carnival [in medieval and Renaissance cultures] celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”57 Tyler Hoffman explains, “The carnival sense of the world usually involves mockery of all serious, ‘closed’ attitudes about the world, and it . . . celebrates discrowning, that is, spectacles of inversion that expose the unstable and temporary nature of any hierarchy.”58 If African American folk humor “is heard wherever African-Americans congregate: in the public spheres of the streets, the bars, and the barber shop,”59 the barbershop is a haven for folk humor, a place where, according to Eddie, “ain’t nobody exempt—you can talk about whoever and whatever whenever you want to.” It creates a rule-free, carnivalesque atmosphere for debate and laughter where no discourse is off limits. Eddie prefaces his jokes by saying, “Now I probably wouldn’t say this in front of white folk, but in front of y’all I’m gonna speak my mind.” The film’s director has said, “Your barber is the one person you’re going to trust, who’s going to be uncensored with you.”60 In the barbershop, no person or subject lies outside of comic territory—not even Rosa Parks or other heroes “who are sacred to people.” The barber holds the position of unchallengeable comic authority. Further, Eddie’s jokes participate in the African American tradition of signifying. Similar to carnival humor, the practice of signifying, “verbally putting down or berating another person with witty remarks, also called ranking, sounding, or dissin,’” often exists in environments where transgressions of social and moral boundaries are acceptable.61 According to Mel Watkins, the African American joking tradition of signifying or “playing the dozens” bears “a historical connection to customs regularly practiced in ancient Greece, where within the context of sanctioned ‘play,’ bystanders or outsiders were mocked or insulted, or in England, where flyting or the impromptu exchange of invective was common.”62 The jokes in the barbershop provoke an ambivalent kind of laughter that is both permitted because of the (absence of) discursive rules of the space and censored by the jokes’ audience. The listeners’ hesitant response communicates both sanction and prohibition: the characters laugh while shaking their heads. Signifying is a critical African American comic trope that functions to revise traditional ways of being and knowing within black political culture.63 If signifying is the endless play of meaning both within single texts and

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between various texts, Eddie’s jokes signify by effectively talking back to the official story of the civil rights movement. Their revision insists on a doublevoiced discussion of history wherein the heteroglossia of a historical movement is not drowned out by the single voice of the narrator of the official story or that of its solitary protagonist, the charismatic hero. Eddie’s jokes deidealize civil rights leaders by accentuating their embodiedness through the signifying maneuver. No longer an idealized apparition of the official story, Parks in Eddie’s story is governed not by lofty ideals of equality and freedom but rather by the demands of her flesh: exhausted, she “sit[s] her ass down.” “That’s what you do when you’re tired; you sit your ass down. I sat down on a bus and I got thrown in jail, and didn’t hear from nobody,” Eddie says. The joke he later makes about Martin Luther King Jr. also focuses on the body: “Martin Luther King was a ’ho—come Martin Luther King’s birthday, I want everybody to take the day off and go get your freak on.” Eddie’s jokes illustrate a refusal to take the official story’s charismatic players seriously and an effort to make them real, embodied beings. When other characters challenge Eddie’s jokes, Eddie responds with a repeated question: “Is this the barbershop? Is this the barbershop? If we can’t talk straight here, where can we talk straight? We can’t talk straight nowhere else.” Eddie’s jokes rely on the poetics and politics of the carnivalesque and signifying: he urges the characters and the audience to laugh at themselves and at the hierarchies—working class versus middle class, real everyday people versus unreal images of Parks and King—through which they understand the world. By provoking laughter at Rosa Parks, Eddie invites his in-film and theater audiences to revise their understandings of leadership, and he points a laughing finger at the gatekeepers who guard a body of historical knowledge that they think ought only be read as serious. Humor in the barbershop opens a space for a critique of charisma that eludes attempts to preserve and authorize the official story of the movement. Jackson’s question, “Why put cyanide in the Kool-Aid?” is itself a joke: it plays on the division between what consumers expect, sweetness, and what Barbershop delivers, poison. His censure is more than a defense of King and Parks; it is a move to preserve a sanitized, unblemished version of history. Further, it undermines its own project of preserving the sacred place of charismatic leadership in the African American political imagination by alluding to what has been understood as one of history’s most devastating instantiations of demagoguery: the deaths of hundreds of Peoples Temple members, followers of James Jones, who consumed cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in Jonestown, Guyana, in January 1978.

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Ebon Pied Piper If Barbershop laces the civil rights/Black Power memorial with its comic venom, Paul Beatty’s 1996 novel, The White Boy Shuffle, does the same, ironically by producing a protagonist who comically gestures to Jones’s cult leadership. The novel, like the Barbershop films, uses humor to critique the paradigm of black charismatic political leadership shored up by the official story of the 1960s. If, as Watkins suggests, humor “is the shared ironic vision of a group” that has “skeptically viewed the gap between appearances and realities and [has] often found contradiction and absurdity,” these texts articulate a common, comic skepticism toward political ideals that black culture has, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, both idealized and rendered absurd.64 The White Boy Shuffle counters the national narrative with a parody of post–civil rights black politics, questioning blacks’ obsession with martyred charismatic leaders and reducing the 1990s discourse of the leadership void to the absurd. The novel’s protagonist, Gunnar Kaufman, spends his childhood in Santa Monica, California, where he and his classmates of various ethnic and racial backgrounds compose their “own definitions of color, trying [their] hardest not to stay inside the lines” (34). At twelve, Gunnar moves with his family to Hillside, a neighborhood in southwest Los Angeles. Here he is thrust into the “unadulterated realness” of an all-black junior high school, and in the lower-middle class, black–Latino–Asian neighborhood, Gunnar learns the codes of black racial identity and American racism (63). Here also Gunnar becomes friends with Nicholas Scoby and Psycho Loco and becomes a star athlete and poet. Finally, the protagonist marries Yoshiko Katso and attends Boston University, where he becomes a “Negro Demagogue” who “convinces black Americans to give up hope and kill themselves” (1). The White Boy Shuffle figures post–civil rights black charismatic leadership as a tragic joke. In the novel’s prologue, Gunnar tells readers, “On one hand this messiah gig is a bitch. On the other I’ve managed to fill the perennial void in African-American leadership.”65 Disinclined to assume the position of messiah, the protagonist renders the idea of singular leadership absurd. He says, “There is no longer a need for fed-up second-class citizens to place a want ad in the Sunday classifieds reading: Negro Demagogue. Must have ability to lead a divided, downtrodden, and alienated people to the Promised Land. Good communication skills required. Pay commensurate with ability. No experience necessary” (1). Signifying on the cultural production of leadership lack during the 1990s, Gunnar performs the absurd extreme of

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charisma, becoming the most dangerous personification of the desire for singular leadership. Standing as a “foster parent,” “Svengali,” “Ebon pied piper,” and “maniacal messiah” before “black goslings” who follow him with “avian obedience,” Gunnar unravels the conception of the black charismatic leader as a messiah who delivers his followers to “the Promised Land” (1). He refuses to promise freedom to his followers; instead, like, William Melvin Kelley’s protagonist in A Different Drummer, he advocates a type of “strategic withdrawal,” telling his readers in the epilogue, “It’s been a lovely five hundred years, but it’s time to go. We’re abandoning this sinking ship America, lightening its load by tossing our histories overboard, jettisoning the present, and drydocking our future” (225). The novel signifies on charisma through the satirical strategy of reductio ad absurdam, which shows the folly of an object by carrying it to its apparent logical conclusion. Not having volunteered for leadership or having been elected through formal means, Gunnar is thrust into the charismatic position against his will. Gunnar’s followers deify him because of his “proofs” as a poet and athlete. He notices, for example, that when he plays basketball, “a collective self-esteem was at stake. People who didn’t give a fuck about anything other than keeping their new shoes unscuffed all of a sudden had meaning to their lives.” He says, “I had the power to make them cry or send them home happy, clucking like chickens” (116). Noting the “dehumanizing consequences” of being an authority figure, Gunnar often turns the dehumanization back onto the followers—they become “chickens,” “goslings” who depend on a leader who refuses to be responsible for them (115). Gunnar is made to play the role of meaning maker for others; he inspires, bestows self-esteem, and affects others’ emotions without wanting or trying to. At Boston University, Gunnar’s rise to leadership begins when the students are drawn to him because of his reputation as a writer and athlete. As one student gushes, “Gunnar, the urban piquancy of your work is so resonant, so resplendent, so resounding . . . you make the destitution of your environs leap off the page. You’re my inspiration” (179). Responding to his poetry in the same way that the high school students in Gunnar’s hometown react to his basketball expertise, Gunnar’s classmates follow him home after the first day of class and convince him to submit his work for publication. The students’ expectations for charismatic leadership thrust Gunnar into his status as “the Deity,” a god or talisman that other characters use to fulfill their own desires (121). Gunnar’s role as godlike meaning maker is solidified at Boston, where would-be leaders contrast his charismatic power. When he begins surveying

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the university campus for political activity, following his best friend’s advice to join a club to ease boredom and homesickness, he encounters a laughable group of activists. At a meeting of Ambrosia, the “citywide black student union,” “Harvard, BU, MIT Negroes were wearing loud African garb over their Oxford shirts and red suspenders, drinking ginger beer, and using their advertising skills to plan how best to package the white man’s burden.” All style emptied of substance, Ambrosia is likened to “a small-town fire department shining an already shiny engine bragging about how brave they’d be if they ever fought a real fire” (183). The novel ridicules the group’s president, Dexter Waverly, by presenting him as a spokesman who, like Ambrosia, is a political simulacrum. Dexter, a shell with no interior, is actually a deteriorating exterior: he suffers from “an eczema condition so severe that when he furrowed his brow tiny flakes of skin fell to the lectern”; still, he “could hold an audience spellbound with a single gesture” (183). Planning a “fashion show–literacy program” that “will use the Afro-chic to uplift the Afroweak,” Dexter notes, “There’ll be booty and learning for days” (184–85). For Ambrosia, politics is wholly a matter of style; Dexter Waverly is the embodiment of a style-centered leadership that reduces political transformation to fashion. Gunnar concludes, “I decided it was pointless to talk to someone who believed a fashion show would save the black race” (187). Later, when Gunnar is asked to give a speech at a rally at the university, he attacks Ambrosia’s and Dexter Waverly’s empty political rhetoric. He is billed as the rally’s “drawing card, the liberal, libertine, and literary nigger stamp of approval” and “agree[s] to speak as long as no one put [his] grainy mug shot on fliers” (196). Shy of the spotlight, Gunnar ponders uncomfortably the position of speaker: Things looked different from the dais, behind a microphone, squinting into the spring sun. I was struck by how unaccustomed I was to looking down at people. Growing up in southwest Los Angeles, coming off a season of playing [basketball] in places known as the Pit and Hell Hole, I was always at the bottom, the spectacle, the fighting cock looking up. (196)

The platform is a self-conscious place where the speaker above is meant to condescend to the audience below. Gunnar “stood at the mountaintop, enjoying the view. . . . Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza burst with color and protest, an outdoor arboretum where the faces below bloomed like flowers in a meadow” (196). Here Gunnar stands in the space created and meticulously structured for charismatic performance. Other speakers lecturing from “the mountaintop” make attempts at “big shot word artistry”: “John Brown was

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trying to fire up demonstrators. Spittle sprayed from his mouth, his tussled hair hung over one eye, his fist pounded the rostrum”; then “Dexter strode to the podium, pandering to the crowd with stale slogans. ‘Power to the people!’ he said. The crowd snapped back, ‘Power to the people!’ and back and forth they went in a huge game of Simon says” (197). Finally, Dexter introduces Gunnar as “star athlete, accomplished poet, black man extraordinaire, voice of a nation” (198). Gunnar’s speech at the political rally initially fails to achieve charismatic splendor. The poet “wanted to address the crowd like a seasoned revolutionary, open with a smooth activist adage, ‘There’s an old Chinese saying . . . ,’ but . . . I didn’t know any Chinese sayings” (199). His “hesitancy grew embarrassing” (199). While charismatic leaders often gain authority in the moment of speech making, it is when Gunnar critiques the spectacle of speech that he is accorded charismatic authority. Gunnar points to the statue of Martin Luther King and speaks candidly to the audience about the memorial plaque, explaining, “Only reason I know what it says is that I was coming out of Taco Bell on my way to basketball practice when I dropped my burrito at the base of the monument” (199). He continues, “When I bent down to wipe the three zesty cheeses, refried beans, and secret hot sauce off my sneakers, I saw what the plaque said. It says, ‘If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. Martin Luther King, Jr.’” He concludes, “I ain’t ready to die for anything, so I guess I’m just not fit to live. In other words, I’m just ready to die” (200). The authenticity of black leaders has often been located in their capacity for martyrdom. Ellison says of black community leaders in Oklahoma: It seemed to me that they acknowledged no final responsibility to the Negro community for their acts and implicit in their roles were constant acts of betrayal. This made for a sad, chronic division between their values and the values of those they were supposed to represent. And the fairest thing to say about it is that the predicament of Negroes in the United States rendered these leaders automatically impotent, until they recognized their true source of power— which lies, as Martin Luther King perceived, in the Negro’s ability to suffer even death for the attainment of our beliefs.66

The White Boy Shuffle signifies on this idea, and charisma becomes a tragic comedy: instead of reproducing the post–civil rights nostalgia for a “charismatic, messianic leader, invariably male, and usually martyred,” who leads black people to a collective better life by first placing his life on the line, the text offers us Gunnar Kaufman, a reluctant antileader who rejects martyrdom and self-sacrifice for the sake of the race.67 Not willing to die for something,

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he proposes to die for nothing. Gunnar continually refuses to be held responsible for the project of racial uplift; he later says, “I have enough trouble being responsible for myself ” (201). He finishes his speech by saying, “That’s why today’s black leadership isn’t worth shit, these telegenic niggers not willing to die. . . . What we need is some new leaders. Leaders who won’t apostatize like cowards. Some niggers who are ready to die!” (200). When Gunnar finishes his speech, he is made a national leader. The audience responds by shouting, “You! You! You!” and pronouncing Gunnar “king of the blacks” (199–200). There is a dual irony in Gunnar’s critique of black leadership. First, he criticizes stylewithout-substance leaders—“telegenic niggers”—for failing to live up to King’s standard of martyrlike commitment. As Darryl Dickson-Carr points out, “The issue for Beatty is not so much the existence of Black Nationalist leaders [since the Black Power movement of the 1960s] as the lack of viable alternatives in a post–Civil Rights, postmodern landscape.”68 But if Gunnnar acknowleges the incongruity between King’s leadership standard and contemporary spokespersons, he also exposes the folly of a charismatic model premised on a self-martyring hero. He irreverently reduces King’s axiom to the absurd, acknowledging that everyone fails to achieve to King’s standard of martyrlike commitment; if taken to its literal extreme, King’s philosophy of martyrdom utters a death statement on a whole generation that has not succeeded in realizing his dream of finding something to die for. For Gunnar, the mass suicide deconstructs the civil rights scenario: “Lunch counters, bus seats, and executive washrooms be damned,” he says; “our mass suicide will be the ultimate sit-in” (2). Gunnar’s ultimate sit-in stages a protest against the civil rights model of protest, and the antileader imagines the mass suicide as an end to civil rights politics. He says, “Past movements in the black struggle seem to have had the staying power of an asthmatic marathoner with no sense of direction, so I suppose as movements go, this one is better than most. No more pleading for our promised forty acres and a mule” (225). Reductio ad absurdam works to make this story both tragically sad and hilariously funny: “full of laughs and high jinks,” the story is tragic in its absurdity (2). As one character waiting for the moment of death along with Gunnar’s followers “laughs aloud at the absurdity of it all,” the novel laughs at the absurdity of charismatic leadership (2). Poking fun at melancholia of black leadership that longs for messianic race salvation “in a world where expectations are illusion . . . in a society that applies principles without principle,” it restages the official story of the civil rights movement and writes charisma as a tragicomedy.

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The White Boy Shuffle is a black postmodern novel that, like others of its genre, uses parody to subvert a realistic depiction of African American life.69 Rather than advancing claims to objective facticity, the text presents narrative as faulty ground for the neutral presentation of reality. In this sense, the text can be situated alongside a body of what Henry Louis Gates calls “Signifyin(g) revisions,” in which “authors produce meaning in part by revising formal patterns of representation in their fictions. This production of meaning, in all its complexity, simultaneously involves a positioning or critique both of received literary conventions and of the subject matter represented in canonical texts in the tradition.”70 The White Boy Shuffle revises formal patterns of literary and political representation, signifying simultaneously on realism and charisma. Gunnar’s own self-creation and leadership formation violate the ordering principles of race, charisma, and realism.71 Given the new black political order in which The White Boy Shuffle emerged—with hyperrealist films, biopics, and other cultural artifacts redrawing the terms by which black men would be understood as citizens and political actors in the post–civil rights era—the generic conventions of parody in the novel are not insignificant. In fact, they restage the civil rights/Black Power memorial precisely through a formal repositioning of the black cultural text from mimetic representation toward playful revision. As unfettered by what Madhu Dubey refers to as the “durable link between realism and racial representation” as are other postmodern black novels by writers like Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany, The White Boy Shuffle topples the realist foundation of the narrative in such a way that throws the whole project of racial representation into crisis.72 Barbershop and The White Boy Shuffle use laughter to revise the charismatic story and undermine the charismatic hierarchy. The film writes ordinary people into civil rights history as the agents of change, making the official story’s sacred heroes real beings with ordinary, human bodies. Beatty’s novel turns the entire charismatic drama into a joke in its antiutopian coming-ofage story. Both expose not simply the charismatic leader but also the whole scenario of charismatic leadership to critical laughter. Generational Shifts and “That Civil Rights Shit” Charismatic leadership circulates in Barbershop and The White Boy Shuffle as hauntology in the Derridean sense, as present absence and absent presence. For Avery Gordon, “haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.”73 The ambivalence to charismatic leaders within

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post–civil rights black cultural production betrays both “a desire for dead things to come alive,” as Gordon refers to ghostly desire, and a yearning to exorcise the leaders from contemporary political aspirations.74 Post–civil rights black culture in this sense is both nostalgic for and dismissive of civil rights–era black leadership. Referring to the civil rights movement as a dead or “passed on” being that haunts contemporary articulations of African American identity, Todd Boyd writes, “Hip hop has rejected and now replaced the pious, sanctimonious nature of civil rights as the defining moment of blackness.”75 If post–civil rights generations of African Americans have metaphorically slayed the political father—rejected civil rights in favor of newer, more heterogenous enunciations of black political desire—it is also evident that the civil rights/ Black Power memorial still functions to maintain black charismatic leadership as that which haunts black political and cultural discourse. The generations of African Americans born after the soul era, the years between the 1963 March on Washington and the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke challenge to affirmative action in 1978, embrace an aesthetic rooted in contradictions. Contemporary black popular culture, Mark Anthony Neal explains, “considers issues like deindustrialization, desegregation, the corporate annexation of black popular expression . . . the globalization of finance and communication . . . while collapsing on modern concepts of blackness.” Neal, defining the postsoul aesthetic, argues that this zeitgeist “renders many ‘traditional’ tropes of blackness dated and even meaningless in its borrowing from black modern traditions” and that “the post-soul aesthetic is so consumed with its contemporary existential concerns that such [soul-era] traditions are not just called into question but obliterated.”76 Along the same lines, Reed explores the “loss of historicity” or “social amnesia” that characterizes post–civil rights American culture: The past . . . is reduced to positive (as similarity) or negative (as deviation) affirmation of whatever currently exists. To the social amnesiacs past and present appear as discontinuous, and thus practically irrelevant to each other, or the past flounces around as a Mardi-Gras image: this week’s banalities adorned by replicas of obsolete artifacts; in either case only a reified present seems to organize life.77

Yet the relationship between black popular culture and the past cannot be defined simply by a positive view of the golden age of black American life or by a negative attitude toward it; rather, the past functions as both a mythical ideal of glory days gone by and a Mardi Gras token to be consumed and later

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thrown away. Contemporary black cultural production, as Neal further argues, appropriates, borrows from, or samples black modern cultural and political projects to “derive meanings more in tune with contemporary experiences.”78 As much as contemporary black culture disavows civil rights leadership, as Eddie does in the barbershop or as Boyd does in his reading of hip-hop culture, it continues to cling to charisma as a constitutive structure of black political postmodernity. Calvin’s crisis in Barbershop reflects this ambivalent post–civil rights generational conflict: Calvin struggles to free himself from the grip of a haunting past—his father’s legacy and the shop’s history—without entirely doing away with its ghostly company. The film, after temporarily suspending the old order in its carnivalesque humor, redraws the lines of authority; as at the end of carnival, life settles back into its normative values and hierarchies. Calvin is introduced as the community’s new father, and the shop is renamed Calvin Jr.’s to reflect his ownership and his claiming his inheritance. In the typical Hollywood happy ending, the credits roll to Mavis Staples’s optimistic, heavenward soul hit, “I’ll Take You There,” and the restoration of black patriarchy through the maintenance of the black men’s haven is complete. Barbershop’s resolution reveals a twofold desire vis-à-vis the past: the characters want to be liberated from the official story of civil rights leadership and to return to an ordered world of black political modernity. Barbershop’s carnival humor and its surrounding media discourse treat the culture of civil rights, to return to Reed, as both “practically irrelevant” and “Mardi-Gras image”; the film dismisses leaders of the previous era as well as conjures them up as mythic ancestors who continue to play a role in present life. In this way, the relationship between the post–civil rights generations and civil rights leadership is structured in, as I have suggested, mourning and melancholia. Barbershop is about the generational transfer of black political masculinity after the 1960s. Entrusted with the legacy of the barbershop in Barbershop and with the responsibility to save a place where “black men mean something,” Calvin honors Calvin Sr.’s legacy by saving the shop even as he rejects the official narrative of civil rights and Black Power that has circulated in American culture since the 1960s. The film might thus be read as a postmodern African American text that both reproduces and resists the containments of black politics after civil rights. If the post–civil rights moment in African American politics inaugurated what Iton calls an “antidactylic” turn against heterogeneity within black social and political movements and toward a “vision of politics that excluded all but elected officials and those interest groups primarily concerned with, and licensed by, the state,” the barbershop’s

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carnivalesque critique of post–civil rights black politics calls into question the gendered, classed, and heteronormative assumptions of black leadership.79 At the same time, as Nunley suggests, the film undermines the historical function of African American hush harbors—to provide a space hidden from public view where African Americans can critique and resist the violent operations of white supremacy—by representing a “fetishized, commodified notion of Blackness” that “makes everyone comfortable.”80 Even more importantly, the film insists on recreating the very masculinist assumptions of post–civil rights black politics that it destabilizes by restoring Calvin Jr. as a proper black patriarch at the end of the film and reminding us that the portraits of national and local black male leaders populating the barbershop are blessing Calvin after all. Like Barbershop, The White Boy Shuffle is a story about black characters who, in the post–civil rights era, are working to piece together identities and ways of exercising political desire in the world that are not overdetermined by the previous generations’ political choices and styles. Charisma fails to account for Gunnar’s unique subjectivity, and he is forced to perform a style of leadership that does not allow him a full range of self-expression. The suicide movement in the novel can be read as an attempt to expunge the entire scenario of charisma from the popular imagination. Gunnar proposes that the whole charismatic cast of players—leader and led—be utterly destroyed, daring the government to bomb the group. Accentuating the group’s eagerness to kill the charismatic scene, Gunnar tells the reader, “Congress passed a motion to quell our insurrection by issuing an ultimatum: rejoin the rest of America or celebrate Kwanzaa in hell. The response was to paint white concentric circles on the roofs of the neighborhood, so that from the air Hillside looks like one big target” (224). Strangely enough, the destruction that Gunnar proposes only haunts the novel’s action, never fully actualizing. The “Emancipation Disintegration,” by the end of the novel, is yet to come, and charisma is a not quite dead specter that refuses to leave the protagonist alone. At the novel’s close, Gunnar reads his father’s suicide poem, which reads, “Like the good Reverend King/ I too ‘have a dream,’ /but when I wake up / I forget it and / remember I’m running late for work” (225). King’s legacy haunts Rölf Kaufman, who dismisses its idealism. Incongruous with the daily pressures of post–social movement and postindustrial black life, the “seething presence” of the “dream” lurks in Rölf ”s subconscious. In the same way, charisma haunts the novel as an undead ideal not yet exorcised, and the novel concludes with an open-ended resolution. The endings of Barbershop and The White Boy Shuffle represent the two impulses of the civil rights/Black

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Power memorial that I have discussed here. While Barbershop mourns the passing of 1960s charismatic leadership so as to instate Calvin’s generation as the proper heir of black politics, Beatty’s petulant protagonist clings melancholically to lost leadership while making fun of how that very melancholia operates in contemporary American culture. A young black college student told political scientist Melanye Price in a 2009 focus group study, “I don’t know anything about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. I don’t know. . . . I saw the movies. Basically that’s what its come down to . . . from what I have witnessed because I don’t play the race game. . . . I don’t pay attention to it.”81 Like Beatty’s Gunnar and Barbershop’s Calvin, post–civil rights generations of African Americans struggle to articulate a political vision responsive to the complexities of life after segregation while resenting, if also reproducing, the national narrative of black charismatic leadership. The difficulty of such efforts to redefine black politics more than four decades after civil rights and Black Power, given the weight of the civil rights/Black Power memorial in contemporary American culture, is only tempered by the fantastic and phantasmic workings of African American humor. Catching a glimpse of the ghostly subjects in these comic texts might finally allow us to read charisma as structured in a triple haunting. In the end, it is not only the leaders whose past we mourn and whose glorious coming we anticipate; it is also our own.

Chapter 6

Claim Ticket Lost Toni Morrison’s Paradise and African American Literature’s Holy Hollow

DAYS AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast in September 2005, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dispossessed as the scenes of New Orleans under water captured television sets and newspaper headlines, I was having a conversation about the “active abandonment” of black New Orleanians with a young pastor of a mostly African American church in Durham, North Carolina.1 She looked at me with a pastoral mix of exasperation, exhaustion, and righteous indignation, and asked, “Where are the ‘black leaders’ now?”—a question perhaps being uttered by many who sat watching the mostly brown and black lives and communities being crushed by a disaster that was at once natural and fantastic. The crisis of leadership that many black Americans have sensed throughout the post– civil rights era—in the post-Katrina landscape perhaps more than ever— stems from a general feeling that the federal, state, and local governments or leaders have abandoned their constituents. It is also connected to a longtime collective yearning for an African American leadership as an answer to state repression. The pastor’s longing for and disappointment with leadership in the wake of Katrina is simply nothing new. Charisma, I have argued, might be understood as a scenario that worked throughout the first half of the twentieth century to both inspire and dissimulate the multiple ways that black Americans resisted the containments, terrors, ideological assaults, legalized prohibitions, and scarcities of modern life in the United States. In the post–civil rights era, when charismatic heroism has served not only as a narrative of the black freedom struggle but also as a dominant storyline within the American state’s self-narrative of innocence and postracist promise, charisma works even more violently as what I have called a narrative regime. Now, the circulation of iconic images of charismatic men “recycle[s] the dream” of prophetic leadership “as if to avoid confrontation with the enduring nightmares of racism, joblessness, 167

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and social misery” while a spectacular narrative of black progress cited in memoriam of civil rights leaders diverts attention away from the necropolitical forms of misery of which Katrina was only one calamitous example.2 The effect of the representational complex of charismatic black leadership is, at least in part, to divert attention away from the necropolitical workings of the neoliberal state—what Achille Mbembe refers to as the institution of sovereignty as “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”—even while calling attention to them in ever more spectacular ways.3 Witness, for example, a 2007 Jena 6 protest in Los Angeles’s historic Leimert Park, where fiery speeches inciting rallygoers to “take back our communities” were followed by the shouting down of a woman’s speech that linked community policing at home to imperialist wars abroad. Here, the spectacle of black male leadership called attention to the state’s racist abuses while disallowing radical critiques of the state.4 The charismatic scenario that has enabled and frustrated public longings for black leadership between 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and 2005, when Hurricane Katrina dramatized the catalysis of racism as the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” has served to contain the freedom drive in black politics since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements.5 Throughout the post–civil rights era, black discontent has been channeled by the performances of public black politics into expressions that constrict, if not exterminate, the leftist, feminist, and internationalist impulses of black radicalism. The civil rights and voting rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, that is, led to two developments that provided the terms by which twenty-first-century black politics could be articulated. First, in the immediate post–civil rights moment, when “the control of black politics was up for grabs,” the three-way contest between black elected officials, protest leaders, and cultural figures ushered in the post–civil rights era as a series of manly contests for political sway. From Jesse Jackson’s appropriation of Amiri Baraka’s “Nation Time” slogan at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, to Isaac Hayes’s upstaging Jackson months later in his performance as Black Moses at Wattstax, there was, as Richard Iton points out, a public struggle “with re gard to the issue of what the proper source of political legitimacy might be: the pulpit, the protest march, and the polling booth or the nightclub, dance floor, and festival stage?”6 Second, with blacks’ entry into formal American politics, nonheteronormative difference posed a threat to a new, official political

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blackness, and, as Cathy Cohen argues, black politicians and other official black representatives—church leaders, for example—have been loath to organize around “cross-cutting issues that are not easily understood or responded to through simple moral categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘deserving’ and ‘unworthy.’”7 What this has meant is that issues that primarily affect groups that are marginalized within black communities—gays and lesbians, for example, or single mothers—are not taken up consistently by political elites. The political response to the spread of the AIDS epidemic among blacks, for example, “ranged from inadequate to neglectful.”8 Black politics in the post–civil rights era has been stratified in this way along lines of intraracial difference: class, gender, and sexuality. Late twentieth-century African American narrative registers these fault lines in contemporary black politics by calling attention to the violences— both white supremacist and intraracial—that the commodification of black leadership in the post–civil rights era renders invisible. In Toni Morrison’s 1997 Paradise, for example, a young civil rights activist and minister contemplates how the black Oklahoma community he serves memorializes the 1960s struggle while trading or “pawning” it in exchange for the comforts of patriarchy and property. He thinks, “Since the murder of Martin Luther King, new commandments had been sworn, laws introduced, but most of it was decorative: statues, street names, speeches. It was as though something valuable had been pawned and the claim ticket lost.”9 In the early 1970s context of the novel, the literal trade of civil rights symbology only circulates “statues, street names, speeches” as decoration for a leadership politic of intraracial patriarchal policing and conservative retreat in the face of terrorizing white supremacy. Reading the novel as a tale “about black nationalism and it discontents,” Candice Jenkins notes that Paradise was written “during a decade fraught with intraracial ambivalence and confusion about what it meant to be ‘black’ in the post–civil rights era.”10 If the 1997 novel excavates a fictional history of the immediate post–civil rights era to problematize the link between an idealized racial authenticity and intimacy, as Jenkins suggests, it also narrates the post–civil rights scene of the early 1970s as a series of foreclosures and violences enacted by black charismatic leadership, moves that were only hastened and hidden by the iconographic trade of black leadership images in U.S. commercial history in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In this sense, it is a post–civil rights gothic that, counterposing postures of questioning and leading, centers curiosity as narrative practice and as postmodern black politic.

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Paradise as Post–Civil Rights Gothic Toni Morrison’s emergence as a prolific author and public figure over the course of the post–civil rights era might be read as its own counternarrative of black charismatic leadership. Morrison’s interrogations of black politics fulfilled the latent promise of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), to defamiliarize contemporary black community making by persistently questioning the means by which her characters are endowed with familial, social, religious, and political authority. While The Bluest Eye renders Soaphead Church a dangerous manifestation of misplaced mystical authority, Sula (1973) carefully constructs women characters who frustrate racial normativities of sex and gender. In 1987’s Beloved, perhaps most famously, Morrison provides a commentary on the African American sermon as sociopolitical genre. Here, Baby Suggs preaches, or rather calls, in a clearing in the Ohio landscape—a site that signifies both the dangers and possibilities of freedom—inviting congregants to feel their wildest freedom dreams in their very bodies. “Uncalled, unrobed, unanointed,” Baby Suggs “took her great heart to the Clearing.”11 She calls, “Here . . . in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet and grass. Love it. Love it hard.”12 The Call in Beloved, delivered by a character who invents “her own brand of preaching” and rejects the very premise of priestly mediation (when someone offers to introduce her to an AME preacher who will “acquaint” her with the Lord, she responds, “I won’t need him for that. I can make my own acquaintance”), is less an exhortation than an invitation into an ecstatic relationship with the self, not the leader; and the process of making liberation is bound to the erotic work of self-love and community building.13 In Love (2003), a novel set during the civil rights years and their aftermath, intraracial class conflict explodes during the 1960s and haunts the 1990s setting of the novel as the “old alliances,” “mysterious battles,” and “pathetic victories” surrounding Bill Cosey’s beach resort threaten to destroy the women fighting each other for his legacy and his affection.14 Further, Morrison’s nonfiction writings have persistently challenged the dominant modes by which race and gender have been articulated in American public culture, suggesting, for example, that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was “cloaked in the garments of loyalty, guardianship, and . . . limitless love” during his confirmation hearings while “the accusing witness Anita Hill, was dressed in the oppositional costume of madness, anarchic sexuality, and explosive verbal violence.”15 Both characters in the national narrative, Morrison writes in an echo of her Playing in the Dark (which was published the same year as the essay on the public discourse surrounding the

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Thomas confirmation), “were black and therefore ‘known,’ serviceable, expendable in the interests of limning out one or the other of two mutually antagonistic fabulations.”16 Throughout the four decades after the civil rights movement, Morrison’s work has narrated how intraracial and interracial forms of domination provide the context for the elaboration of an alternative aesthetic and ethic of “the beloved,” that is, a “hopeful vision of the healing, and loving, power of the ancestral—and artistic—imagination.”17 Morrison’s Paradise fulfills the very promises of her oeuvre: to destabilize the hierarchies that have often structured black community making, to catalog the violences that have at times attended black solidarities, and to make reading itself a ghostly encounter in which “the order and quietude” of the reading experience is “violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead” and quaint visions of the past become untenable.18 We can read Morrison’s work, particularly in the trilogy that ends with Paradise, as an attempt, in Avery Gordon’s words, to “comprehend the living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with, the endings that are not over.”19 In the ghost-of-civil-rights-past plot of the post–civil rights gothic that is Paradise, a gruesome tale of charismatic authority gives way to an alternate universe of political affect, a universe where fugitive women rise from the dead to demand a reckoning and a reimaging of black collectivity. My readings of Du Bois’s Dark Princess, Schuyler’s Black Empire, Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, and the Barbershop films have suggested that humor is a device often used by African American culture producers to contest the romantic political vision that makes the charismatic leader a divinely given answer to the contradictions of black life after slavery, Jim Crow segregation, migration, and civil rights. I want, finally, to insist that it is also the willingness to read the charismatic scenario through gothic lenses that will allow us to more fully account for the various generic inventions of black literature’s engagement with African American politics. To represent charisma as a horror fiction is to link the romantic promise of political leadership to an awareness of its potential violences. A gothic reading of charisma insists that the unsavory aspects of the love affair between leader and adherents not be bracketed in any serious discussion of leadership and democracy. For many theorists of leadership, charisma is a romantic fiction that promises a happy marriage of desire and social structure, ideal and reality. Toni Morrison’s Paradise, like Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, foregrounds a gothic reading of charisma that restages the black freedom struggle as a series of violences. More than Moses, Paradise centers the very processes of writerly communication and readerly interpretation, presenting us with

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a metatextual postmodern gothic that rerevises Exodus as a violent trope for the articulation of the black liberation project. By reading Paradise as another revision of Exodus—another repetition with another difference—I am implementing a black feminist reading practice that, considering the two novels kindred texts in a contemporary archive of contestation, can reorient public and academic understandings of black politics before and after civil rights. If Moses in Hurston’s novel is a tyrannical monster who threatens to violently crush any threat to his charismatic authority on the way to Canaan, there is a similar gothic figure disturbing dreams of egalitarian social life in Toni Morrison’s Paradise, a story about the perils that charisma poses not to a people en route to paradise but to a nation that has established the utopian promised land. Hurston’s novel is about the violence of national formation and the imposition of a new, alien political order; Morrison’s is concerned with the violence necessary to police freedom in a community haunted by the stories of its founding and structured by a dangerous form of political authority. Paradise is about “not just the fact of being freed from slavery, but what one does with the ‘freed self.’”20 While Hurston’s revision of Exodus is a direct rewriting of the ancient text that transports the characters, themes, and locations of the biblical text to the present, Morrison’s more indirect revision draws on the biblical typology of Exodus without rehearsing the story of Israel’s flight from Egypt. The images of destined exodus in Morrison’s novel echo the themes of flight, trial, deliverance, and violent conquest in the Old Testament story of the Israelites’ transgenerational journey from Egypt into Canaan. The novel’s patriarchs, like Israel’s storytelling elders relating the journey out of Egypt and the subsequent wandering in the wilderness, tell their children of “the signs God gave to guide them—to watering places . . . away from prairie-dog towns fifty miles wide and Satan’s malefactions” (14). Resituating the ancient Exodus myth in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Southwest, Paradise tells the story of an all-black town in Oklahoma founded by divinely chosen patriarchs fleeing a hostile post-Reconstruction environment. The town’s mythical history becomes its foundational narrative, legitimizing its uneven and violent power structure and its ultimate murder of five women living in an abandoned mansion nearby. Paradise, like Moses, Man of the Mountain, explores the hidden dangers within the founding myth and interrogates the masculinist foundations of the charismatic leadership paradigm that the myth generates. In doing so, Paradise attempts to make space for a freedom unregulated by normativities of gender and race and questions, to quote

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Deborah McDowell’s introduction to Hurston’s Moses, “whether liberation is ever achieved through a single charismatic leader . . . explor[ing] and at times critiqu[ing] the idea of a religious leader who mediates between an oppressed people and God, the state, or any other Presence.”21 Paradise is a ghost story. It retrieves “histories ignored by dominant Western traditions” and draws attention to “what has been irretrievably lost— those personal memories, communal traditions, and unrealized possibilities that have disappeared without benefit of permanent documentation.”22 In her revision of the legendary story of a people making freedom, Morrison highlights the haunted moments of liberation, moments in which freedom is visited by that which it has violently repressed. Tammy Clewell writes, “The ghosts [Morrison] raises in Paradise enable her to recover a largely neglected communal history and to prevent the inheritors of this history from denying the existence of plural specters in the name of a repressive social unity.”23 As in Moses, gothic elements surface here as evidence of the absent presence of the past; gothic scenes in Paradise point to an uncanny relationship to a past that terrorizes the present.24 Like other black postmodern fiction, it explodes the civil rights/Black Power memorial, as I suggested in chapter 5, to interrogate the link between blackness, masculinity, and political authority. Paradise’s narrative landscape recalls the scenes of gothic novels. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of gothic narrative structures describes various gothic framing devices: These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties . . . possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past.25

Paradise incorporates nearly all of these elements in its story about the violence often deemed necessary to police freedom. Its first pages narrate a scene of haunting and hunting: nine men invade a living space known as the Convent, seeking to annihilate the women living there. The Convent, an abandoned mansion that was converted into a Catholic school for Native American girls and later abandoned again, is a ghoulish place that “floated, dark and malevolently disconnected from God’s earth” (18). Inside, “macramé baskets float next to Flemish candelabra” (4); “Christ and His mother glow in niches trimmed in grapevines” (4); statues of “tiny men and women in white dresses and capes of blue and gold stand on little shelves cut into niches in the

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wall” (9); and the shapes of marble nymphs “strangle grape leaves and tease the fruit” (4). Here, nine men arrive on a kind of witch hunt, and a mysterious “chill intensifies as the men spread deeper into the mansion” (4). The men journey to the Convent on a hunting mission, prepared to ensure that “nothing inside or out rots the one all-black town worth the pain” (5). Outside of a small town where, ironically, “nothing . . . thought she was prey” (9), the women in the Convent are hunted and shot down like “panicked does” (18). In a scene of monstrous terror, the men “shoot the white girl first,” refining their poison “like butter: the pure oil of hatred on top, its hardness stabilized below” (4). One of the hunters, the novel later narrates, often “blow[s] out the brains of quail to keep his own from exploding” (104); in this scene, he, “a leader in everything, smashes the cellar door with the butt of his rifle” and finds “the devil’s bedroom, bathroom, and his nasty playpen” (17). For Deacon Morgan, who leads the men in the hunting expedition that opens the novel, terrorizing pursuit is calming: “Shooting . . . had settled him and returned things to the way they ought to be” (107). As its gothic first pages intimate, this is a story about the grotesque, hunterlike violence needed to simulate order, to “[return] things to the way they ought to be,” and to maintain a paradise of people who are “the right color” (107). Ruby, a town built on the model of a “dreamtown” turned “ghosttown” (5), produces a nightmarish brutality in its leading men (5). The Convent outside of the town is a haunted/hunted space where dying and dead people dwell, threatening Rubyites’ belief that “death was blocked from entering” the town’s borders. Sarah Appleton Aguiar points out that “Gigi arrives at the Convent in a hearse; Mavis in the Cadillac in which her infant twins died. Pallas cannot speak at first, and Seneca engages in a ritual self-bloodletting.” For Aguiar, “the Convent and Ruby are described as symbolic tombs, places rife with death,” and the men’s raid on the Convent is justified by their knowing that the women of the Convent are not quite alive; the massacre stems from “their resolve to rid the community of the abomination of death.”26 In my reading, Ruby’s leadership is authorized not only by their obsession with immortality, but also by a narrative that, like the laws that Moses delivers, demands strict adherence. Any threat to the power structure inscribed by Ruby’s exodus story must be expunged. The exodus narrative in Paradise authors and authorizes the monstrous violence that opens the novel; the same story that gives the male leadership a language of peoplehood gives the men the words to justify the scene of annihilation at the Convent. In this way, the novel is concerned with the making of charismatic leadership as scenario, as archive and repertoire, as solidified narrative and portable script.

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Paradise explores the myth of Exodus and its simultaneously liberating and stifling history. Ruby is a small, all-black town built on ideals of racial purity and fixed meaning. The town’s twin fathers, Deacon and Steward Morgan, “repeated exactly” what their forefathers did when they built a town called Haven in 1890. When poverty pervades the Haven that the Old Fathers have constructed, Deacon and Steward lead a downtrodden-again people to a new promised land after World War II (113). They rule the town, named Ruby after their sister who dies when refused service in a white hospital ninety miles away, by the model of their father and grandfather. The Morgan twins boast “powerful memories” and a connection so strong that they barely speak to each other but rather communicate almost telepathically (13). The twins “were in eternal if silent conversation. Each knew the other’s thoughts as well as he knew his face and only once in a while needed the confirmation of a glance” (155). The narrator notes the memory of the two-headed being hyperbolically: “Between them they remember the details of everything that ever happened—things they witnessed and things they have not. . . . And they have never forgotten the message or the specifics of any story, especially the controlling one told to them by their grandfather” (13). For Linda Krumholz, Deacon and Steward “epitomize unified authority; they share one memory, one purpose, and one belief ” (21). The twins own Ruby’s history, both literally and metaphorically: as the town’s financiers and largest shareholders, they are its primary proprietors; further, their “total memory” writes the official story that dictates both the everyday and spectacular eruptions of violence in the novel (107). They are a two-headed Joshua that inherits the monstrous authority bequeathed by the “Moses generation,” the original leaders sent by God. In Paradise, the first exodus—the journey from Louisiana to Haven, spurred by the end of Reconstruction—is marked by purposeful wandering through hostile territory and mystical representations of divine chosenness. “Raggedy as sauerkraut,” Steward Morgan remembers, “they dreamed of clean clothes with buttons, shirts with both sleeves. They walked in a straight line” (96). Along the way, the travelers experience what their history calls the Disallowing. Arriving at a town called Fairly, a name that plays on the lightskinned complexion of its inhabitants, the nine large families and others who come along for the journey are turned away because of their dark skin. This Disallowing is similar to the one experienced by the Israelites of the Old Testament, who are turned away when attempting to pass through the Edomites’ territory. In the ancient text, Moses sends a messenger to the king of Edom: “Thus says your brother Israel: You know all the adversity that has befallen

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us. . . . Now let us pass through your land,” and the king responds, “You shall not pass through, or we will come out with the sword against you. . . . And Edom came out against them with a large force, heavily armed. Thus Edom refused to give Israel passage through their territory; so Israel turned away from them” (Numbers 20–21). In Morrison’s revision of Exodus, the 8-rock families, so named by town historian Patricia Best after a “deep deep level in the coal mines” (193), turn away from those who turned them away, and their hatred, hidden always by their “non-committal eyes,” gels into an “icy suspicion of outsiders” that is passed down through the generations (160). The moment of turning away, for Ruby’s progenitors, solidifies their connection to each other and to God. Social cohesion is formed among them by a shared experience of oppression. However, the community lacks direction until a Mosaic figure arises to lead. Steward Morgan thinks, “After Fairly they didn’t know which way to go” (96). But when Steward’s grandfather, Zechariah, asks for divine guidance in his humming prayer to God, God responds: “He heard footsteps—loud like a giant’s tread” (97). Zechariah and his son, Rector, “saw him at the same time. A small man . . . too small for the sound of his steps. He was walking away from them” (97). “He is with us,” Zechariah tells his son. “He is leading the way” (97). The narrator notes, “From then on, the journey was purposeful, free of the slightest complaints. Every now and then the walking man reappeared, along a riverbed, at the crest of a hill, leaning against a rock formation” (97). The novel also highlights the travelers’ divinely inspired resilience: they “became stiffer, prouder with each misfortune” as they followed Zechariah to their promised land (14). One critic notes that guided by “Zechariah’s prophetic vision, this group reacts against the danger of being obliterated by the rest of society by creating a solidly knit community” searching for “a place where they feel safe and where they can do away with the imposed deprecating view of themselves.”27 The patriarch leads a people in danger of being scattered to a promised land; they, like the Israelites, are formed as a nation in their divinely led trek toward sanctuary. Deacon and Steward claim the charismatic authority passed down from Zechariah, and they possess the same author-protagonist privileges that Hurston’s Moses boasts. The two town patriarchs are given the power to write and to play the main character in Ruby’s story. “As God’s steward and deacon, his mediators on earth,” Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos writes, “They are invested with divine power” to determine who is included in Ruby’s story.28 They write a heroic story of the triumph of manly authority over guilt and shame. Charismatic authority surfaces as a monster driven to madness by a mark of shame inscribed on the people by the Disallowing. The shame of the

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Disallowing is a blemish in the town’s founding myth that must at all costs be converted from shameful event to glorious narrative in the public record. Ruby’s exodus story, written as official story, legitimates the town’s monstrous structure of power.29 Ruby’s official story of a mission threatened but not thwarted by evil opposition defines the concepts of divinity, good, evil, and purity by which the people of Ruby live. It is a narrative solidified in special public occasions. In Ruby, “The town’s official story, elaborated from pulpits, in Sunday school classes and ceremonial speeches, had a sturdy public life. Any footnotes, crevices or questions to be put took keen imagination and the persistence of a mind uncomfortable with oral histories” (188). Deacon and Steward’s “total memory” polices the narrative and its circulation, silencing opposing voices when necessary. Ruby’s Christmas play avows this official story by extending the messianic nativity narrative to encompass Ruby’s history. The play becomes a communal meditation on the history of exodus through hostile territory, an “obvious attempt to secure a spiritual and religious foundation for the community.”30 In the prologue to the play, Ruby’s oldest citizen, Nathan DuPres, sets up the drama as a celebration of the arrival in the promised land: “There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of,” he begins; and he concludes, “May God bless the pure and holy” (204–5). In the play, seven couples with babies in swaddling clothes come before masked characters whose costumes show yellow and white faces with “gleaming eyes and snarling lips, red as a fresh wound” (211). One of the seven Josephs steps away from the Marys and Baby Jesuses and asks, “Is there room?” “The masks turn toward each other” and “roar, shaking their heads like angry lions. ‘Get on way from here! Get! There’s no room for you!’” (211). The play dramatizes at once the turning away of God’s chosen messiah at the inn and the historical act of shame known as the Disallowing. The holy families chant “God will crumble you” as the audience “hums agreement” and the yellow-masked players fall to the ground (211). In this moment of communal catharsis, the drama affirms the town’s belief in their own chosenness and relives the memory of shame for which their official story of righteousness compensates. Ruby’s residents appropriate biblical mythology in a way that binds them as a community and affirms the violent destruction of external threats to their messianic promise. The narrative, a “tightly controlled version of the town’s history,” not a voice or rod of power, inspires terror and provides the script for a kind of solidarity that necessitates violent policing.31 The play prompts the town historian, Patricia Cato, to discover that in Ruby, “everything requires protection” (12), including its own historical

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narrative, and neither Deacon nor Steward “put up with what he couldn’t control” (278). This obsession with order and control makes necessary the policing of gender distinctions, the fierce monitoring of youths’ behavior, and finally the violent raid that is at the center of the novel’s action. The Convent outside of Ruby offers women a space for dreaming and self-creation that exists as a stark contrast and threat to Ruby’s ordered society. There “plants grew in a circle, not a line, in high mounds of soil” (41). Unlike the founders of Haven who follow an angel to their God-blessed Canaan, the women who drift into the Convent stumble on it mostly by accident: one resident unknowingly on her way to the Convent “accepted the risk of stowing away in trucks. She preferred traveling resolutely nowhere, closed off from society, hidden among quiet cargo” (138).32 While the Old Fathers travel by divine signs, and the pilgrims to Ruby, in the second exodus, follow Deacon and Steward, the women making their way to the Convent happen on it on their way somewhere—or nowhere—else. Only Sweetie, a Ruby resident, decisively journeys to the Convent in an attempt to escape Ruby’s stifling social order: “The small thing she wanted was not to have that dawn coffee, the already drawn bath, the folded nightgown and then the watchful sleep in that order, forever, every day and in particular this here particular day. The only way to change the order, she thought, was not to do something differently but to do a different thing” (125). Women like Sweetie are trapped in Ruby’s history, buried like Hurston’s Miriam in a story that threatens to choke the life out of them. The Convent’s existence as a sanctuary for women and a queer space that allows for the doing of different things is a threat to Ruby, whose leadership always desires faithful and accurate reproduction and obliterates difference. “The women of the Convent are not a threat because of what color they are but because they reflect the illegitimacy of the authority of the men of Ruby,” according to Peter Kearly.33 The order inscribed in Ruby’s official story feeds the two-headed charismatic monster. Charismatic leadership, Cedric Robinson explains, comes into being to generate and replicate order. He explains that the fabrication of order, which underlies the constructions of political authority and leadership in the West, stems from human beings’ perception of chaos: Social order must consist of integrations, institutions and patterns in order to satisfy the images of the mind and the skills of the brain and eye. And that coherence . . . is obtained by one object, political authority, acting on the others and corresponding as such to another dictate of the perceptual experience.34

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And the official story in the Morrisonian sense serves an essentially conservative, reproductive function; created “in and from chaos,” it “restore[s] or imitate[s] order.”35 Richard Misner wonders about the town’s official stories as reproductive myths: “Over and over and with the least provocation, they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks, the grands and great-grands; their fathers and mothers. . . . But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on. As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates” (161). As Aguiar points out, “there are no ‘new’ stories in Ruby; only the founding narratives exist, told endlessly by the men.”36 The leadership’s desire for duplication or exact repetition of the Old Fathers’ story allows for the massacre at the Convent: just as God “crumbles” the yellow-masked players who fall to the ground in the Christmas play, the Convent women are crumbled by the town’s obsession with 8-rock purity and order: “Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game. God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby” (18). The final lines of the opening chapter imagine the women as both Eve figures, seen as responsible for the men’s fall from grace, and as sacrificial Christ figures “anointed with oil.” For Krumholz, the “leaping women,” “caught in mid-leap and arrested there for 250 pages . . . signify a new point of departure, a leap out of the known into new possibilities of representation and imagination.” In this “space of insight, revision, and grace,” the women open up the possibility of escape from the trapping, stifling historical narratives that Ruby continually tells.37 “See?”: African American Literature’s Holy Hollow While Morrison’s post–civil rights gothic depicts the destructive potentials of charisma as narrative and performative regime, it also transforms the voids left by the passing of Ruby’s ancestors and the end of civil rights protest—the “claim ticket[s] lost”—into sacred sources of rebirth and renewal. Paradise “does not tell ghost stories . . . as a means of critiquing illusory notions of self-wholeness and social unity” in a way that is characteristic of postmodern deconstruction. Rather, Clewell points out, it “engages multiple figures of haunting as a work of rebuilding interior and exterior dwelling places worthy of human habitation.”38 It deconstructs to reconstruct; the condition of lack—caused by the problems of generational transfer, the mourning for the town’s fathers, and the impossibility of racial purity—is transformed into a “holy hollow” (73), a hauntological space now worthy of human living.

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Morrison’s holy hollow, I would argue, can be read as a metaphor for African American literature’s scene of contestation, a scene in which the collective journey from a conservative shutting down of black politics to a radical reimagining of black politics requires a leap into unknown social and political territory. In Paradise, the character of Richard Misner becomes a primary reconstructive voice. Richard voices the text’s suspicion of charisma as a leadership model and rearranges the structure of humans’ relation to the divine. For Ruby, the official story validates the analogy of the charismatic relationship; that is, people are to leader as leader is to God. When Reverend Pulliam tells the town before praying at a wedding ceremony that love is “a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God” and that “you have to earn God,” Richard revises the pattern of authority inscribed by the first preacher’s sermon-prayer (141). For Pulliam, only exceptional individuals, capable of extraordinary love, merit connection to the divine. “Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. . . . God bless the pure and holy,” he insists (142). Richard responds to Pulliam’s message with a wordless sermon when he removes the crucifix from the church’s back wall, holds it before the congregation, and meditates on the symbolism of the cross, the “mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace”: Without this sign, the believer’s life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. . . . But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well, life was a whole other matter. See? The execution of this one solitary black man propped up on these two intersecting lines to which he was attached in a parody of human embrace. . . . See? (146)

Richard’s foregrounding of the image of the cross revises the generative myth of charisma in two critical ways. First, the minister rejects the top-down power structure of humans’ relation to the divine. The cross, for Richard, “move[s] the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one” (146). It “pull[s] humans from backstage to spotlight . . . to the principal role in the story of their lives,” such that life itself is revised and becomes “a whole other matter” (146). For Richard, collectivity is about the continuous fashioning of new stories rather than the solidification, in story after story and performance after performance, of old myths. Second, Richard refuses to translate the human–divine authority structure written into Pulliam’s equation of love as a privilege or “diploma” conferred upon the worthy onto the leader–people relationship between minister

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and congregation (142). Richard removes desire from the authorial and potentially authoritarian God–leader–human schema and democratizes it. He believes that without the cross, “Christianity was just like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging everyday evil” (146). In this revisionary moment, he makes a connection to the divine entirely visible and available for the congregation. Whereas during Ruby’s exodus only Zechariah gains access to the divine direction and served as mediator, here power is pluralized, distributed equally among the congregation. The repetition of the question “See?” in this passage rewrites the town fathers’ mode of divine direction. Instead of hearers of an official story repeated exactly and passed along through generations, Richard’s wordless sermon invites the congregation to be an active, collective narrator rather than passive character in the town’s story. No longer an invisible voice, Misner’s God is palpable. “In Paradise,” Krumholz suggests, “divinity is figured not as a singular truth but as a dynamic process of insight, which combines an apprehension of the invisible or inexpressible forces with a process of reading” that leads the reader to a space where the revision of political subjectivity becomes possible.39 Rather than “playing God” by “thundering messages in the reader’s ear,” Morrison “tries to teach the reader to see differently, to see what is not visible but is readable only through signs and the openness to perceive them.”40 She thus makes visible the structure of charismatic authority and offers an alternative image, undoing its monstrous capabilities. The authoritative word is not issued from a towering figure above the congregation or from an author who has a power unknowable and unattainable to the reader; rather, the power to change power itself comes from within and among. Here Misner trades the declarative for the interrogative, centering a politics and aesthetics of curiosity in his restaging of Pulliam’s sermon. He deconstructs the divine–human relay of authority suggested by Pulliam’s sermon. In doing so, he deconstructs himself. Like Moses, who ends Hurston’s novel with all questions and riddles but no answers, Misner here is emptied of declaratives and left only with interrogatives: “See? . . . See? . . . Would they see?” Deacon and Steward, the town’s twinned leadership, understand the revisionary possibilities in Richard’s attempt to democratize divine power and are moved to shut down Richard’s thought-sermon: “Whatever Richard Misner was thinking,” Steward thinks, “he was wrong. A cross was no better than the bearer” (154). Steward removes power from the collective to the individual plane, from collective seer to individual bearer. He is moved to “grab the pew in front of him and put a stop to Misner’s behavior” (154).

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Though Deacon and Steward are moved to police any challenges to their leadership, Ruby is not the only space in the novel that forecloses its own visions of democracy and equality. Paradise’s intricate exploration of its central question about the evolution and devolution of utopias, “How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?” (292), extends even to the Convent, which fails to sustain itself as a queer, open-ended space that, like Morrison’s description of “home” in the 1998 essay of the same name, is “both snug and wide open” (5).41 The Convent’s snug wide-openness disintegrates into Rubylike obsession with order when the loving, consoling mother figure, Consolata, emerges from a conversion experience and takes over the women’s healing process. Depressed and shut up in the Convent’s wine cellar, Connie notices, “the timbre of each [of the women’s] voices told the same tale: disorder, deception, and . . . drift. The three d’s that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift” (222). The novel tells of Consolata’s growing frustration with the Convent, a space that readers are led to believe is a home that nourishes its inhabitants back to life with well-cooked meals and special, unique items from its own garden: “Consolata looked at them . . . and saw broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying . . . more and more she wanted to snap their necks. Anything to stop the badly cooked indigestible food, the greedy hammering music, the fights, the raucous empty laughter, the claims. But especially the drift” (222). “On her worst days,” the narrator says, “she wanted to kill them all” (223). Connie’s intolerance of the women’s storytelling, cooking, laughter, music, and drift, or lackadaisical approach to healing, is transformed into charismatic authority when, after a mystical encounter with God in the Convent’s garden, she is given control of the women’s bodies: “I call myself Consolata Sosa,” she says, “If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for” (262). Transformed by her mission, Connie leads the women in “loud dreaming” and other healing rituals.42 The women now “could not leave the one place they were free to leave,” and “with Consolata in charge . . . they altered” (223). Even if Consolata’s transformation cannot be read as a simple movement “from a lush to a charismatic guru,” her leadership takes on a form that imprisons as well as frees—indeed, imprisons in order to free.43 The novel writes against a simple binary equation of male space with fixity, order, and sameness and female space with fluidity, nurturing, and openness. Both Ruby and the Convent exhibit the tendency to collapse on their own ideas of liberation. Freedom here, as Moses points out in Hurston’s novel, “is a funny

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thing”; it crosses, undercuts, and bumps up against itself.44 Under Connie’s charismatic teaching and counseling, the women recreate themselves and are reborn when they “enter [the rain] and let it pour like balm on their shaved heads and upturned faces” (283). The Convent’s new leadership is like Haven’s old leadership: its attempts to protect its inhabitants against moments of disallowing—rejection, refusal—are haunted by the forms of power it escapes, even as its beneficiaries achieve their desired ends of freedom and self-creation. Deacon, Steward, and their followers are not the only monsters in Paradise. Charismatic authority, sneaking into the Convent with its power to free and to discipline before the men from Ruby arrive, plays the gothic monster in Morrison’s story. The characters in Paradise are not stifled simply by monstrous individuals; rather, they are trapped within a political form that is always already dangerous. In the end, Morrison’s gothic heroines, fallen in the Convent’s garden and resurrected in dreamscapes, wrest political knowledge and movement from the grip of charismatic heroism. They, like Hurston’s Miriam, return to the text to demand their rightful place in the novel’s story of freedom. Billie Delia, an ex-resident of Ruby, thinks of Ruby as a “backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of mares and so got rid of them” (308). Billie Delia’s wishing “with all her heart that the women were out there” propels the reader into the novel’s final scenes, where the Convent women are shown as stronger, freer versions of themselves out there, beyond the walls of the Convent. Gigi appears as an apparition beside a lake to her father, who takes her for a kind of warrior in fatigues and army boots (“You in the army?” he asks [310]). There, Gigi, performing the refrain from an old spiritual, “I ain’t gonna study war no more,”45 removes her military clothes and swims in the “part of the lake” where “it was okay to swim nude” (310). Next, Pallas is seen with a sword, retrieving a pair of shoes that she has left under her ex-lover’s bed and accomplishing the poetry of another spiritual: “I’ve got shoes, you’ve got shoes /All of God’s children got shoes /When I get to Heaven goin’ to put on my shoes /Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heaven” (312).46 Mavis is spied by her daughter eating at a restaurant that she likes because “they let you choose” how to eat (313); and Seneca is shown being cared for by a friend who nurses her bloodied hands (“It’s fine now. Look” [317]). Finally “a woman black as firewood is singing” to Consolata in an imperfect paradise where “sea trash gleams” and “bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal” on a beach (318). The last image of the novel is that of a ship bearing

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passengers “lost and saved, atremble,” who “will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise” (318). The women of the Convent are Paradise’s gothic heroines who encounter an earthly, embodied paradise “down here” ungoverned by heroic narratives of leader-wrought salvation. “Demonstrat[ing] that it is possible to return, to float across the slim margin between death and life and challenge the very linguistic arrangement that holds this distance between worlds as finite and impenetrable,” they return to the text to gesture toward new ways of being and knowing.47 They beckon readers toward a space where liberation from the containments of black politics and white supremacy, as in Moses, Man of the Mountain, engenders an endless process of creation and revision in which “you just got to keep on gathering it fresh every day.”48 A gothic reading practice “insists that what is customarily hallowed as real by society and its language is but a small portion of a greater reality of monstrous proportion and immeasurable power.”49 Morrison’s revisions of Exodus uncover the unspeakable violences of the often romanticized narrative of African American political leadership, cautioning readers to be wary of the myth’s crushing potential. The monstrous figure not simply the leader but rather the national narrative—the official story—itself, an all too familiar tale of individual and collective identity that hides within it a violence toward others that potentially amounts to “unutterable horror.”50 Paradise enters the gothic landscape of charisma, a cultural regime that, like a towering castle, masks within its beauty the “contrast in power for its inhabitants”; and Morrison’s characters uncover the secret histories that haunt them.51 Like the minister whose silent sermon challenges the residents of Ruby to write stories of their own instead of continuing to act out an official story that legitimizes unequal relations of power, Paradise warns against a politics rooted in officialized narratives of exodus that inscribe a rigid, hierarchical paradigm of leadership. The raid on the Convent by the nine men from Ruby is told in the town’s “official story” as a tale that reinforces the men’s innocence. Only Patricia’s version captures the unstated reasons for it: “nine 8-rocks murdered five harmless women (a) because the women were impure (not 8-rock); (b) because the women were unholy . . . and (c) because they could” (297). The power in the story—the “because they could”—is a product, to paraphrase historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, of the power in the story of Exodus.52 The power of Exodus to author and authorize public understandings of African American leadership leaves the women of Paradise, gothic heroines in their own right, with the imperative to take their liberation

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into their own hands and escape a social world overdetermined by a historical narrative set in iron and cast in the town’s annual Christmas play.53 Paradise interrogates the mythology of charisma and its dangerous implications for individual autonomy and collective visions of community and democracy. The novel, Megan Sweeney writes, “facilitates the dual work of knowing and imagining necessary for performing a critical ontology of U.S. culture—for attempting to grasp the present in what it is while at the same time experimenting with the radical possibilities for ‘being, doing, or thinking’ otherwise.”54 In Paradise, after the massacre at the Convent, Richard Misner and Anna Flood return to the abandoned mansion to search for the hunted women’s mysteriously missing bodies. They find in the Convent’s garden an Edenic site representing both the community’s fall and the location of its recreation (for “God had given Ruby a second chance”), an unexplainable opening to an unknown world (298). “You see a door; I see a window,” says Richard (305). While “there are no windows” in the Convent’s kitchen, its garden offers the possibility for flight (5). The two characters, driving away from the Convent, ask themselves, “What would happen if you entered? What would be on the other side? What on earth would it be? What on earth?” (305). Ruby’s inhabitants find freedom and salvation in the wonder and puzzlement of the imagination. Sweeney argues that Paradise “offers a ‘minimiracle’ of imagination that forces the present to waver, that concretizes the possibility of an earthly home in which a passionate commitment to social justice . . . constitutes the grounds for achieving safety and redemption.”55 The novel drops its readers off in “holy hollow between sighting and following through” (73). It is itself the door-window in the garden that allows for escape from the confines of a historical narrative that stifles challenges to rigid order and into the creative space of “poetic knowledge” and imagination.56 Paradise’s “holy hollow” might finally be understood as the metaphor for what I have called the politics of curiosity in post–civil rights African American fiction. If post–civil rights black fiction asks its readers to abandon their expectations for charismatic leadership, it also insists on the asking as a politics in and of itself. As such, it begs a new subject relation to both contemporary African American cultural production and contemporary black politics, a relation in which neither charismatic authority or charismatic authorship is the genesis of romance. It is in the space of what might be called an alternative punctuation of contemporary African American narrative’s scene of black politics—where the privileging of the question mark over the exclamation point leaves the reader space to imagine a new relation to

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leadership, to politics, to history itself—that social transformation is restaged as an “open field” rather than “a closed system.”57 In this—the holy hollow, the question mark, the clearing, the invitation to the leap of faith—the possibilities of remaking social reality are in the hands of a raucous bunch of fugitives making their way toward an elsewhere yet to be determined. Such is the scene of contestation that African American literature has crafted throughout the contemporary era. See?

Epilogue

WHEN OPRAH WINFREY, charismatic in her own right, officially joined the campaign for Barack Obama’s presidential bid in December 2007, she made back-to-back appearances in Des Moines, Iowa, and Columbia, South Carolina, lending her formidable cultural authority to electoral politics—as she called it, “stepping out of her pew”—for the first time in her decades-long career. As Winfrey appeared before a record-number South Carolina audience that weekend, she set in motion a series of reversals—from the Midwest to her childhood home down South, from polished, unaccented, journalistic American diction to the sanctified elocution of a well-churched black Southerner speaking to a Sunday afternoon crowd, from the muted monochromatics of a lavender pantsuit in which she appeared before the Iowa caucuses to the bold and bright yellow blazer that lit up a stage erected at the Gamecocks’ end zone, and from ordinary stump speech to charismatic display. In the eighteen-minute speech at the University of South Carolina’s Williams-Brice Stadium, where Winfrey officially announced her support for the man who would become the first black president of the United States, she introduced Obama to the mostly African American crowd of over 29,000 people as the fulfillment of the freedom dreams that had sustained black culture through segregation. “Dr. King dreamed the dream,” she announced. “But we don’t just have to dream the dream anymore. We get to vote that dream into reality by supporting a man who knows not just who we are but knows who we can be.”1 African American political and expressive cultures, throughout the contemporary era, have figured charismatic leadership as a way out of a brutal regime of racialized terror and exclusion. In moments of crisis, the work of the charismatic leader is to provide a practical schema for sweeping change as well as to serve as a fantastic locus of projections of hope, wholeness, national identity, and renewal. The charismatic leader fills a void, dares a 187

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dream, brings national identity into florid articulation, and redeems the past while ushering in the new. But when longing for charismatic leadership takes the place of social movement history and women activists are conjured as the narrative and historical excess of social change, our imagining of social and political change is reduced to a catalog of charismatic men and surrogate women, a record of spectacular shows of power rather than the ordinary labor of making change, and a series of gross understatements of both the terror required to maintain the hegemony of racial capital and the formidable ways that people have resisted it. When the performance of charismatic leadership stands in for building movements and relationships, for grassroots political education, and for a practiced commitment to disassembling social hierarchies, the promise of social justice and political empowerment is endangered by a formation of authority that limits our capacities to remake the world. My aim in this book has thus been to break open the contemporary African American literary tradition, to show how it has been shaped not only by the understandable seductions of charismatic leadership but also by the many suspicions and reconstitutions of it in narrative fiction and film over the past century. The Obama presidency raises new questions for those of us who research and teach the efforts of the oppressed to govern themselves and the expressive forms that bear witness to those efforts. How have black American publics’ political desires and intellectual imperatives been reshaped since the inauguration of the first black American president in 2009? How do the changes in African American public life and political involvement show up in black fiction, film, music, dance, and fashion? How does the cultural text mark the Obama era both as a moment of profound disorientation, loss, disaffection, and material lack, and as an occasion for hope, change, and progressive reinvigoration? In what ways does the black literary text continue to be a stage for social critique as well as become more intimately complicit with the ruses of American biopower? Finally, if it is true that scholars in American studies “are now in a moment when our very capacity to question the fact and power of nationalism is jeopardized precisely because of the identity and charisma of the president,”2 how does our own capture within the charismatic symbolics of the American presidency inflect our readings of an African American culture that is now precariously placed “in the unfortunate position of being within the belly of this beast”?3 The literary text begs these critical questions in spectacular moments of public literary instruction even as it has helped to ground and direct them in my inquiries throughout this book. Consider that Winfrey’s South Carolina

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endorsement reached its climax with the literary recitation by a woman who has garnered such clout as a reader and literary consumer that she remade the market for American literature—particularly African American literature—in the years since the publication of Toni Morrison’s Paradise.4 “Everybody knows I love books,” Winfrey said as she asked the crowd to recall Ernest Gaines’s 1971 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Referring both to the novel and the 1973 PBS adaptation starring Cicely Tyson, Winfrey conjured the text’s scene of messianic longing and offered the South Carolina crowd Obama as messianic fulfillment: I remember Miss Pittman, her body all worn and withered and bent over. As she would approach the children she would say to each one, “Are you the one? Are you the one?” Remember how she stood in that doorway and she held that baby in her arms and she said, “Are you the one, Jimmy? Are you the one?” Well I watched that movie many years ago but I do believe today I have the answer to Miss Pittman’s question. It’s a question that the entire nation is asking. Is he the one? Is he the one? South Carolina, I do believe that he’s the one. To bring you the audacity of hope! Barack Obama!

Winfrey’s endorsement presented Obama as the answer to the primordial cry of black history, a cry that the black literary text is figured as testifying to over and again. The speech collapsed three different historical developments—slavery, desegregation, and the global economic crisis and Iraq war, which were at the center of the 2008 election campaign cycle—into a single moment of political expression connected by the singular form, and promise, of the charismatic leader. “These are dangerous times,” Winfrey said. “We’re all watching Dancing with the Stars trying to forget about it. But I know you feel it. Don’t you feel it?. . . But we need a leader who shows us how to hope again and have faith again in America as a force for peace.” The scene of literary instruction that constructed Oprah Winfrey in mainstream news outlets as John the Baptist to Barack Obama’s Jesus authorized the black literary text, as if charismatic leader, to give voice to the hopes and dreams of a collective black readership.5 Conjuring the image of a Miss Pittman “worn and withered,” searching for the one who would deliver black folks from oppression and America from its impending implosion, Winfrey painted the coming Obama presidency with the bold, dramatic strokes of a charismatic scenario witnessed, predicted, packaged, and authorized by the black novel. In this way, it drew a tidy line between the novel and the fiction that charismatic leadership is an easy answer to social ills. If, as I have argued, the charismatic scenario is a portable and loosely scripted routine

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that can be broken down and reconstructed, improvised with each new conjuring of itself, the literary recitation in this scene called upon the novel to authorize the post–civil rights reproduction of the charismatic scenario, the mode of political staging that I have highlighted throughout this book. The novel was called forth not to contest charisma but to summon it and testify to it, to catapult the crowd out of the ordinary into a mystical figuration of political temporality that Winfrey called in her closing moments “Obama time.”6 Winfrey’s endorsement speech was one of many labors by the Obama campaign to create a narrative arc from Moses to emancipation to civil rights to black presidency. The campaign might be read as a palimpsestic figuration of charisma that depended on the constant interchangeablity and the linear progression of charismatic leaders from antiquity to now. That is, Obama would be figured as both the same as King and the Joshua to King’s Moses.7 This figuration required a contraction of chronological time and a suspension of it, a sped-up history of the black freedom struggle emptied of its complexity and a reconstituted black freedom imaginary in which Obama could appear out of time and out of history. So Winfrey instructed the crowd: Just as Barack Obama has seized this moment—and it’s a beautiful thing to see him do it, isn’t it? Oh, it’s a beautiful thing. He has seized this moment. South Carolina, January 26 is your moment. It’s your moment. It’s your time.

Understanding the narrative and rhetorical work of Obama’s campaign and presidency, particularly as it relates to a new configuration of political temporality, helps us understand how the cultural text bears the double weight of paying homage to black suffering and protest on one hand and authorizing the foreclosure of antiracist claims for citizenship or political mobilization on the other.8 The campaign’s circulation of the civil rights/Black Power memorial within a messianic temporality of a new now, packaged in repeated homage to King, prompted Kimberlé Crenshaw to remind us of the danger in mistaking “this particular milestone—one in which a spectacular man breaks through a monumental racial barrier—with the broader reach of King’s dream, that of ending the everyday racial realities that shape the lives of everyday people.”9 To mistake the moment of charismatic wonder surrounding the Obama candidacy as the phenomenal and instantaneous result of a long history of oppression and resistance is to accept, first, that history is made by charismatic men, and second, that historical transformation happens, paradoxically enough, both in a single moment of grace and gradually, incrementally,

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at a snail’s pace. On the one hand, the time for change is now; on the other, this now is only possible because a process of transformation that would otherwise be infinitely protracted is sped up by the miraculous appearance of the leader. The temporal mash-up of King–Obama figuralism was effected by the very use of the word now. “When people ask me why I’m running for president now,” Obama would often say in his stump speech, “I always respond: because of what Dr. King called “the urgency of ‘now.’” “The lifting of sermonic form and language from King’s mission and placing them into a different temporal frame,” James Manigault-Bryant argues, maintains a “veneer” of civil rights protest “but reapplies the sermonic in the service of empire.”10 My point in calling attention to the campaign’s rhetorical work in constructing King and Obama as interchangeable objects in a single discrete narrative and as “the opening and closing chapters of a triumphant tale about how America finally overcame its tragic racial sins” is not to compare the two figures, to recall that King’s philosophies and labors of social justice were more capacious than Obama’s, or to argue that Obama is somehow a lesser leader than the slain civil rights forebear he claims.11 Rather, it is to interrogate how the staging of black charismatic leadership vis-à-vis the book recitation, the rhetorical flair, the sermonic style, the conscious circulation of symbols, the quotations, and the various forms of civil rights memorialization enacts a temporal collapse that reproduces the violences of charisma that I have attempted to call attention to throughout this book. The staging of black American history and identity as a parade of leaders ending with Obama— and the reapplication of that staging in the service of a postracial tale of American goodness—short-circuits desires for social, political, and economic justice and channels them into a fiction of leadership that is lacking in historical detail, structured in social hierarchy, and shaped by normative gender codes. The charismatic scenario is put to use to conjure a history of black protest only to lay it to rest once and for all. That the election of Barack Obama was proclaimed as both the end and the messianic fulfillment of black politics by mainstream news outlets points to the conundrum of “Obama time”: that the appearance of Obama as charismatic leader called up a history of black protest leadership and pummeled that history into a now represented as outside of history—that is, outside of race. New York Times Magazine writer Matt Bai, for example, presented the Obama candidacy as simultaneously an ouster and a rightful follow-up to civil rights leadership, offering readers an ethnographic look into black politics that centered around glossy portraits of James Clyburn, Sharpe James,

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John Lewis, and Jesse Jackson as the now ineffectual remnants of civil rights history, and Jesse Jackson Jr., Elijah Cummings, Cory Booker, Deval Patrick, and Barack Obama as harbingers of a new era in black leadership. The “newly emerging class of black politicians . . . men (and a few women) closer in age to Obama and Jesse Jr.,” he pointed out, are at home “inside of the establishment, bred at universities rather than seminaries,” and they “are just as likely to see themselves as ambassadors to the black community as they are to see themselves as spokesmen for it.”12 In his roll call of black leadership, Bai narrated the generational shift in notions of black representivity as a clash of gifted sons and prodigal fathers. The postmortem for civil rights leadership hinted at what voters expect of black leaders in a U.S. political climate that does not demonize but demands, domesticates, and flattens out racial difference: “It’s all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black— to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience.”13 The emergence of a new black leadership class, however, does not do away with but rather depends on the very fiction that has circulated throughout black political modernity and postmodernity: that change is impossible in the absence of charismatic leadership. While the twentieth-century master narrative of black politics as a catalog of charismatic leadership, as I have been at great pains to show in these pages, is based in a fiction that trades the heterogeneity of the black freedom struggle for the ease and counterfeit glory of leadership heroism, the claim that the Obama presidency is the inevitable end of the black freedom struggle only serves a self-congratulatory neoliberal logic of postracialism. To posit Obama as the end or fulfillment of the black leadership void that defined black American public political anxieties since the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King Jr. allows American popular and political cultures to, quite paradoxically, celebrate a black president and eschew black politics as anachronistic. Even more importantly, it reinscribes the very assumptions that the image of the old black politics has constructed: that history is made by specially gifted men, and that we are at our democratic best when we are being led by the most gifted men among us. In fact, what has now surfaced as the new master narrative of black politics’ obsolescence only reinscribes charisma as a structuring paradigm and explanatory frame for black politics. Centering around a single individual presumed to be gifted with a privileged access to the divine, charismatic authority now finds its most convincing expression not in the old men of the civil rights generation but in the new men, the now men of neoliberal multiculturalism. The narrative of obsolescence, which would convince us that

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the black leadership void that defined black American life since the murder of King has been definitively filled, only reinforces the validity of the narrative of the messianic void; what’s more, it obscures the workings of the neoliberal project of reorganizing racial injury, a project that depends on the simultaneous reproduction of racial hierarchy and the foreclosure of antiracist discourse, or indeed any analytic, scholarly or urbane, that presumes race as an independent variable. The ability of mainstream media, the Obama campaign, and the Winfrey speech to negotiate the messianic symbolics of the coming Obama presidency—in effect, to position Obama as both precipitous end of blackness and fulfillment of blacks’ dreams—is compelling evidence that the United States is now “a racial state we have never seen before, one that does not enunciate itself primarily through abstract universalism but that articulates itself through minority difference.”14 This is a symbolic crisis, I would argue, that the cultural production of black charismatic leadership since Reconstruction set in motion and that the Obama campaign and presidency converted into political capital time and again. The narrative of black leadership’s obsolescence builds on the myth of its centrality and necessity to political engagement. This myth that liberation is best achieved under the direction of a single charismatic leader, is, I have argued, the animating fiction of modern black politics, and a fiction that the master narrative of the Obama presidency only justifies. Just as the Bible’s Israel cried out for a messiah, so did we cry out for a leader and, the story goes, got one. The one. Transformative social and political change demands “relentless acts of memory,” not refuge in a sanitized past or flight to illusions of charismatic national care.15 As we witness the foreclosure of antiracist politics—as the very mention of race in the public domain often invites instant sanctions— the histories of antiracist resistance and, accordingly, the histories of resistance within resistance movements are in danger of being lost in a haze of racial paranoia.16 Borders are being fortified and policed in ever more violent ways. Incarceration is publicly offered as social panacea while public education is privatized, if not altogether dismantled. In the university, ethnic studies programs are being evacuated and dismantled while humanities departments face budgetary cutbacks and are made to constantly defend their intellectual worth. Given such a context, the stories we tell ourselves about survival cannot be as simple as the leadership romance, no matter how convenient or seductive such a romance might be. Those of us committed to teaching the expressive cultures, histories, social movements, and politics of racial and ethnic minorities and to the intellectual and political work of confronting terror in its myriad forms no doubt have

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many challenges ahead. Because of this, and because stories of singular leadership are not enough to capture or sustain the labor necessary for social and political change, the project of contestation that weaves itself throughout African American narrative since World War I is as urgent now as it was when George Schuyler thought better of writing the tale of black revolution as the work of a single madman-genius and about-faced; when Zora Neale Hurston wrote the story of a young, same-gender-desiring woman into the iconographic, monstrous tale of the prince of Egypt’s leadership; when William Melvin Kelley ever so quietly blasted away civil rights spectacle in his 1962 novel; when the post–civil rights generation started delivering its devilmay-care postmortems to civil rights; and when Toni Morrison’s heroines broke through black politics’ haunting past into some holy hollow in the closing pages of her 1997 Paradise. African American narrative has in this way hinted at the longings and challenges that will face us in the time to come. It is my hope that it has also summoned us to a new politics of politics and, more importantly, cleared a space for us to imagine ever more ways of surviving, together, this sojourn.

Acknowledgments

I OWE THANKS TO SO MANY who have enabled and in every way enriched the writing of this book that began as a dissertation at Duke University. Maurice Wallace was this book’s earliest and most earnest supporter and helped me discover the best in my thought and writing. At moments, this book is for him. Wahneema Lubiano has been a generous and brilliant interlocutor as long as I have known her; she has challenged this work in inspiring and instructive ways. Janice Radway and Michael Hardt have also been eager supporters who continue to model generous and engaged work for me. My research was supported by funding from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Duke University, the Social Science Research Council, and the Academic Senate at the University of California, Riverside. I thank the staff members at the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; and the John Hope Franklin Center for African American Documentation at Duke University. Research assistance from Regis Mann and Andrew Bond was critical. I was fortunate enough to encounter good friends and colleagues at Williams College. My deepest thanks to Stéphane Robolin, Mora BeauchampByrd, and Leslie Wingard for keeping watch over me and protecting my sanity through that cold Berkshires winter. My colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, have been lively interlocutors and friends. Jennifer Doyle, Emory Elliott, Kendra Field, Tracy Fisher, George Haggerty, Keith Harris, Jodi Kim, John Kim, Katherine Kinney, Tiffany Ana López, Michelle Raheja, Dylan Rodríguez, Setsu Shigematsu, Carol Anne Tyler, and Traise Yamamoto have made writing this book inland a joy. Vorris Nunley was an 195

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ideal reader and a generous friend even when he could not resist hating on me or suggesting bad movies. My walks with Jayna Brown and Roxy, along with the meals we shared in front of her jumbotron, sustained and inspired me. And Lindon Barrett profoundly touched and changed me in the few moments that I was able to enjoy his presence. I am grateful for the professors, colleagues, students, and friends who encouraged and engaged this project over the years, including Stephen Best, Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown, Richard Blint, Jennifer Brody, Rudolph Byrd, Jordan Camp, Christian Campbell, Avery Gordon, Michelle Gordon, Sarah Haley, R. Scott Heath, Johari Jabir, Candice Jenkins, Ferentz Lafargue, Natasha Lightfoot, Mark Anthony Neal, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Charles Payne, Leigh Raiford, Michael Ralph, Sherie Randolph, Cedric Robinson, Evie Shockley, Tasneem Siddiqui, Cynthia Spence, Ula Taylor, Rebecca Wanzo, and Dagmawi Woubchet. Richard Yarborough was a cheerful and generous mentor. Ricardo Bracho was a gifted indexer and DJ. Christopher Freeburg was a peer mentor par excellence, a friend who witnessed this book’s development from its earliest stages and supplied necessary doses of perspective, humor, and gossip on an almost daily basis. H. L. T. Quan and C. A. Griffith provided loving shelter and feedback, plus exquisite food and drink. Salamishah Tillet was an inspiration and a confidante when it counted most. And in Shana Redmond I found a sister and my best barmate. The LOUD Collective contributed reading after reading in addition to all kinds of necessities and frivolities, from a refrigerator door in Long Beach to a magical oven in Echo Park. Very special thanks and cheers to Christine Balance, Maylei Blackwell, Jayna Brown, Aisha Finch, Mishuana Goeman, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Yogita Goyal, Grace Hong, Arlene Keiser, Kara Keeling, Jodi Kim, Caroline Streeter, Deb Vargas, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and all LOUDies of times past, present, immemorial, and other. Thanks to my parents, Hampton and Eileen Edwards, who always gave me room to grow while teaching me to think independently—and who read rough drafts of much of this book—and to Elise Edwards, who, in addition to being my first teacher, has been a generous sibling and roommate. My other moms (Margo Hall and Cassandra Sneed Ogden), Phyllis Chesley, Fern Denise Green, Verietta-Sarone Williams, Karen Jean Hunt, Bayo Holsey, Rhonda Jones, Funlola Azuana, Zion Temple United Church of Christ, and Preeti and Kimiyo Bone fed me, laughed with me, employed me, and otherwise supported me while I was researching and writing this book. Tanya Huelett’s love, her “Plan A” beans, and her wit have fortified me since the days we roomed together at Mellon Mays conferences. Kai Green inspired me to dig deeper and

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stand taller, to face the work ahead with grace, dignity, and fearlessness. Rhon and James Manigualt-Bryant, ideal co-conspirators, made magic with song and sustenance and shared countless laughs and video chats. And Deborah R. Vargas, with her Texas-sized heart and unmatchable strength, moved furniture and mountains for me. Like the rest of you and others still, she made this endeavor worth the risks.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 75. 2. All of the ellipses here and below are Badu’s own. Millions More Movement, Afternoon (Washington, D.C.: C-SPAN Video Library, 2006). 3. On disidentification as an engagement with a dominant ideology that “neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it” but rather “works on and against dominant ideology,” see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 4. Taylor, Archive, 75. On how Badu “presents a spectrum of black womanhood” that contests black popular culture’s—and black political culture’s—masculinism, see Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post– Civil Rights Era (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 192. On how the black love song often uses the black signifying practice of indirection to critique state repression, see Michael George Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51. 5. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah, Pt. I: 4th World War (2008). 6. Maurice O. Wallace has pointed out that the Million Man March “perceives the crisis of black America phallocentrically as the consequence of an embattled black masculinity.” See also Wahneema Lubiano’s critical assessment of black nationalist “commonsense” that places the Million Man March within a frame of romantic, conservative black family values. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 5; Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others,” in The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 251. For me, the anniversary march was a staging of the charismatic scenario that pointed to the transparent masculinism of the African American charismatic ideal: leadership was depicted as the rightful domain of men, and political empowerment was understood in the context of

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black men’s “aton[ing] to God for [their] shortcomings as men, husbands and fathers” “Millions More Movement: 10th Anniversary Commemoration of the Million Man March,” http://www.millionsmoremovement.com. See also Amy Alexander, The Farrakhan Factor: African American Writers on Leadership, Nationhood, and Minister Louis Farrakhan (New York: Grove Press, 1997); and Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 7. Dora Muhammad, “Erykah Badu Opens Up about Her Religion, Current Tour, True Freedom, and the Millions More Movement,” Final Call, 2005, http://www.final call.com/. 8. Black feminist activism and scholarship have been shaped by their attention to how intraracial hierarchies of gender and class affect how black women are positioned within black social and political movements as well as in American political, academic, and popular cultures at large. When Frances Beale addressed the issue of Black Power leadership, for example, she lamented that because “the Black male has exerted a more prominent leadership role in our struggle for justice in this country” and black men are “maintaining that they have been castrated by a society but that Black women somehow escaped this persecution and even contributed to this emasculation,” the black woman “can justly be described as a ‘slave of a slave.’” Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005), 112. See also bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); and Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981). My aim is to advance black feminist critiques of intraracial disciplining within black political culture by raising the question of how charisma has functioned throughout the contemporary era as a cultural, affective, performative, and historiographical complex of black leadership that naturalizes and normalizes unequal relations of power. 9. Daphne Brooks, “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 1 (2007): 184. 10. Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 58, emphasis added. 11. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 163. 12. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 55. On the liberatory possibilities of black performance, see also Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Free Press, 2001); Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Iton, Black Fantastic; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994).

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13. Taylor, Archive, 130. 14. My stress on the construction of normative heterosexual masculinity through the cultural complex of charismatic leadership in this study is meant to hold in tension two claims: first, that heterosexual male masculinity has been a privileged site for the projection of black political authority, and second, that it has not been the only site for such a projection. That is, the anchoring of black politics in heterosexual male masculinity has not precluded either the rise of women charismatic leaders in black social and political movements or the operationalizing of charismatic authority in queer or homonormative contexts. I hope that this work enables further research on the question of how precisely charisma is not necessarily attached to heternormative masculinity even if it is anchored in and by it. 15. Taylor, Archive, 54–55. 16. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 245. 17. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995), 233; Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4. 18. Lubiano, “Black Nationalism.” 19. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 26. 20. Lubiano, “Black Nationalism”; Barrett, Blackness and Value; Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Ferguson, Aberrations; Candice Marie Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

1. Restaging the Charismatic Scenario 1. Emphasis added. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115. By invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of structuring structures, I mean to point to charisma as a kind of habitus. Bourdieu calls the habitus that which is produced by “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72. See also Maurice Wallace’s elegant reworking of Bordieu in his theory of black masculinity’s “structuring structures.” Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine, 15. 2. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 49.

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3. On black political modernity as citizenship, see Helen Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2006): 1047–66. 4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 5. Manning Marable, Black Leadership (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), xiii. On preachers as leaders during slavery, see also E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 24–25. 6. Barrett, Blackness and Value, 83. 7. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 154. 8. Ibid., 118. 9. As Barrett explains, “man is postulated as having a natural right to himself protected by law, in the same way he has a natural right to property also protected by law.” Blackness and Value, 70. 10. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 110. 11. Ibid., 108. 12. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Jenkins, Private Lives; Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Ferguson, Aberrations. 13. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 62. 14. Gaines’s foundational history of black leadership in the twentieth century provides a context for this post-Reconstruction turn toward gender-defined values of bourgeois respectability on the national scale: “By the turn of the century, theories of racial hierarchy were understood in evolutionary terms, and African Americans argued along these civilizationist lines for the race’s development and potential. Although today this logic would strike us as inegalitarian, if not racist, in its day, the false universalism of civilization reigned for those innocent of our hard-won skepticism toward civilization.” Uplifting the Race, 35. 15. Singh, Black Is a Country, 31. See also W. E. B. Du Bois and David L. Lewis, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1998); Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997). 16. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 43, 130. 17. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5.

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18. Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York: Amistad, 2008), 273. 19. Christopher Robert Reed, All the World Is Here! The Black Presence at the White City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 107. 20. As C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya explain, “While middle-class black churches have been more careful in keeping better records and in adopting more efficient organizational forms, their pastors must not only possess the proper educational credentials but also a charismatic preaching ability.” Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 14. 21. Giddings, Ida, 276–77. 22. Reed, All the World Is Here, 194. 23. Marlon Bryan Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 42. 24. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests, Reconstruction was for blacks a project of representation in both senses: to speak for (Vertretung) and to depict (Darstellung). Douglass was a representative because “he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race’s great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion.” Gates, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (1988): 129. 25. Giddings, Ida, 265, 77. 26. Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender and History 11, no. 1 (1999): 113; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 27. Nasstrom, “Down to Now,” 114–15. 28. Rudolf Sohm, Outlines of Church History, trans. May Sinclair (London; New York: Macmillan, 1895), 66–67. 29. Ibid., 67. 30. Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 86–87. 31. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al., 3 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 2:1111. 32. Ibid., 2:1112. 33. Ibid., 2:1117, 2:1113. 34. Ibid., 2:1115. 35. Ibid., 2:1122. 36. Ferguson, Aberrations, 100. 37. Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 157. 38. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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39. Robinson, Terms, 158, 151. 40. “The Kind of Leaders We Need,” Chicago Defender, March 29, 1930, 14. 41. Diana Taylor, “Afterword: War Play,” PMLA 124, no. 3 (2010): 1888. 42. Taylor, Archive, 55. 43. Taylor, “Afterword,” 1888. 44. Ibid., 1888–89. 45. Charles Johnson, Dreamer (New York: Scribner, 1998), 82. 46. One important study of African American Christianity surmises that “African Americans have invested far more authority in the charismatic personality” because of the emphasis in black collectivities on inspired speech and rhetorical giftedness, which “stemmed from the oral traditions of African cultures and religions, where people with the best speaking abilities were viewed as divinely gifted.” Lincoln and Mamiya, Black Church, 14. On the centrality of black religious rhetorical forms, particularly the sermon chant, in modern black social and political movements, see Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000). 47. David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 173. 48. Ibid., 170. 49. Lubiano, “Black Nationalism,” 290. 50. Taylor, Archive, 54. 51. Hortense J. Spillers, “Variations on the African-American Sermon,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 264. 52. Taylor, “Afterword,” 1893. 53. On Jackson’s urging King to break with the script of his speech by reminding him of the visions he had related to her—“Tell them about the dream, Martin”—see Johari Jabir, “On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and the Sanctified Swing,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 664. 54. Tammy L. Brown, “‘A New Era in American Politics’: Shirley Chisholm and the Discourse of Identity,” Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008): 1021. 55. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 300. 56. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 35. 57. Toni Morrison, “The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing,” in Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), xv.

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58. Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, “Self-Portrait of the Fascist Agitator,” in Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin Ward Gouldner (New York: Harper, 1950), 99. 59. Holloway points out that although Bunche argues that “we are lacking in the data necessary to undertake any comprehensive analysis of Negro leadership,” the conditions under which the study was produced—at Gunnar Myrdal’s behest, within already established sociological parameters for understanding black American life—ends up focusing on three prominent leaders in the study. See the introduction to Ralph J. Bunche and Jonathan Scott Holloway, A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 60. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 61. Kelley, Race Rebels; John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 62. T. W. Adorno, “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” in Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin Ward Gouldner (New York: Harper, 1950), 418–19, 420. 63. Robinson, Terms, 283. 64. Cedric J. Robinson, “Malcolm Little as a Charismatic Leader,” Afro-American Studies 3 (1972): 82. 65. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, rev. ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Black Leadership Myth,” New Yorker, October 24, 1994, 7–8; Carby, Race Men. 66. Philip Smith, “Culture and Charisma: Outline of a Theory,” Acta Sociologica 43, no. 2 (2000): 101–11. 67. Taylor, Archive, 26. 68. Tavia Nyong’o, “Passing as Politics: Framing Black Political Performance,” Women and Performance 15, no. 1 (2005): 74. 69. Ibid. 70. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 6–7. 71. Paul C. Taylor makes a similar move to wrest aesthetics from its rarefied position as a philosophy of taste when he asks, “What more useful task could the discipline [of aesthetics] take up than that of excavating the hidden ways in which history and culture condition our choices, beliefs, desires, and preferences?” He goes on to argue for a “recasting [of] aesthetics as a kind of cultural criticism, as a discipline ready to deal with the beauty of human bodies as with the beauty of art.” Taylor, “Malcolm’s Conk and Danto’s Colors; or, Four Logical Petitions Concerning Race, Beauty, and Aesthetics,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 670. Taylor is building on Arthur Coleman Danto’s argument that “the aesthetics which addresses itself to the

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encoloration of meanings . . . would be, on the whole, an immense contribution to ourselves as cognitive beings if we were to study, from that perspective, the degree to which we are aesthetic beings, whose minds . . . are filled with (aesthetic) colorations and preferences” (274). See Arthur Coleman Danto, “A Future for Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (1993): 271–77. 72. These categories are exemplified by such black leadership studies as Leon F. Litwack and August Meier, Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Marable, Black Leadership; Bunche and Holloway, Brief and Tentative Analysis; H. Viscount Nelson, The Rise and Fall of Modern Black Leadership: Chronicle of a Twentieth Century Tragedy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003); Kevern Verney, The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881–1925 (New York: Routledge, 2001); Jacob U. Gordon, Black Leadership for Social Change (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000); Ronald W. Walters and Robert Charles Smith, African American Leadership (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Clarence Lusane, African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections (Boston: South End Press, 1994); John White, Black Leadership in America: From Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1990); Alexander, Farrakhan Factor. 73. See Kelley’s influential critique of top-down history in Race Rebels. 74. Walters and Smith, African American Leadership, 15. 75. Nathan Irvin Huggins, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Charisma and Leadership,” Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (1987): 479. 76. Walters and Smith, African American Leadership, 25. 77. Krasner, Beautiful Pageant, 171. 78. Kenneth M. Warren astutely points out that this solicitation ignores that the collective already effectively has a leader in Marrow’s Josh Green. See Warren, “The End(s) of African American Studies,” American Literary History 12, no. 3 (2000): 637–55. 79. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 281; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990), 39. 80. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 33. 81. Ibid., 40. 82. Ibid., 46. 83. Ibid., 15. 84. Ibid., 36. 85. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 2nd ed., ed. David W. Blight, 67–68. 86. Ibid., 68. 87. Ibid., 69.

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88. Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 81. 89. Ibid. I am deliberately distinguishing between a masculinity prescribed to biological maleness and conforming to normative gender codes and what Judith Halberstam calls “female masculinity.” The distinction here is important because although women often gain charismatic authority through the sometimes queer performance of what are constructed as masculine traits, they are more often demonized for overstepping the bounds of femininity when performing leadership roles. For example, Nanny Boroughs was censured for being too manly when she preached. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. My point here is that the ascription of a heteronormative, patriarchal masculine ideality to the charismatic leader does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of women’s leadership, particularly if Halberstam is right to insist that constructions of masculinity reach beyond the male body to include “various forms of female masculinity.” Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 90. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 25. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 91. 94. Ibid., 147. 95. Trouillot argues that the Haitian Revolution “entered history with the particular characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happens,” noting “the incapacity of most contemporaries to understand the ongoing revolution on its own terms.” Silencing the Past, 73. 96. James, Black Jacobins, 95. 97. Spillers, “Variations,” 253. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 254. 100. “The news that Hon. Marcus Garvey, the president-general of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had been shot by an assassin (who later committed suicide) . . . drew the largest crowd of Negroes who ever assembled in a hall in New York City.” The story continues, “Amid deafening cheers and applause, Mr. Marcus Garvey alighted from his carriage supported by his cane and friends, entered the hall and ascended the platform.” Robert A. Hill, Marcus Garvey, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 2:105. 101. Stanley Nelson et al., Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind (Arlington, Va.: PBS Home Video, 2001). 102. David Krasner explains that the UNIA’s theatricality “combined music, movement, drama, and an enormous cast into a unified and compelling aesthetic experience.” Krasner, Beautiful Pageant, 167–87.

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103. Branch, Parting the Waters, 139–40. 104. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak locates the Marxist tendency toward idealizing Vertretung (representation) when she discusses Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which, she argues, works “on the structural principle of a dispersed and dislocated class subject: the (absent collective) consciousness of the small peasant proprietor class finds its ‘bearer’ in a ‘representative’ who appears to work in another’s interest.” Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1994), 71. She argues here for the distinction between two forms of representation—Darstellung and Vertretung—and points out that “the staging of the world in representation, its scene of writing, its Darstellung—dissimulates the choice of and need for ‘heroes,’ paternal proxies, agents of power—Vertretung” (74). 105. Spillers, “Variations,” 252. 106. Morrison, “Official Story,” x; Spillers, “Variations,” 253.

2. Leadership’s Looks 1. Gates, “Black Leadership Myth,” 7. 2. Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 44. 3. Ibid., 25; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 4. See Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (New York: Octagon Books, 1970). 5. On the paradox of the liberal construction of liberty, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. See also Barrett’s discussion of how black women have been “disbarred from possessive individualism” but have also expressed “a freely exercised exorbitance of possessive individualism.” Barrett, Blackness and Value, 121. 6. Marable, Black Leadership, xii. 7. Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 106. 8. See Gaines’s accounts of post–Great Migration lynchings and race riots in Washington, D.C. (1919), Chicago (1919), and East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), in Uplifting the Race. 9. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart points out that the movie theater during the Great Migration was one site at which blacks developed “public spheres” that “intervened in the racist patterns of dominant cinema.” Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 104. 10. On verbal display as a kind of cultural production that bears the transformations of black urban modernity, see Ross, Manning the Race. 11. On the history of the phonograph as an innovation of the modern, see Weheliye, Phonographies. On the loudspeaker, see Frederick V. Hunt, Electroacoustics: The

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Analysis of Transduction and Its Historical Background (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954). 12. See Brown, Babylon Girls; Brooks, Bodies in Dissent. 13. Brown, Babylon Girls, 158. 14. Stewart, Migrating, 13. 15. On these agitators’ self-conscious appropriation of fascist-style oratory and symbolism, see Thompson, Black Fascisms. Fauset, in Black Gods, describes a typical service of the Mt. Sinai Holy Church, a branch of the Mt. Sinai Holy Church of America, Inc., which won many converts in the early twentieth century: the church service opens with communal song, proceeds through testimonies and more singing, and then witnesses “the arrival of the preacher,” at which point “the singing becomes more intense, and usually the preacher takes charge of it” (17). Next the preacher offers a sermon, during which “there is much shouting, ‘Amen! Praise the Lord!,’ etc., and from time to time the preacher interrupts her discourse with a song that is taken up by the congregation” (17). Fauset’s descriptions of other services in other “new” denominations of this time follow the same charismatic sequence. 16. On the “age of charisma” as “one of the features of the twentieth century” see Arthur Schweitzer, The Age of Charisma (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984), 3. 17. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 239. 18. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5. 19. Jill Watts, God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 49. 20. Carby, Race Men, 29. 21. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 38–39. See also Robinson, Terms, 159. 22. Taylor, Archive, 118. In her analysis of Latino/a American performance as a vehicle of cultural memory, Taylor argues that mystical spokesmen such as Walter Mercado and El Indio Amazónico transmit “the ‘memory’ of the primal bodily integrity” that moderns and postmoderns are presumed to have lost and present themselves as those able to reactivate the link to premodern wholeness (110–32). 23. Even collective forms of resistance that emerged during this era often reinforced the performance of gender distinctions as a constitutive feature of a black political modernity structured in the wish for charismatic representation. As Shana L. Redmond writes of the UNIA anthem, “‘Ethiopia (Thou Land of Our Fathers),” the “repetitive and ceremonial aspect of the anthem’s performance forced women to negotiate their roles within the category of ‘persons’ as well as their distinct difference from the men whom they sung alongside.” Redmond, “Citizens of Sound: Negotiations of Race and Diaspora in the Anthems of the UNIA and NAACP,” African and Black Diaspora 4, no. 1 (2011): 25. For critiques of how historians have neglected to study “invisible” forms of political engagement (including but not limited to women’s organizing) and for revisionist histories of twentieth-century black activism, see Kelley, Race Rebels; and Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.

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24. Nelson, Rise and Fall, 110. 25. Krasner, Beautiful Pageant, 13. 26. Ross, Manning the Race, 42. 27. Carby, Race Men, 50. 28. Ibid., 56. 29. Ibid., 66. 30. On how the leader is supposed to compensate for some existential lack within followers, see Lowenthal and Guterman, “Self-Portrait,” 99. 31. “Fine Tributes to Marcus Garvey as Anniversary of the First World Convention Is Observed,” Negro World, August 7, 1926, 2. 32. Ibid. 33. “Epochal Day’s Events Will Go Down in History Reviewed from the Sidelines,” Negro World, August 21, 1926, 2. 34. “Impressive Divine Service Marks Eloquent Opening of Convention; Eloquent Sermon by Rev. Dr. J. H. Chase,” Negro World, August 21, 1926, 2. 35. Ibid. 36. “Harlem’s Homage to Garvey as Seen by the White Press,” Negro World, August 21, 1926, 2. 37. “U.N.I.A. Parade Shows Strength of Garveyism,” Negro World, August 21, 1926, 6. 38. “Epochal Day’s Events,” 2. 39. On “facework” as one of the ways that charismatic leaders use impression management behaviors to draw followers, see William L. Gardner and Bruce J. Avolio, “The Charismatic Relationship: A Dramaturgical Perspective,” Academy of Management Review 23, no. 1 (1998): 45. 40. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 578. 41. Du Bois credits Washington’s preeminence to his white supporters and is nostalgic for when black Americans chose their own leaders and “founded . . . a peculiar dynasty” of political influence. Du Bois, Souls, 39. The Maroons, Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Cuffe, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, “Toussaint the Savior,” and others populate Souls’s pantheon of black leaders. 42. Ross, Manning the Race, 44. 43. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Star of Ethiopia,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), series 12, Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 44. “A Proposed Pageant to Celebrate the Adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment Abolishing Slavery,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), series 12, box 327, folder 6125. Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 45. In his reading of Du Bois’s pageant, David Krasner emphasizes that for Du Bois, the pageant “was a political instrument that could bring together visual spectacle and

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dramatic performance, amounting to a useful device for creating a sense of community.” Krasner, Beautiful Pageant, 86. 46. “What Is a Pageant,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), series 12, box 327, folder 6125, Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 47. Krasner, Beautiful Pageant, 87. 48. Susan Kay Gillman, “Pageantry, Maternity, and World History,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Kay Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 390. 49. Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997), 75. 50. “The Kind of Leaders We Need,” Chicago Defender, March 29, 1930. 51. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 212. References to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 52. Susan Kay Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 151. 53. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 18. 54. Du Bois, Souls, 38. 55. Emmanuel S. Nelson, “George Samuel Schuyler,” in African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 325. 56. Ransby, Ella Baker, 80. 57. Ibid., 83. 58. Ibid., 89. See also Michael W. Peplow, George S. Schuyler (Boston: Twayne, 1980). 59. Michael W. Peplow, “George Schuyler, Satirist: Rhetorical Devices in Black No More,” CLA Journal 18, no. 2 (1974): 253. 60. Ann Rayson, “George Schuyler: Paradox among ‘Assimilationist’ Writers,” Black American Literature Forum 12, no. 3 (1978): 102. 61. See Jeffrey B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 3. 62. See Rayson, “George Schuyler,” 102. 63. Jeffrey Ferguson situates the “problem” of Schuyler within contemporary debates about black studies and current incarnations of the race question, Ferguson argues that Schuyler’s career must be wrested from the no-man’s-land reserved for black conservatism and be engaged as a serious body of social commentary spanning over forty years. See Ferguson, Sage of Sugar Hill. 64. George Samuel Schuyler, “Reflections on Negro Leadership,” Crisis, November 1937, 327, 347. 65. Ibid., 327. 66. Ibid.

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67. Ibid., 327, 347. 68. George Samuel Schuyler, “The Separate State Hokum,” Crisis, May 1935, 135. 69. Ibid., 148, 149. About the influence of philosophical pragmatism on Schuyler, see Ferguson, Sage of Sugar Hill, 37. 70. Gillman, “Pageantry,” 379; Susan Kay Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Introduction: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Juxtaposition,” in Gillman and Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line, 27. Much of the new criticism on Dark Princess is collected in an important volume that documents an emerging history of feminist literary critical engagement with Du Bois, from Claudia Tate’s, Hazel Carby’s, and Joy James’s important work in the 1990s to reinterpretations of Du Bois’s work in the 2000s. See also Alys Eve Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trans-atlantic Modern Thought (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 71. Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 32. 72. Claudia Tate, introduction to Du Bois, Dark Princess, xxiv. 73. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, 33. 74. For an insightful reading of how Dark Princess should be read as troubled nostalgic fantasy rather than blueprint for black internationalism, see Yogita Goyal, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press). 75. Du Bois, Souls, 12. 76. Ibid., 8. 77. Ibid. 78. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 2003), 145. 79. Ibid., 151. 80. Ibid., 386. 81. Ibid., 171. 82. Tate, introduction to Dark Princess, xix. 83. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, 14. 84. Paul Gilroy reads Matthew’s aesthetic struggle as offering the reader “important clues towards Du Bois’s own struggles to differentiate the good from the beautiful.” Matthew, Gilroy argues, “searches in vain for some cultural and emotional authenticity in this insubstantial, depthless world. He takes refuge in the art and music that his uncultivated, power-hungry, and money-grubbing wife cannot fathom.” Black Atlantic, 142. 85. On this point, see Roderick A. Ferguson, “‘W. E. B. Du Bois’: Biography of a Discourse,” in Gillman and Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line, 269–88. 86. Michelle Elam and Paul C. Taylor, “Du Bois’s Erotics,” in Gillman and Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line, 229.

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87. Monica L. Miller argues, “In Dark Princess . . . Du Bois realizes his longstanding wish for racial leadership by ‘men who were—different’ with a kind of activist-dandy, whose nattily-clad body signifies on—rather than blindly accepts— masculinist tropes.” Miller, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic Race Man,” Callaloo 26, no. 3 (2003): 740. Du Bois “establishes a phenomenon on which the aesthetic philosophy of the text turns: engagement with actual pieces of art, coupled with a sense of the potential liberating and focusing force of affect inspired by the aesthetic, serves rather than hinders the revolutionary cause” (747). 88. Dohra Ahmad, “‘More Than Romance’: Genre and Geography in Dark Princess,” English Literary History 69, no. 3 (2002): 781. 89. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 144. 90. Tate, introduction to Dark Princess, xxv. 91. Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Interracial Romance and Black Internationalism,” in Gillman and Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line, 100. 92. Ibid. It is also worth noting that for Claudia Tate, the romance form serves to affirm Du Bois’s idealistic belief in the inevitability of racial justice. See Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 93. On how Dark Princess might be read as a “narrative of governmentality” that represents Madhu as the promise of a “radical tomorrow” organized by critical agency rather than the codes of liberal civil society, see Ferguson, “W. E. B. Du Bois,” 278. 94. Moses, Black Messiahs, 154. 95. Miller, “W. E. B. Du Bois,” 755. 96. “The Kind of Leaders We Need,” Chicago Defender, March 29, 1930, 14. 97. Tate, Psychoanalysis, 62. 98. John A. Williams, foreword to George Samuel Schuyler, Black Empire, ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), xi. 99. George Samuel Schuyler, Black Empire, 18. References to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 100. Here I am reading against the tendency to read Black Empire as veiled black radical propaganda. This tendency is apparent in the editorial afterword to Black Empire, which contends that the serial novel “recreates an important moment in the history of African-American thought” by employing “melodrama . . . to mask a radical vision”—that Black Empire is “a clarion call for black mobilization” and evidence of Schuyler’s pre–World War II radicalism. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen, afterword to Black Empire, 310. I read the novel, along with critics like Jeffrey Ferguson, as satire. See Ferguson, Sage of Sugar Hill. 101. Thompson, Black Fascisms, 81. 102. Hill and Rasmussen, afterword to Black Empire, 260. 103. Ibid. 104. Williams, foreword to Black Empire, xiii.

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105. Thompson, Black Fascisms, 73. 106. Ibid. On African American resistance to Italian aggression in Ethiopia, see Kelley, Race Rebels. 107. Ferguson, Aberrations, 85. 108. Weber, Economy and Society, 2:1113. 109. Robinson, Terms, 77. 110. Ferguson, Aberrations, 92. 111. Ibid. 112. On Dark Princess as the work of Du Bois’s “unconscious pattern of consolidating the libidinal economies of desire and freedom,” see Tate, Domestic Allegories, 51; and Jenkins, Private Lives, 211. 113. Robinson, Terms, 112. 114. Carby, Race Men, 50. 115. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59. 116. Ibid., 59.

3. Moses, Monster of the Mountain 1. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), xxiv. References to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1947), 358. 3. Robinson, Terms, 158. 4. See, for example, Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C. (Head Niggas in Charge): The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Adolph L. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Houston A. Baker Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Norman Kelley, The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics (New York: Nation Books, 2004). 5. Huggins, “Martin Luther King, Jr.,” 479–80. 6. Houston A. Baker Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Ibid., 26. 9. Ibid., 27. 10. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 53. 11. Ibid. 12. Ferguson, Aberrations, 126. 13. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 59.

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14. Brown, Babylon Girls, 163. 15. See Giddings, Ida. 16. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. 17. See Bernice Reagon Johnson, “African Diaspora Women: The Making of Cultural Workers,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (1986); Barrett, Blackness and Value. 18. In “The Fire and the Cloud,” Hurston shows Moses at the end of his political career as leader of Israel, faking his own death so as to escape the strictures of charismatic leadership. Hurston, “The Fire and the Cloud,” in The Complete Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 117–21. 19. Zora Neale Hurston, “The Emperor Effaces Himself,” 1925, box 1, folder 16, Zora Neale Hurston Collection, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 20. Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 4, 10–11. 21. Weber, Economy and Society, 1112. 22. Ibid. 23. Ella Baker, for example, often rejected the masculinized leadership structure of black political and social organizations as she worked tirelessly in the black freedom movement, according to historian Barbara Ransby. While Baker was initially “carried away” by Martin Luther King’s oratory, she would often challenge his leadership style. And while King kept Bayard Rustin and Stanley David Levison close allies, “it was probably King’s sexist attitudes toward women,” Ransby writes, “that prevented him from having the same kind of collegial relationship with Baker.” Ella Baker, 174. 24. Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. 25. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 3. 26. Ibid., 4. 27. Houston A. Baker Jr., Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 29. 28. Theophus Harold Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 67. 29. Ibid., 162. 30. Note, for example, common references to Harriet Tubman as “Black Moses” or the “Moses of her people.” See Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine, 2004). Addressing the issue of female Moses figures, Smith argues that the connection of Mosaic figuration to women proves the “troping virtuosity”—the conjurational power—of the image. Smith, Conjuring, 69. 31. Ilona N. Rashkow, “Oedipus Wrecks: Moses and God’s Rod,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book, ed. Timothy K. Beal and David M. Gunn (London: Routledge, 1997), 82.

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32. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 17. 33. Renita J. Weems, “Reading Her Way through the Struggle: African American Women and the Bible,” in The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics, ed. Norman K. Gottwald and Richard A. Horsley (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993), 37. 34. Ibid., 41. 35. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9, 120. 36. Ibid., 118. 37. Ibid. 38. Weems, “Reading,” 35; Deborah E. McDowell, “Foreword: Lines of Descent/ Dissenting Lines,” in Moses, Man of the Mountain, by Zora Neale Hurston (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), xiii. 39. Honig, Democracy, 118; McDowell, “Foreword,” xvi. 40. McDowell, “Foreword,” x. 41. Blyden Jackson, introduction to Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), xvii. 42. Hurston, Moses, 114. 43. See Smith, Conjuring, 32–39. 44. Ruth T. Sheffey, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain: A Fictionalized Manifesto on the Imperatives of Black Leadership,” CLA Journal 29, no. 2 (1985): 206–20. 45. Jackson, introduction to Moses, xvi. 46. Mark Christian Thompson, “National Socialism and Blood-Sacrifice in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain,” African American Review 38, no. 3 (2004). See also Thompson, Black Fascisms. 47. Barbara Johnson, “Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowen and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 29. 48. Glaude, Exodus, 5. 49. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, introduction to Modern Gothic: A Reader, ed. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 1. 50. For Freud, the uncanny names “what is frightening,” “what arouses dread and horror” (219). It marks moments in which “the familiar can become [unfamiliar] and frightening” (220). Further, it refers to a sense of hidden danger within a heimlich, or homely, environment. The uncanny “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (241). Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). Here I am arguing that

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Hurston’s gothic readings of Exodus index a sense of fearful alienation in relation to a familiar story of political leadership. See Avery Gordon’s analysis of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which argues that we “are haunted by somethings we have been involved in, even if they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other” (51). For Gordon, the uncanny is “an enchanted encounter in a disenchanted world between familiarity and strangeness” (55). Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 51. Evie Shockley, “Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women’s Sexuality, and (Living) Death in Ann Petry’s ‘The Street,’” African American Review 40, no. 3 (2006): 444. For another exploration of the employment of gothic fiction to communicate fear before U.S. racial conventions, see Daphne Lamothe, “Cane: Jean Toomer’s Gothic Black Modernism,” in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004). 52. Robert Morris, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Ambitious Enigma: Moses, Man of the Mountain,” CLA Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 305. 53. McDowell, “Foreword,” 8. 54. Darryl Dickson-Carr, African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 79. 55. Shockley, “Buried Alive,” 440. 56. Dickson-Carr’s reading of the novel points out that Moses, in Hurston’s novel, is a double-faced protagonist: he “must be considered a great prophet, both a hero and an antihero, inasmuch as he is a decidedly flawed leader of an even more flawed people who admire him and revile him at turns.” Dickson-Carr, African American Satire, 80. 57. I refer here to Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the familiar tale of a doctor whose ambition to bring the dead to life leads him to piece together a murderous monster. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Lorne Macdonald and Kathleen Dorothy Scherf (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994). 58. Johnson, “Moses and Intertextuality,” 24. 59. Thompson, “National Socialism,” 410. 60. Hurston, Moses, xxiii. 61. Maria Diedrich, analyzing Moses’s “power to command God,” explains that Hurston’s novel communicates an anthropocentric vision of God that is in line with African-derived religion and black American folk religion. “It is man, not God, who stands central in Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. Reversing the biblical pattern of God commanding man, Hurston’s novel portrays a movement from man to God. Man cries, and God listens; man challenges god to act” (179). Diedrich, “‘Power to Command God’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Black Folk Religion,” in Studien Zur Englischen Und Amerikanischen Prosa Nach Dem Ersten Welt krieg, ed. Maria Diedrich and Christoph Schoneich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986).

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62. Honig, Democracy, 115. 63. Susanne Becker, “Postmodern Feminine Horror Fictions,” in Sage and Smith, Modern Gothic, 71–72. 64. Becker includes this quote from Jane Eyre in her explication of the “typical gothic image of the sexual woman.” Ibid., 71. 65. Weber, Theory, 361. 66. Walters and Smith, African American Leadership, 111. 67. Weber, Economy and Society, 2:1112. 68. Ibid., 2:1148, 2:1149. 69. Honig, Democracy, 109. 70. See Exodus 15. 71. Robinson, Terms, xi.

4. Disappearing the Leader 1. William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1989), 201. References to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 2002), 541–42. 3. Kelley, Race Rebels; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 4. On the “hidden transcript,” see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 111. By focusing on the hidden transcript as the vanishing point here, I do not mean to repeat what studies in black politics have attempted to expose as a naive faith in working-class resistance. Rather, my aim is to redress what I have referred to as the historiographical violence of the charismatic scenario. Here I relocate what the master narrative must forget: that the concerted and collective movements toward black freedom from white supremacist terror and policing have been heterogeneous, multifaceted, and multiply oriented. For critiques of the working-class centrism in black cultural politics, see Warren, “End(s)”; Iton, Black Fantastic; Hanchard, Party/Politics. 5. Kelley, Different Drummer, 4. 6. Trudier Harris, “William Melvin Kelley’s Real Live, Invisible South,” South Central Review 22, no. 1 (2005): 33. 7. Ellison, Invisible Man, 14. 8. Alice Walker, Meridian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 38, 18, 21. 9. Thulani Davis, 1959 (New York: Grove Press, 1992), 133. 10. Johnson, Dreamer, 102. 11. Nasstrom, “Down to Now,” 115. 12. Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 15. 13. Ibid., 6. 14. Ransby, Ella Baker, 188–89.

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15. Baker “always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend so largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means that the media made him, and the media may undo him.” Payne, Light of Freedom, 93. 16. Torres, Black, White, 89. 17. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 17. 18. On the photography of the civil rights movement, see Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 19. Leigh Raiford, “‘Come Let Us Build a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2007): 1130. 20. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 14–15, 39. 21. Moten, In the Break, 22. 22. Robinson, Black Marxism, 169. 23. Barrett, Blackness and Value, 58. 24. Moten, In the Break, 55. 25. David Bradley, foreword to Kelley, Different Drummer, xxv. 26. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 157. 27. Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984), 40. 28. Saldaña-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination, 43. 29. Ibid., 193. See also Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 30. Saldaña-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination, 235. 31. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 179. 32. Wondering why Nat Turner “spare[d] poor whites,” why Toussaint L’Ouverture “escort[ed] his absent ‘master’s’ family to safety before joining the slave revolution,” and why, on the whole, black radicalism has been marked by an absence of violence against whites, Robinson offers a series of speculations on the black radical tradition, all of which suggest that antiracist, antislavery, anticolonial resistance has to be historically situated as exceeding the conditions that produce it. The absence of revolutionary violence against colonizers, Robinson explains, can be attributed to the fact that “violence was not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations”; it was, rather, the “renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses.” Black Marxism, 168–69. 33. Ibid., 444. 34. Ibid., 169.

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35. Robinson, Terms of Order, 151, 153. 36. John M. Reilly, “The Black Anti-Utopia,” Black American Literature Forum 12, no. 3 (1978): 108. 37. Ibid., 109. 38. Analyzing black novels featuring white protagonists, Robert Fikes Jr. argues that black writers wrote “white life” novels in the face of the “allure of universality.” As the literary establishment in the first half of the twentieth century “nudged, if not intimidated, Black writers to aspire to universality, to downplay the racial aspect in their material and foreswear protest,” black writers “flirted with universality” to fulfill their “desire for self-fulfillment,” their quest for artistic achievement, and their desire for approval from publishers, readers, and critics. See Fikes, “The Persistent Allure of Universality: African-American Authors of White Life Novels, 1845–1945,” Western Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (1997): 230. See also Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 39. A Different Drummer, 23; Harris, “William Melvin Kelley,” 37. 40. Bradley, foreword to Different Drummer, xxv. 41. Harris, “William Melvin Kelley,” 33. 42. Moten, In the Break, 57. 43. On radicalism as the “general critique of the proper,” see Moten, “Case of Blackness,” 177. 44. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 29–30. 45. Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 46. Harris, Exorcising Blackness, 22. 47. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 98–99. 48. Ibid. 49. Belinda Robnett, “African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–65: Gender, Leadership, and Micromobilization,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (1996): 1667. 50. Nasstrom, “Down to Now,” 114. 51. Robnett, “African-American Women,” 1688–89. 52. H. L. T. Quan, “Geniuses of Resistance: Feminist Consciousness and the Black Radical Tradition,” Race and Class 47, no. 2 (2005): 47. 53. By signaling charismatic leadership as performative affect, I am drawing on work that links leadership to the dramaturgical work of staging. Morris points out that “charisma . . . is based not so much on the beliefs held by charismatic individuals or their followers as on performance. Experience is often crucial to performance, and most ministers who became charismatic civil rights leaders brought a great deal of experience into the movement.” Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 8. See also Gardner and Avolio, “Charismatic Relationship.” By debilitating effect, I mean the way that

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the ascription of leadership status weakens the charismatic leader’s ability for selfexpression as well as a social movement’s capacity to represent itself as anything other than charismatic cult. As Peniel E. Joseph explains, for example, SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael “found it increasingly difficult to modulate his visibility” for the benefit of SNCC when the “press increasingly portrayed SNCC as a hierarchical organization controlled exclusively by Carmichael.” Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2006), 169. 54. Quan, “Geniuses,” 47. 55. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color, 228. 56. If it is true, as Keeling suggests, that the only femininity available to black women in the history of Western cinematic perception has been a “denigrated femininity,” then the representation of black men as feminine in Drummer shows the project of racial subjection to depend on a double disfiguring of gender codes: first, the exclusion of black women from the ideological link between femininity and the biological female body; and second, the feminization of black men via lynching. Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 83–85. 57. Robinson, Black Marxism, 444.

5. “Cyanide in the Kool-Aid” 1. Payne, Light of Freedom, 392, 400. 2. Morrison, “Official Story,” xvii. 3. Ibid., xvi. 4. Valerie Smith, “Meditation on Memory: Clark Johnson’s Boycott,” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (2005): 532. 5. Ibid., 537. 6. On how contemporary criticism can engage the “phantom subjects of history,” see Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 196. 7. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 155. 8. On the role of Lee’s film in the commodification of Malcolm X’s image, see chapter 14 in hooks, Outlaw Culture. On the 1990s circulation of Malcolm X as cultural icon, particularly in Lee’s film, see Reed, Stirrings; Manning Marable, Manning Marable on Malcolm X: His Message and Meaning (Westfield, N.J.: Open Media, 1992). 9. “Great Expectations,” season 6, episode 3 of A Different World (National Broadcasting Company, July 9, 1993). Several important works have noted how post–civil rights black culture has been enabled by the Black Arts Movement as well as shaped in opposition to the militant masculinity of 1960s and early 1970s cultural nationalism. See Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (1989): 233–43; Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002); Iton, Black Fantastic. 10. Neal, Soul Babies, 3.

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11. Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent and Michele Wallace (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 32. 12. Angela Y. Davis, “Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 292. 13. Renee Christine Romano and Leigh Raiford, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), xxii. 14. Singh, Black Is a Country, 6. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. On how the post-1960s wrought the violent reorganization, not the end, of white supremacist tactics aimed at the management, policing, or extermination of racialized populations, see Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 18. On the ambivalent nature of contemporary memorializations of civil rights, see Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement. 19. On the two speeches, see Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, “Clinton and Obama Unite, Briefly, in Pleas to Blacks,” New York Times, March 5, 2007, A14. 20. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green, introduction to Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950, ed. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 2. 21. Reed, Stirrings, 212. 22. Ossie Davis, Life Lit by Some Large Vision: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Ruby Dee (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 153. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 168. 25. My understanding of melancholia as a phantasmic figuration is influenced by Rayner, who explains that the melancholic subject denies loss in such a way that it incorporates the lost object or keeps it “in a place, as though it were actually kept ‘in’ the body, that is, sealed off from even the unconscious libidinal processes” and “sealed off against any kind of knowledge other than the phantasmic, magical, and hallucinatory.” Ibid., 168. 26. Defining postmortem charisma, Ann Ruth Willner explains that that after the leader’s death, “he and his works take on . . . a mythical quality and become part of the reservoir of myths and symbols of his society and perhaps even for others. . . . Even those for whom he was not charismatic and those for whom he ceased being so share in the drama he enacted. And they too transmit its awe and aura to their descendants” (199). The charismatic leader assumes a second rise to power after his death, becoming “the Prometheus of politics who . . . steals from the gods by stretching political reality beyond the bounds of belief and prediction” (201). Willner,

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The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984). 27. Chris Rock, Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker (New York: HBO Home Video, 1999). 28. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 19. 29. Warren, “End(s)”; Warren, So Black and Blue; Reed, Stirrings; Kelley, Head Negro; Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—And What We Can Do about It (New York: Crown, 2006); Baker, Betrayal. 30. See, for example, Todd Boyd’s autobiographical preface to his postmortem on civil rights, in which he writes of a street fight between himself and Spike Lee: “I told him not to let my Ph.D. fool him and went on to tell him that we could settle this like we got some class or we can get into some gangsta shit. . . . He ended up running off into the rain like a little schoolgirl when he realized that I was the wrong nigga to fuck wit!” Boyd, New H.N.I.C., xv–xvi. As an example of how feminist and black queer studies deconstructed black leadership in ways that resisted the restoration of black patriarchy, see Dwight A. McBride, “Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998): 363–79. 31. Kelley, Head Negro, 9, 13. 32. Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness. 33. In Weber’s well-known theory of the modern economic order, he explains that the Protestant ethic “dominate[s] worldly morality” such that instead of the desire for material goods “[lying] on the shoulders” like a “light cloak,” “fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, new ed. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 181. Stahlhartes Gehäuse, what Talcott Parsons translates here as “iron cage,” has been translated more recently by others as “shell as hard as steel.” See Peter Baehr, “The ‘Iron Cage’ and the ‘Shell as Hard as Steel’: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” History and Theory 40, no. 2 (2001): 153–69. For Weber, charisma provides a way out of the shell; it, “in its most potent forms, disrupts rational rule as well as tradition altogether and overturns all notions of sanctity.” Weber, Economy and Society, 1117. I thank James Manigault-Bryant for sharing his insights on this point. Manigault-Bryant, e-mail, April 19, 2010. 34. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51. 35. Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 37, 43. 36. Robinson, Terms, 57. 37. Carby, Race Men, 21. 38. Miller, “W. E. B. Du Bois,” 739. 39. Iton, Black Fantastic, 19. 40. Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), x.

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41. Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 42. Neal, Soul Babies, 4. 43. For Weber, one of the “principal characteristics of charismatic authority” is followers’ recognition of the leader’s decisive authority. He notes that this recognition “is freely given and guaranteed by what is held to be a ‘sign’ or proof, originally always a miracle, and consists in devotion to the corresponding revelation, hero worship, or absolute trust in the leader.” Weber, Theory, 399. 44. Branch, Parting the Waters, 129. 45. Ibid., 139–40. 46. Ibid., 142. 47. See, for example, Kelley, Race Rebels; Robinson, Black Movements. 48. Robinson, “Malcolm Little,” 89. 49. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 11. 50. Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010), xvii. 51. Kevin Rodney Sullivan, Barbershop 2 Back in Business (Beverly Hills, Calif.: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004). 52. In Panther, the narrator describes the formation of the Black Panther Party as a moment rather than a process. The character chronicles how Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the cofounders of the party, became involved in a physical altercation with police and were then sent to jail, where they conceived of the party. In jail, Bobby says to Huey, “You know, the Man is convinced that his foot is an integral part of our ass. But fuck that!” Huey responds, “Dig it, fuck that!” Judge explains the origin of the BPP as the product of a kind of spontaneous combustion: “Just two fed up brothers. . . . Next thing you know, BAM!” The impulsive—or explosive—history of the Black Panther Party sets the film up as a black urban gangster film; perhaps it is this story of the party as a group with plenty of guns but no political plan that Barbershop 2 indexes intertextually in this moment of re-vision. Melvin Van Peebles, Panther (New York: PolyGram Video, 1995). 53. Vorris Nunley, Keepin’ It Hushed: African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric, Rationalities, Barbershops, and Knowledge in African American Life and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 134. 54. Scott Bowles, “‘Barbershop’ Dialogue Too Cutting, Some Say,” USA Today, 2002, 1D. 55. Neal, Soul Babies, 21. 56. Bowles, “‘Barbershop’ Dialogue,” 1D. 57. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 58. Tyler Hoffman, “Treacherous Laugher: The Poetry Slam, Slam Poetry, and the Politics of Resistance,” Studies in American Humor, new series, 3, no. 8 (2001): 50.

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59. Mark Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 92. 60. Maureen Tkacik, “Barbershops Are Back but with a Twist: A Haircut and a CD,” Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2002, A8. 61. Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 64. 62. Ibid., 577. 63. Gates centralizes revision as a trope of Signifyin(g): “To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxiii. 64. Watkins, On the Real Side, 568. 65. Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 1. References to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 66. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 19. 67. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xii. 68. Dickson-Carr, African American Satire, 202–3. 69. Much research has been done to interrogate the intersections between postmodernism and African American literary production. See Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988); W. Lawrence Hogue, Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color since the 1960s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). On black postmodernism’s subversion of realism, see Wahneema Lubiano, “Shuckin’ Off the African-American Native Other: What’s Po-Mo Got to Do with It?,” Cultural Critique 18, no. 1 (1991): 149–86. 70. Gates, Signifying, 113. 71. Ellison, Shadow and Act, xvi. 72. Dubey, Signs and Cities, 44. In an especially incisive critique of realism, particularly in Lee’s films, Wahneema Lubiano writes, “Realism as the bedrock of narrative is inherently problematic. Realism poses a fundamental, long-standing challenge for counter-hegemonic discourses, since realism, as a narrative form, enforces an authoritative perspective.” Realism “temporarily allows chaos in an otherwise conventional or recognizable world, but at the end the narrative moves toward closure, the establishment of truth and order.” See Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (1991): 262. 73. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

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74. Ibid., 51. 75. Boyd, New H.N.I.C., xxi. 76. Neal, Soul Babies, 3. 77. Adolph L. Reed, Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 3. Fredric Jameson considers the present’s nostalgic relationship to the past, referring to what Reed calls a loss of historicity as the “waning of affect.” The waning of affect is “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.” Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994; reprint, 5th reprinting), 9. See also Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 111–25; Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 178–209. 78. Neal, Soul Babies, 17. 79. Iton, Black Fantastic, 82. 80. Nunley, Keepin’ It Hushed, 150. 81. Melanye T. Price, Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 66.

6. Claim Ticket Lost 1. In the special issue of American Quarterly devoted to Hurricane Katrina, editor Clyde Woods characterizes Katrina as a “blues moment” and details the government’s response of “five-day-long active abandonment” within the dialectic of Bourbonism— the House of Bourbon’s “famed indifference to human suffering,” which led “them to create one disaster after another”—and the Blues, a “knowledge system, epistemology, and development agenda” that centers working-class leadership, social vision, sustainability, social justice, and the making of a new commons. See Woods, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 429. 2. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xii. 3. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 14. 4. I have written of this event in detail elsewhere. See Erica R. Edwards, “Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Black Leadership’s Gothic Tale,” Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008). 5. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28. 6. Iton, Black Fantastic, 98. 7. Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness, 337. 8. Ibid., 339. 9. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1997), 117. References to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 10. Jenkins, Private Lives, 121.

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11. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), 102. 12. Ibid., 103. 13. Ibid., 173. 14. Toni Morrison, Love (New York: Knopf 2003), 37. 15. Toni Morrison, “Introduction: Friday on the Potomac,” in Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), xv–xvi. 16. Ibid., xvii. 17. J. Brooks Bouson, “Uncovering ‘the Beloved’ in the Warring and Lawless Women in Toni Morrison’s Love,” Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 4 (2008): 359. 18. Morrison, Beloved, xix. 19. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 195. 20. Peter Widdowson, “The American Dream Refashioned: History, Politics and Gender in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 328. 21. McDowell, “Foreword,” xxi. 22. Tammy Clewell, “From Destructive to Constructive, Haunting in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” West Coast Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Criticism 36, no. 1 (2002): 1. 23. Ibid., 2. 24. For an analysis of Paradise’s use of gothic conventions to critique mass consumerism, see Steven Collis, “Consumerism and the Gothic in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 21, no. 2 (2004): 49–52. 25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986), 9. 26. Sarah Appleton Aguiar, “‘Passing on’ Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 514, 516. 27. Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos, “Hybridizing the ‘City Upon a Hill’ in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” MELUS 28, no. 4 (2003): 12. 28. Ibid., 17–18. 29. Morrison defines the official story as a narrative “born in and from chaos. Its purpose is to restore or imitate order and to minimize confusion about what is at stake and who will pay the price of dissension.” She writes, “In order to succeed it must monopolize the process of legitimacy. It need not ‘win’ hands down. . . . It needs only to control the presumptions and postulates of the discussion.” “Official Story,” xv–xvi. For Morrison, the official story creates the public language with which people articulate their desires, ideas, and very identities. 30. Rob Davidson, “Racial Stock and 8-Rocks: Communal Historiography in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Twentieth-Century Literature 47, no. 3 (2001): 366. 31. Ibid., 359. 32. The movement of the 8-rock families toward their new land approximates the linear structure of the biblical myth. Eddie Glaude explains the way that the Exodus story proceeds along a linear progression toward an emancipatory telos: “The journey

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forward—the promise that where we are going is radically different from where we are—marks the transformative aspect of the narrative. Unlike ancient tales in which the journey begins and ends at home, the narrative structure of Exodus describes a progression, the transformation of people as they journey forward to a promised land. . . . Once the Israelites leave, there is no turning back.” Glaude, Exodus!, 5. The narrative structure of Paradise underscores its difference from Exodus. The novel proceeds along a circuitous route, writing against Exodus’s plot structure. 33. Peter R. Kearly, “Toni Morrison’s Paradise and the Politics of Community,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23, no. 2 (2000): 12. 34. Robinson, Terms, 37. 35. Morrison, “Official Story,” xv. 36. Aguiar, “‘Passing on’ Death,” 513. 37. Linda J. Krumholz, “Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 36, no. 1 (2002): 22. 38. Clewell, “Destructive,” 2. 39. Krumholz, “Reading,” 30. 40. Ibid., 31. 41. In this essay, Morrison develops the idea of home as “a social space that is psychically and physically safe” (10). It is “a world-in-which-race-does-not-matter” (3). She explains that home—a space that allows for specificity without essentialism and difference without dominance—is something like a house with many windows and doors. Rather than “a thick-walled, impenetrable container” that locks in, shuts up, and entraps, home becomes “an open house” that leaves identity open to the infinite possibilities of radical change (4). See Toni Morrison, “Home,” in Lubiano, House, 3–12. 42. The narrator tells readers that “stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above the guttering candles. . . . And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning” (264). 43. Megan Sweeney discusses readers’ and critics’ responses to Paradise in popular arenas such as the New York Times and Newsweek. Here she cites David Gates’s review, which argues that the novel “asks us ‘to swallow too many contrivances.’” Against Gates, Sweeney argues that “Connie’s imperatives serve as a ritualized invitation rather than signaling another paradise-cum-totalitarian regime; while she takes charge of the redemption rituals, the other women fully participate in, and negotiate, the collective process of healing.” Sweeney, “Racial House, Big House, Home: Contemporary Abolitionism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4, no. 2 (2004): 57. 44. Hurston, Moses, 268. 45. See “Down by the Riverside,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 17–18.

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46. See “All God’s Children Got Shoes” in All-American Gospel: The Best Collection of Gospel Music Ever Assembled! Complete Vocal/Piano Sheet Music Arrangements, ed. Michael Johnson (Ventura, Calif.: Creative Concepts, 1996). 47. Holland, Raising the Dead, 66. Holland’s analysis of Morrison’s Beloved discusses its inversion of death: “It is not an end point, and her inversion of Beloved’s fate in the novel demonstrates that it is possible to return.” Further, she writes, “And black women consistently ‘return’” (ibid.). The women of Paradise perform a similar movement of return, a movement that troubles the lines between death and life, past and present. 48. Hurston, Moses, 268. 49. Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 21. 50. Sedgwick, Coherence, 14. 51. Bayer-Berenbaum, Gothic Imagination, 23. 52. Trouillot, in Silencing the Past, describes historical silencing as an active process that involves conscious disappearances of historical traces at silence at four sites: sources (fact creation), archives (fact assembly), narratives (fact retrieval), and history (the solidification and legitimization of silences). He argues that unequal relationships of power determine the sociohistorical evidence available at each of these sites. 53. Much conflict between the characters of the novel centers around the words inscribed on the communal oven at Ruby’s meeting place. While the town’s fathers insist that the words, rubbed off over time, once read, “Beware the furrow of his brow,” the younger generation suggests that they should read, “Be the furrow of his brow.” Meanwhile, Dovey Morgan wants to preserve the open-ended meaning of the symbol: “Specifying it, particularizing it, nailing its meaning down, was futile. The only nailing needing to be done had already taken place. On the cross. Wasn’t that so?” (93). The words on the iron oven play a primary role in the town’s attempt to cement the official story of its history. 54. Sweeney, “Racial House,” 48. 55. Ibid., 62. 56. My understanding of poetic knowledge is informed by Robin D. G. Kelley’s writing about surrealism, which argues that progressive social movements “do what good poetry always does: transport us to another place” and “enable us to imagine a new society. . . . It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I call ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic knowledge.’” Kelley, “Finding the Strength to Love and Dream,” Chronicle of Higher Education 48, no. 39 (2002): B9; Kelley, Freedom Dreams. 57. On the question mark as part of a visual system of representation (punctuation) that can be altered through artistic innovation, see Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation Art, Politics, and Play (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 21–22.

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Epilogue 1. For coverage of Winfrey’s speech, including video, see Katharine Seelye, “Oprahpalooza in South Carolina,” New York Times Online, http://thecaucus.blogs .nytimes.com/2007/12/09/oprahpalooza-in-south-carolina/. On Winfrey’s influence and the “Oprah culture industry,” see Trystan T. Cotten and Kimberly Springer, Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 2. Roderick A. Ferguson, “An American Studies Meant for Interruption,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2010): 219. 3. On how the Bush era saw the “public positioning of oppressive black conservatism and the normalizing of the same while supporting amazingly offensive policies and politics, and masquerading them when convenient under a black umbrella,” in effect dropping black officials into the belly of the beast, see Carole Boyce Davies, “‘Con-di-fi-cation’: Black Women, Leadership, and Political Power,” in Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, ed. Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: Feminist Press, 2009), 405. 4. John Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences,” African American Review 35, no. 2 (2001): 181–204. See also Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005). 5. One news story reported that after Winfrey’s appearance in Des Moines, Iowa, the day before the South Carolina endorsement, an attendee said, “I think Oprah is John the Baptist, leading the way for Obama to win.” Jeff Zeleny, “Celebrity Meets Politics as Winfrey Stumps for Obama,” New York Times, December 9, 2007, sec. 1, p. 39. 6. As David Remnick explains, Obama’s self-positioning as heir of the black freedom struggle itself depended on a kind of textual authority: “Over the years, Obama read the leading texts of the black liberation movement: the slave narratives; the speeches of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Malcolm X; the crucial court opinions of desegregation; John Lewis’s memoir.” Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Knopf, 2010), 13. 7. For an insightful reading of how Obama “adapted the emblematic Biblical story of bondage and emancipation to describe a circumstance that was, at once, personal (‘my story’), tribal, national, and universal” and in turn related “that Biblical story to the struggle of the elders of civil rights,” see ibid., 20. 8. I have discussed the cultural production of black presidency through tropes of differing and competing temporalities at length in Erica Edwards, “The Black President Hokum,” American Quarterly 63 no. 1 (March 2011): 33–59. 9. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Dr. King’s True Legacy: A Lesson for Progressives in the Age of Obama,” Huffington Post, January 27, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ kimberle-crenshaw/dr-kings-true-legacy-a-le_b_161438.html.

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10. James Manigault-Bryant, e-mail, April 19, 2010. 11. Crenshaw, “Dr. King’s True Legacy.” 12. Matt Bai, “Post-Race,” New York Times Magazine, August 10, 2008, 38. 13. Ibid., 39. 14. Ferguson, “American Studies,” 215. 15. Kevin K. Gaines, “Of Teachable Moments and Specters of Race,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2010): 197. 16. I am thinking, for example, of the case of Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to step down from her position with the Department of Agriculture after remarks that she made at an NAACP event went viral. On racial paranoia as “the fears people harbor about other groups potentially hating or mistreating them, gaining a leg up at their expense,” see John L. Jackson, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness: The New Reality of Race in America (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008), 4. On how American public culture in the post–civil rights era has normalized knee-jerk sanctioning and scapegoating in response to race or racist commentary, see Michael Awkward, Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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Index

Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, xix absent presence, xxi, 43–44, 141, 144, 162, 173 activism, 7; black, 11, 20, 27, 107, 209n23; civil rights and Black Power era and, 145; epistemologies of, 110; rhetorical, 29; women’s, 109–10, 145, 151, 200n8, 209n23 Adorno, Theodor, 21 aesthetics, xx, 24, 37, 45, 53–55, 60, 136, 138, 205–6n71; antiaesthetics, 63, 65; charisma and, xx; curiosity and, 137, 181; leadership and, 58; politics and, 24, 45, 53–54 affect, xiii, xxi, 17–18, 21, 60, 78–79, 105, 128, 142, 144, 171, 200n8, 213n87, 220–21n53; waning of, 226n77 affirmative action, 163; end of, 4 African American culture, contemporary, 35, 85, 144, 163–64; contemporary American culture and, 166; production of, xiii, 131, 135, 164 African American Leadership, 25 African American literary text, xvii–xxi, 12, 22, 27, 33, 36, 42, 80, 106, 162, 188–89 African American literature, xvi, xviii, 4, 22, 26, 33, 42, 50, 72–73, 77,

87, 91, 106, 125, 135–38, 147, 180, 186, 189; film and, xv, 22, 26, 33, 77, 135–38, 147; interwar period and, 37, 42, 45, 50, 52, 61– 62, 70–72 African American narrative, contemporary, xv, xviii–xx, 3, 21–22, 33, 70, 185; writers and filmmakers of, xv, 82–83 African American studies, 143 African Blood Brotherhood, 39 Afro-Asian: empire, 54; romance, 54 Afrofuturism, 54, 70 “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia,” 145 agency, 20, 58, 213n93 Aguiar, Sarah Appleton, 174, 179 Alabama, 84, 140 American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, An, 71 American Quarterly, 226n1 American Studies, xviii, 25, 188 antiracism, 19, 79, 109, 112, 139; foreclosure of, 190–93; history of, 73, 193, 219n32; spokesmen for, 109 anxiety, 35, 37, 61, 105 Apple Computer, Think Different campaign, 138 archive of disruption, xxii Asia, 54

233

234

Index

Asian immigrants, 10 assembly, 44; political, 7 At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, 26 Aunt Jemima, 8 authority, ix, xiii–xv, xx, xxii, 3, 11–33, 40–41, 52, 56, 64, 66, 73, 77–89, 96–97, 100–101, 129, 136, 149– 50, 152, 154, 160, 164, 170, 176, 180–81, 188; charismatic, xiv, 11– 16, 21–23, 26, 28, 30, 32–33, 35, 37, 52, 65, 77–79, 81–87, 89, 97, 100–101, 106, 109, 119, 160, 171–72, 176, 181–83, 185, 192, 201n14, 207n89; comic, 154–55; engineered spectacle of, 65; political, xx, 13, 15, 19, 21, 40, 54, 59, 62, 73, 77, 80, 82–84, 86, 140–41, 146, 170–73, 178, 201n14 authors, xvi, xviii, xx, 36, 50 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The, 150 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The, 189 Awkward, Michael, 231n16 Badu, Erykah, ix–xv, xxii, 19, 199n2, 199n4, 199n5; black feminist political petulance of, xiv; pop feminist social critique by, xii; R&B (rhythm & blues), alternative, and, xii; critique of black nationalist symbols by, xii Bai, Matt, 191–92 Baker, Ella, xvii–xviii, 51, 107, 110–11, 145, 215n23 Baker, Houston, 78–79, 84, 101, 143 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 155 Baltimore, 39 Bambara, Toni Cade, 108–9 Baptist Church, 80–81, 84; Women’s Convention in the, 41 Baraka, Amiri, 168

Barbershop, xvi, xxi, 83, 137, 147–57, 162–66, 171 Barbershop 2: Back in Business, 152–53 barbershop, the, 148; as carnivalesque, 155, 164–65; as critical public space, 148; as haven for folk humor, 155; as heroic communal space, 153–54 Barrett, Lindon, xix, 5, 113, 202n9, 208n5 Beale, Frances, 200n8 Beatty, Paul, xvi–xvii, xxi, 33, 73, 83, 137, 146, 157–66, 171 belonging: American normative masculinity as, 21; national, 110; political, 135 Beloved, 170 Benston, Kimberly W., 204n46 Best Men, 7–8 Best Women, 8 Betsey Brown, 108 Beyond a Boundary, 43 Bible, 5, 31–32, 84, 86, 93, 193 Black Arts Movement, xix, 138, 221n9; post–, 138 Black Empire, xvi, 37, 50, 52–54, 62– 70, 72–73, 83, 106, 137, 171, 213n100; as science fantasy, 67–70 “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa,” 67–68 black feminist: critique, xviii, 54, 143, 145, 200n8, 212n70; discourse, 145; inquiry, xviii–xix; project, xix; reading practice, 79, 172 “Black Feminist Statement, A,” xviii Black History Month, 140 “Black Internationale: Story of a Black Genius against the World, The,” 63–67 Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, The, 30, 43

Index black leadership, xvii, xix–xxii, 6–8, 10– 13, 16, 20, 22–26, 28, 33, 35–42, 44, 46, 48, 50–54, 57, 59–63, 65, 69–70, 72–73, 77–78, 81–84, 89– 90, 103, 105–6, 125–27, 131, 136–42, 144, 146–47, 157, 161, 163, 165, 168–69, 192–93, 200n8, 202n14; charismatic leadership, 3, 6–7, 27, 36, 39, 70, 87, 89, 135, 142, 151, 157, 166, 168–70, 191, 193; iconography of, 139, 146, 169, 194; memorabilia of, 137; Negro, 11, 52–53; new, 79, 192; political leadership, ix, xv, xvii, xx, 8, 18–19, 22, 33, 35, 42, 45, 81, 91, 103, 135–36, 138, 143, 151, 154, 157; protest leadership, xx, 19; romance of, 48, 51, 193; spectacular, 10–11, 18, 27, 46, 51, 72, 111, 123, 128, 131, 135, 188, 190; studies of, 22– 27, 71, 78, 100, 143, 205n59, 206n72; void in, xxi, 45, 142–43, 157, 187–88, 192–93 Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 118, 219n32 black nationalism, xiv, 11, 18, 20, 27, 152, 199n6; agenda of, xiv; consumption of, xxi, 138; formations of, xix; ideologies of, 137; movements of, xvi, xviii, 118; nationhood and, xvi, 84–85, 90, 101, 106, 136 Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, xix Black No More, 51–52 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 153, 224n52 black politics, x–xxii, 3–4, 8–12, 16– 26, 35–42, 45, 50–54, 58, 70–73, 77, 79–81, 135–44, 147–48, 157, 164–66, 168–72, 180, 184– 86, 191–94, 201n14, 218n4; containment of freedom drive in, 168; scene of, xvi, 8, 136, 144, 180, 185

235

Black Power, xix, 3, 135, 138–40, 145, 147, 149, 152–55, 157, 161–62, 164–66, 168, 173, 190, 200n8 black queer studies, 143, 223n30 Bloody Sunday, 140 Bluest Eye, The, 170 Booker, Cory, 192 Book of Revelation, 60 Bordieu, Pierre, 201n1; structuring structures and, 4, 37, 201n1 Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, The, 26 Bourbonism and the House of Bourbon, 226n1 Boyce Davies, Carole, 230n3 Boycott, 137 Boyd, Todd, 163, 223n30 Bradley, David, 116, 121 Branch, Taylor, 32, 149–50 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 229n57 Brontë, Charlotte, 86, 97 Brooks, Daphne, 200n12 Brooks Higginbotham, Evelyn, 8, 26 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 39 Brown, Elaine, xix Brown, Elsa Barkley, 7–8, 26, 145 Bunche, Ralph, 20, 205n59 Burroughs, Nanny, 207n89 Caliban, 108 captives, 6, 32, 118 Carby, Hazel, xviii, 22, 26, 40, 43, 72, 146, 212n70 Carmichael, Stokely, 220–21n53 carnival, 109, 164 Catholic Church, 12–13, 173 Cedric the Entertainer, 152 “Certainly,” xii charisma, x, xiii–xxi, 3–4, 11–16, 18– 24, 26–27, 35–36, 39–42, 54, 57, 60–62, 64, 67–73, 77–79, 81–86, 90, 92–94, 100–101, 103, 105, 110, 113, 119, 126, 128–29, 136– 38, 142–44, 147, 149–51, 156–58,

236

Index

160–62, 164–67, 171–72, 179–80, 184–85, 190–92, 200n9, 201n14, 201n1, 223n33; feminist critique of, 86; feminist deconstruction of, 85 postmortem, 142, 222–23n26; revolutionary force of, 14, 100– 101, 117; studies of, 14, 16; as tragicomedy, 161 Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society, 23 charismata, 13, 113, 119–20 charismatic leadership: archive and repertoire of, 175; spectacle of, xvi, 117, 137 charismatic scenario, ix–xxii, 3–33, 35, 37, 39, 41–42, 45, 54, 60, 62–63, 66–67, 69, 73, 77, 82, 94, 136–38, 144, 146, 162, 165–68, 189–91, 199–200n6, 218n4; public archive of, 23; traditional African America and, xiii. See also restaging charlatan, xvi, 36, 65, 70, 81, 83, 143 Chase, Rev. J. H., 44 Chesnutt, Charles, 27 Chicago, xx, 8, 39, 50, 57–59, 109, 154; black Chicagoans, 148 Chicago Defender, 16, 48, 50 Chisholm, Shirley, 19 Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker, 143 church, black Christian, 5–8, 12–14, 17, 27, 39, 51–53, 62, 69, 79, 84, 123, 144, 167, 169, 180, 192, 204n46, 209n15 citizenship, 6, 19, 37, 41, 190, 202n3; black, 3–4, 6, 12; modern, 4 Civilization and Its Discontents, 71 civil rights: history, 26, 106–7, 110–12, 128, 135–36, 139–40, 154, 162, 185, 191–92; leaders, xxi, 106, 111–12, 119, 128, 135–36, 138– 40, 149–56, 161–64, 168, 191–92; marches, 27, 140; memory, 11, 139–41, 148–49, 168–69, 191–92, 222n18; movements, xviii, 3, 11,

26, 73, 108, 110–11, 119, 128, 135, 138, 141, 147–50, 156, 161–63, 168, 219n18; narratives, xvi–xvii, xx, 106, 108–13, 116–31, 136, 194; post–, xii, xvi–xvii, xxi, 12, 107–8, 131, 135–37, 139–40, 143–47, 157, 160–72, 185, 194, 221n9, 223n30, 231n16; protest, xvi, xxi, 121, 141, 161, 179, 191; scholarship, 11, 107, 135–36; spectacle, 11, 106–9, 116–17, 121, 135–39, 149–51, 160, 168, 194; struggle, 11, 110, 137, 149; television news media and, 110–13, 116, 135–36 Civil Rights Act, 168 civil rights/Black Power memorial, 139– 42, 147, 149, 152, 154, 157, 163, 165–66, 169, 173, 190–91, 222n18; film and, 139 Clark, Septima, 145 class, xix, 6–9, 11, 14, 16, 18, 22–23, 25, 30, 51–53, 59, 72, 79–80, 114, 151, 156–57, 165, 169–70, 192, 200n8, 218n4, 226n1 clearing, the, 186 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 140–41 Clyburn, James, 191–92 Cohen, Cathy, 26, 144, 169 collectives: black radical, 13; black religious, 6; political, 5; social, 6; spectral, 114, 121 collectivity, xvii, xxi, 79, 86, 107, 109, 121, 180; black, 141, 171; prophetic, 13, 72; radical, xxii, 129 colonial: others, 8; subjects, 108 coloniality, 129 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, xx, 8–10 Colvin, Claudette, 145 Combahee River Collective, xviii commonsense, black nationalist politics and, xiii–xiv, xix, 11, 18–20, 25, 27, 81, 103, 107, 112, 143, 199–200n6

Index contestation, xiv, xvii–xviii, 3, 10, 20, 23, 26, 32–33, 36, 50, 61, 73, 78, 110, 119, 131, 136, 194; archive of, x, xvii, 4, 36, 42, 77, 103, 172; scene of, xxi, 87, 180, 186 Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, 44–45 conversion, 17, 55–56, 64–65; architecture of, 64; ecstatic, 31, 64; jailhouse, 17; Jamesian scene of, 59; of Martin Luther King Jr., 17, 79; narrative of, 152; political, 29, 55, 58, 72; social, 58; spectacle of, 65; of water into wine, 18 counterarchive, 12, 108 Cox, Oliver C., 20, 24–25 Crisis, 47, 51–52 “Criteria of Negro Art,” 50 critics, 24, 54, 68, 78, 87, 91, 119, 213n100, 228n38, 228n43; of Black Aesthetics, 50; cultural, xviii, 138; literary, 22; social, xii, 3 Cuffe, Paul, 210n41 cultural studies, xviii, 4, 24–25, 27; black, 22, 25 Culture and Charisma: Outline of a Theory, 23 Cummings, Elijah, 192 curiosity, xvii, 131, 136–37, 169, 181, 185; archive of, 147 Danto, Arthur Coleman, 205–6n71 Dark Princess, xvi–xvii, 37, 45, 48, 50– 51, 53–62, 70, 72–73, 83, 171, 212n70, 212n74, 213n93, 214n112; as melodrama, 62 Davis, Angela, 145 Davis, Ossie, 138, 141 Davis, Thulani, 108–9 Dearborn Street Corridor, 9 decolonization, 112–13 Def Jam Records, xiii democracy, 21, 84, 95, 103, 171; brutality and, 4; participatory, 137;

237

radical, 118; retreat of, 73; visions of, 182, 185 Department of Agriculture, 231n16 Derrida, Jacques, 144 desegregation, 138, 154, 189 desire, black political, ix, xvi, xx, 11– 12, 17, 20, 33, 41, 44, 50–51, 58, 60, 69–73, 77, 82, 84, 137, 158, 163–65, 188; collective, 71–72; fear and, 90; justice and, 191; phenomenological experience of, 79–80; romantic, 58, 60, 62, 70; sexual, 56, 69 Detroit, 39, 111 deus ex machina, 61–62; machina ex machina as variation of, 69 diaspora, 77; and modern black freedom dreams, 29 Dickson-Carr, Darryl, 91, 161, 217n56 Diedrich, Maria, 217n61 Different Drummer, A, xvi–xvii, xx–xxi, 105–31, 158, 221n56; strategic withdrawal in, 113, 158. See also disappearance Different World, A, 138, 221n9 disappearance, xvi, 42, 68, 70, 87, 106–9, 112–14, 120–21, 123–24, 126–27, 130, 136, 229n52; selfdisappearance, xvii, 106 disidentification, 37, 199n3 divinity, 16, 21, 23, 27, 31, 43–44, 46, 58, 61–62, 70, 77, 82, 85, 94, 96, 106, 135, 137, 150, 171, 176–81, 192 division of labor, gendered, 6 Douglass, Frederick, xv, xix, 9–11, 29– 30, 46–47, 203n24 Dreamer, 17–18, 108–9 Dubey, Mahdu, 162 Du Bois, W. E. B., xvi–xvii, xx, 10, 27– 28, 33, 35–37, 39–40, 42–43, 45– 48, 50–73, 83, 115, 146, 171, 195, 210n41, 210–11n45, 212n70;

238

Index

double consciousness and, 4, 55; soul and, 146. See also idealism du Maurier, Daphne, 86 ecclesiae, black, 5 Economy and Society, 13, 71, 223n33 ecstasy, 12–13, 58, 66, 71–72, 79 Egypt (biblical), 81–82, 88–89, 91–94, 102, 172, 194; American Egyptomania and, 82; black imaginary and, 81–82; Egyptology and, 82. See also Moses, Man of the Mountain ekphrasis, 43 Ellison, Ralph, 106, 108–9, 143, 160 emancipation, 4–8, 29, 37–38, 190; postemancipation, 6–7, 28 “Emperor Effaces Himself, The,” 81 Emperor Jones, The, 43 epistemology, 14–15, 86, 105, 129, 145 erotics, xx, 36–37, 45, 48, 51–54, 65, 70–73, 79–80, 170; aesthetics and, 58, 65; human–divine encounters of, 56, 69; leadership and, 37, 52– 54, 59, 70, 73, 126; liberation as, 170; power and, xx, 54, 65–66, 79– 80; women’s, 77, 79–80 ethnic studies, xviii, 193 exceptionalism: American, 139; racial 46–47 exegesis, black sermonic, 19 Exodus, xvii, 83–87, 90–91, 95–97, 99, 101, 103, 135, 140, 151, 172, 175–77, 184–85, 227–28n32; Hurston’s rewriting of, xvii, 77–78, 81, 93–94, 101, 103, 216–17n50; Morrison’s revision of, 172, 174–78, 181, 184–85, 227–28n32. See also Moses, Man of the Mountain; Paradise Exodus and Revolution, 83–84 Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, 83 expressive culture: black, xxi, 47, 187; of racial and ethnic minorities, 193– 94

facework, 45, 210n39 fantastic, the, 26, 42, 54, 91, 108, 136, 141, 166–67, 187 Farrakhan, Louis, x, xii–xiii fascism, xx, 36, 69–70, 93, 209n15 Fauset, Arthur Huff, 209n15 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 105, 145 femininity, xiii, 98, 207n89, 221n56; as antirevolutionary, 130; denigrated, 129, 221n56 feminist studies, 25, 54, 223n30 femme fatale, 90, 97–98, 100 Ferguson, Jeffrey B., 211n63 Ferguson, Roderick, xix, 14, 71, 80, 213n93 fetish, 45, 145; commodity fetish, 145–46 fiction, x, xv, xviii–xxii, 3–4, 11–12, 16, 23, 26–27, 54, 62, 77, 81–83, 106, 189, 191–93; absent presence and present absence in, 144; civil rights in, 108–13, 117, 119, 131; explanatory, 126, 129, 136; romantic, 85, 89, 171 Fifteenth Regiment of New York’s National Guard, 39–40 Fikes, Robert, Jr., 220n38 “Fire and the Cloud, The,” 81, 215n18 First Baptist Church, 140 founder, x, xiii, 15, 82, 86, 91, 94, 101, 178, 224n52; foreigner as, 86; as national leader, 82, 91, 94–95 Fraile-Marcos, Ana Maria, 176 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 91–92, 217n57 Frazier, E. Franklin, 202n5 freedom struggle, black, xv, 4, 20, 37, 46, 106–13, 119–20, 128, 131, 135, 140, 167, 190. 192; as liberal rights struggle, 119; mediatization of, 118; as a series of violences, 171; women’s work in, 145

Index Freud, Sigmund, 71, 216–17n50 Fromm, Erich, 71 fugitivity, xviii, 118, 130, 171, 186 Gaines, Ernest, 189 Gaines, Kevin K., 26, 39, 202n14, 208n8 Garrow, David J., 151 Garvey, Marcus, xvi, xx, 18, 27, 31–32, 36, 39, 43–45, 70, 81; detention in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, 43–45 Garvey Day, 44 Gates, David, 228n43 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 22, 35, 162, 203n24, 225n63 gender, ix–xx, 5–11, 14–15, 21–23, 25–28, 47, 54, 72, 85, 101, 123– 31, 146, 165, 169–72, 178, 191, 200n8, 202n14, 207n89, 209n23, 221n56; hierarchies of, xiii, xv, 5–6, 10, 28, 42, 73, 78, 100, 128–30 Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, 26 Get on the Bus, 141–42 ghosts, xvi, xxi, 90, 120, 171, 173–74, 179–80; ghostly figuration and, 135, 144, 163–66, 171, 221n6 Giddings, Paula, 8–9 Gillman, Susan, 50 Gilmore, Glenda, 7, 26 Gilroy, Paul, 4, 212n84 Glaude, Eddie, 83–85, 89–90, 101, 227–28n32 globalization, 4; capital and, xxi, 117; economic crisis and, 189 Gordon, Avery, 162–63, 216–17n50 Gosnell, Harold, 20 gothic, xvii, xxi, 78, 83, 86–87, 89–91, 95–97, 100, 103, 106, 131, 169– 74, 179, 183–85, 217–18n50, 217n51; black feminist versions of, 169, 172, 184; female, 86–87, 90,

239

97; heroines of, 90, 183–84; irony in, 87; literary tradition of, 90; monsters in, 90–92, 95, 100, 172, 176, 178, 183, 218n57. See also Moses, Man of the Mountain; Paradise governmentality, 60 Goyal, Yogita, 54, 212n74 grace, gift of, 12–13, 16, 31–32, 39, 59, 61, 68, 77, 82 grassroots: movement, 112, 122, 125; organizing, 136; political education, 188; resistance, 112, 126 “Great Expectations,” 221n9 Great Migration, 35–36, 38–39, 41; lynchings and race riots after, 208n8 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 200n12 Guterman, Norbert, 20, 210n30 Haitian revolution, 30, 46, 207n95 Halberstam, Judith, 207n89 Hall, Stuart, 138 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 145 Hanchard, Michael George, 199n4 Harlem, xvi, xx, 39–41, 44, 51, 56, 64 Harlem Renaissance, 36, 42 Harris, Trudier, 108, 121, 125 Harrison, Hubert, 39 Hartman, Saidiya, 4, 15 Hayes Compromise of 1876, 6–7, 35 Haytian Pavilion, 9–10 Hebrew, 85, 88–89, 91, 93, 95–97; Yahve, God of the, 85, 89 heroism, black male political, 29–30, 83, 89, 121, 183, 192 heteroglossia, xiv, 89, 156 Hill, Robert A., 68–69, 213n100 hip hop, xiii, 137, 164 historians, xx, 12, 30, 84–85, 101, 135–36, 145, 150, 209n23 historiography, 24, 50; contemporary black, 21; materialist, 27 Hitler, Adolf, 15 Hitlerian, 87, 93

240

Index

Hoffman, Tyler, 155 Holland, Sharon, xix, 229n47 Holloway, Jonathan Scott, 205n59 holy hollow, xvii, 179–80, 185–86, 194 home, 5–6, 90, 182, 185, 227–28n32, 228n41 Honig, Bonnie, 86–87, 91 horror fiction, xx, 78, 90–91 Huggins, Nathan Irvin, 78–79 humanities, 22, 193 humor, xvii, xxi, 81, 87, 131, 153, 156–57, 171; African American, 137, 147, 166; carnivalesque, 131, 156, 164; folk, 155, 164. See also Barbershop; White Boy Shuffle Hunt, Frederick V., 208–9n11 Hurricane Katrina, ix, 167–68, 226n1; necropolitics and, 168; and recovery, xii Hurston, Zora Neale, xvi–xvii, xx– xxi, 28–29, 33, 36, 73, 77–78, 81–83, 86–102, 106, 136, 146, 171–73, 176, 178, 181–83, 194, 215n18, 216–17n50, 217n56, 217n61 hush harbors, 165 Ice Cube, 147 ideal, xix, 13, 16, 36, 58, 61, 171, 207n89; black masculine as, 43, 72, 83, 85; charismatic, 143, 147, 150, 165, 199–200n6; cultural, xviii, 4, 6, 12, 42, 46, 48, 131; democratic social, 21; past as, 163–64; political, xviii, 3–5, 22, 60, 86; racial, 169, 175; rarefied, xv; regulatory, xix; romantic, xvi idealism, 51–54, 65, 165, 213n92 identity, 3, 23, 36, 86, 228n41; African Americans and, xix, 8, 36, 84, 163, 191; class and, 8; collective forms of, 84, 184; national, 78, 187–88; racial, 36, 41, 55, 135, 157 “I Have a Dream,” 19, 138, 204n53

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, 26, 219n18 incarceration, 193 incorporation, 142 Indiana, 168 Indio Amazónico, El, 209n22 inhumanity, black, 30 In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era, 26, 199n4, 200n1, 218n4, 221n9 intellectuals, African American, xv; black women writers as, 85–86 interiority, black, 121, 123 internationalism, black, 10–11, 53, 56, 59, 212n74 intimacy, black, 130, 150, 169 intraracial heirarchies, 7, 72, 90, 170– 71, 200n9; interracial hierarchies and, 90, 171 introjection, 142 Invisible Man, 106, 108–9 Iowa caucuses, 187 Iraq War, 189 Israel (biblical), 82, 85, 89, 91–93, 97– 98, 102, 106, 172, 193, 215n18 Iton, Richard, 26, 147, 164, 168, 199n, 200n12, 218n4, 221n9 Jabir, Johari, 204n53 Jackson, Blyden, 87 Jackson, Jesse, x, 142–43, 148–49, 154, 168, 192 Jackson, Jesse, Jr., 192 Jackson, John L., 231n16 Jackson, Mahalia, 19, 204n53 James, C. L. R., 29–30, 43 James, Joy, 25, 145, 212n70 James, Sharpe, 191–92 James, William, 55–56, 71; on the conversion scene, 55–56, 59 Jameson, Frederic, 226n60 Jane Eyre, 86, 97, 218n64

Index Jena 6, 168 Jenkins, Candice, xix, 169 Jim Crow, xvii, 35, 60, 108, 116, 171 Johnson, Barbara, 87–88, 92 Johnson, Charles, x, 17 Johnson, Clark, 33 Jones, James, 156 Jonestown, 156 Joseph, Peniel E., 220–21n53 jouissance, 66 Jun, Helen, 202n3 Kearly, Peter, 178 Keeling, Kara, 112, 221n56 Kelley, Norman, 143 Kelley, Robin D. G., 25, 36, 200n12, 209n23, 229n56 Kelley, William Melvin, xvi–xvii, xx, 73, 105–9, 113–17, 119–22, 125, 136, 158, 194 King, Coretta Scott, 140 King, Martin Luther, Jr., xv, xxi, 17, 27, 31–32, 52, 78–79, 84, 101, 109– 11, 135–43, 147–54, 156, 160–61, 165–66, 190–93, 204n53, 214n23 King–Obama figuralism, 187, 190–93 Kool-Aid, 156 Krasner, David, 18, 27, 207n102, 210– 11n45 Krumholz, Linda, 175, 179, 181 Lawrence, Jacob, 42 leadership, ix–x, xii–xiii, xv–xxii, 3, 5– 33, 35–48, 50–54, 56–63, 65, 67– 73, 77–79, 81–84, 87, 89–91, 96, 99–100, 102–3, 105–6, 109–12, 114–17, 119–21, 123–29, 131, 135–47, 150–51, 154, 156–59, 161–72, 174, 178, 182–89, 191– 94, 199n6, 200n8, 207n89, 215n23, 216–17n50, 220–21n53, 226n1

241

Leadership among Negroes in the United States, 20–21, 24 lectio divina, 30–32 Lee, Spike, 137–38, 141–42, 223n30, 225n72 leftists, black, 51, 168 Leimert Park, 168 Levering Lewis, David, 40 Levison, Stanley David, 215n23 Lewis, John, 192 liberalism, 11, 14, 37–38, 58, 60–61, 109, 119; civil society and, 213; democracy and, 4; freedom and, 37, 113; liberty and, 208n5; order and resistance and, 119 liberation, 4, 17–18, 42, 56, 58, 68, 83, 112, 119, 129, 155,173, 182, 184–85; black, 56, 68, 83, 172; as erotic work, 170; haunted moments of, 173; from masculinism, 86, 89; myth of, 193 Liberia, 66 Lincoln, C. Eric, 203n20, 204n46 linear: perspective, 107; progression, 89, 190; seduction of linearity, 89– 90; structure, 227–28n32 literary studies, xviii, 22, 24, 26; black, 21–22, 52; critics of, 22 longing, 13, 58–60, 194; for the dead, 140; erotic, 45; for freedom, 16; for leadership, 30, 50, 61, 142, 167– 68, 188; messianic, 189; political, 48, 58–60; romantic, 42, 58–60, 100; uncritical, 25; upward– outward, 43 Long Walk Home, The, 138 Lorde, Audre, 73, 79–80, 117 Los Angeles, 45, 137, 141, 157, 168; riots of 1992, 137 loudspeaker, 38, 41, 208–9n11 Love, 170 Lowenthal, Leo, 20, 210n30 Lubiano, Wahneema, xix, 18, 199– 200n6, 225n69, 225n72

242

Index

lynching, 105, 123, 125, 127– 28, 208n8; black women’s campaigns against, 10, 80; feminization of black men via, 221n56 Macpherson, C. B., 208n5 macrofiction, 3, 109–10 Malcolm X, 22, 27, 111–12, 125, 135, 138, 150, 166, 221n8; film about, 137–43, 147, 221n8 Mama’s Gun, xi–xii Mamiya, Lawrence, 203n20, 204n46 Manigault-Bryant, James, 191, 223n33 Marable, Manning, 5, 25, 38 March on Washington, 111–12, 148, 163 Mardi Gras, 163–64 market: exchange, 63; society, 145–46; transnational, 146 marketplace, 137–38, 145–47; for American literature, 189; production of black activist objects and, 138, 145–47 Marrow of Tradition, The, 27, 206n78 Marxist theory, xviii, 208n104; Jamesonian understanding of nostalgia and, 145; Marxist notion of history as class struggle, 30; Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and, 208n104 masculinity, 6, 21, 54, 61, 83, 138, 147, 173, 207n89; American ideology of, 129; black, 6, 129, 138, 145, 201n1; black hetero masculinity, xiii; black political, xix, 164; feminized black, 130; heterosexual, 30, 201n14; militant, 221n9; modern, 117; normative, xv, xix, 6, 21; revolutionary, 150 Mbembe, Achille, 168 McDowell, Deborah, 87, 173 McGuire, Danielle L., 26, 107, 145, 151 Meeks, James, 154

melancholia, xxi, 141, 161, 164, 222n25 memorial impulse, 141–42, 154 Mercado, Walter, 209n22 Meridian, 108–9 “Message to the Grass Roots, A,” 111, 125 messiah, black leader as, xvi, 60, 62, 69, 83, 157–58, 177; J. Edgar Hoover’s fear of, 105 microfictions, 3, 109 Midian (biblical), 82, 89, 92–93, 96 Midway Plaisance, 8–9 migration, 38, 171 Miller, Monica, 146 Million Man March, ix, xii, 3, 137, 141, 199–200n6; Part II, xii Millions More March, x–xv, 3, 19, 199– 200n6 Millions More Movement, ix–x, 199n2 minstrel: cast, 125; performance, xx– xxi; performer, 109; show, 122, 125, 127–28; postminstrel trope, 125 minstrelsy, 105 missionary evangelism, 63 Mississippi, 109–10 modernity, xx, 4, 14–15, 38, 40, 47; black migratory, xvii, 38, 42; black political, x, xx, 4–14, 23, 26–27, 35–40, 43, 47, 50–51, 54, 62, 70, 72–73, 80–81, 89–90, 135, 164, 192, 202n3, 209n23; black urban, 208n10; capitalist, 11, 15, 40, 144; Western, xiv, 4, 14, 41, 70 Montgomery, Alabama, 84, 149–51 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 137, 151 Montgomery Improvement Association, 32, 149, 151 Mormonism, 15, 101 Morris, Aldon D., 204n46 Morrison, Toni, xvii, xxi, 20, 33, 73, 136, 146, 167–86, 189, 194, 227n29, 228n41, 229n47

Index Moses (biblical), xxi, 77–78, 81–82, 84–85, 91, 95, 101, 142, 175–76, 190; Harriet Tubman as, 21, 215n30; Isaac Hayes as, 168; myth and, 100; Moses Generation, 140, 175 Moses, Bob, 19 Moses, Man of the Mountain, xvi, xx, 28– 29, 77–103, 106, 171–73, 184, 217n56, 217n61 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 22, 61 Moten, Fred, 112, 118, 122, 220n43 mourning, xxi, 88, 140–41, 144, 164, 179 Mt. Sinai Holy Church, 209n15 Mullen, Bill, 54–55 multiculturalism, 4 Myrdal, Gunnar, 71 naming, 92, 142 narrative, xv, xvii, xx, 4, 11–12, 14, 16– 27, 31–33, 43, 59, 61, 65, 69–73, 77–78, 83, 85, 89–90, 96, 99, 101, 106–8, 114, 120–21, 129–31, 147, 162, 167–69, 173–79, 185, 188, 190–94; African American, xv, xvii– xxi, 19–22, 33, 70, 73, 80, 131, 136, 169, 194; of black politics, 4, 16, 112, 120, 136–37, 168–69, 185, 192; dominant forms of, 30, 107, 147; heroics of, 85, 96–97, 184; Madonna figures in, 151; master narrative, 11, 16, 20, 107, 111, 193, 218n4; national, 139, 145, 157, 166, 170, 184; official, 164, 184, 227n29; and performative regime, xv, 3, 72–73, 77, 167, 179; post–civil rights, 108–9; public, 16, 20, 24; of self and nation, 145, 150, 167; tropology of, 35 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 29–30 Nasstrom, Kathryn, 11, 109–10, 128

243

nation, ix, xvii, xix, 27, 78, 82, 93–103; allegories of, 86; modern capitalist forms of, 13; nation-state, 5 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 231n16 National Black Political Convention, 168 Nation of Islam, x, 39 “Nation Time,” 168 Native Americans, 10, 173 Neal, Mark Anthony, 154, 163 Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom, 26 Negro Leadership: A Tentative Analysis, 20 Negro Politicians, 20 Negro World, 31, 43–45 Nelson, H. Viscount, 25 New Amerykah, Pt. I: 4th World War, xii New Jack films, 137 New Negro Movement, 51; art of, 53, 60; era of, xvi, xx; literature of, xix–xx New Orleans, 167 news media, xx–xxi, 110–12, 118, 135 New Testament, 60 Newton, Huey, 224n52 New World, 16, 107, 118; captivity in, 15 New York, 39–40, 45, 54–55, 143 New York Times Magazine, 191–92 1920s, xvi, 36, 38, 40, 42–43, 51–52, 61, 68 1930s, 36, 42–43, 51–52, 61; early, 124; mid-, 4 1959, 108–9 1960s, 11, 26, 84, 106, 108, 112, 136–40, 145, 148, 151–53, 157, 164, 166, 169–70, 221n9; early, 11; late, 25, 52; post, 222n17 1990s, xxi, 25, 137–39, 141–43, 145, 147, 157, 169–70, 212n70, 221n8; late, xii, 143

244

Index

Nobel Prize, 52 nonrational, 70–73, 78–80; desire produced by, 37, 67, 72; knowledge formed by, 72, 78–80, 100 normativity: gender and sexual, 21, 172–73; heterosexual, 60; racial, 170, 172–73 North Carolina, 7, 45, 167 Nunley, Vorris, 154, 165 Nyong’o, Tavia, 23–24 Obama, Barack, xix, xxi, 140–41, 187– 93, 230n6, 230n7 official story, 20, 24, 33, 80, 108, 131, 136, 145–51, 154–56, 161–64, 175, 177–81, 184, 227n29, 229n5; of contemporary black struggles for self-determination, 131; as master narrative, 20; as reproductive myth, 179; and spectacle, 136 Old Testament, 172 O’Neill, Eugene, 43 order, 19–20, 42, 119–21, 126, 130, 155, 162, 174, 178–79, 182, 185; capitalist, 5–6, 118, 144; modern economic, 223n33; new, 82, 85, 101, 172; suspension of, 164; Western terms of, xiii–xiv, 16, 70, 80, 109 Outkast, 154 Outlines of Church History, 12–13 Oval Office, 111 pageantry, 45–46, 54; of divinely ordained black supremacy, 53; politics and, 39, 46; speech-making spectacle as, 32. See also Star of Ethiopia pageants, 39–40, 43, 45–50, 59–60, 66, 69, 210–11n45 Panther, 138, 153, 224n52 Paradise, xvi–xvii, xxi, 146, 167–86, 189, 194, 227n24, 227–28n32,

228n43, 229n47; nativity narrative in, 178–79; reproductive myths in, 179 Parks, Rosa, 140, 149–52, 154–56 patriarchy, black, xiv, 6–7, 164, 169 Patrick, Deval, 192 Payne, Charles, 107, 111, 136 performance, ix–xvi, xx, 5–10, 15–17, 19, 22–24, 28, 36, 46, 112, 127–28, 168, 180, 188; black political, xvi, 10, 15, 26, 33, 36, 39–41, 45, 48, 56, 67, 78, 83, 99, 105–12, 135, 144–46, 168, 200n12, 209n23; theories of, xviii, 15, 23–24, 36, 207n89, 209n22, 220–21n23 Petry, Ann, 90 Philadelphia, 39, 45 phonograph, 38, 208–9n11 photography, 26, 43, 111, 219n18 Pittsburg Courier, 50 Playing in the Dark, 170–71 Plessy v. Ferguson, 35 political science, xviii, 25–26, 78, 119 popular culture, xxii, 13, 33, 135; black, xvi, 39, 135, 138, 142, 147, 163, 199n4 possessive individualism, liberal complex of, 6 postcharismatic politic, xviii postindustrial black life, 142, 165 postmodern: black cultural production, 137–38; black fiction and film, 135, 164, 172–73; black novel, 162 postmodernity, black political, x, xv, 4, 23, 164, 169, 192 postracialism, 191–92 postsoul, 4, 163 power, xv, xx, 19, 78, 82, 84–85, 88, 90–91, 94, 100, 144, 176–77, 181–84, 181, 188; American biopower as ruse of, 188; black political, 7, 33, 73; conjurational, 215n30; divine, 16, 23, 181; double, 112; “hoodoo,” 93; imperial,

Index 92; juridical, 14, 94; leader’s death and, 222; masculine, 19, 142; mystical, 146; to name, 129; organizational, 111; phallic, 127; plural, 181; racial, 11; state, 112; supernatural, 12, 146; structure, 172, 174, 177, 180; transfer of, 30; two-headed, 95–96; unequal, 172, 184, 200n8, 229n52; woman’s power silenced, 102; women’s erotic power, 77, 79–80 premodern, 35, 40, 46, 71–72, 209n22 present absence, xxi, 44, 144, 162 Price, Melanye T., 166 Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy, xix Prometheus, 92 protest, ix, xxi, 11, 109–10, 121, 135, 140, 151, 161, 168, 190–92; black, ix–xxi, 110, 118, 135, 139–40, 146, 151, 191; civil rights, xvi, xxi, 121, 138–41, 151, 161, 179, 191; history, 106, 138–40, 151, 191; melodrama of, 62; methods of, 107; paraphernalia of, 138–39 radical forms of, 140; spectacle of, 108, 114, 122 public culture, xvii, xxi, 35, 51, 231n16; black, xvi–xxi, 35 public sphere, 7, 78–79, 90, 122, 144– 45, 208n9 punctuation, 185–86, 229n57 Quan, H. L. T., 129–30 race, ix, xiii, xvi, xix, 5, 10, 14, 22, 68, 80, 106, 140, 146–47, 162, 170, 172, 191–93, 231n16 race men, xvi, 31, 35, 42–43, 61, 83, 104, 111, 112, 122, 124 Race Men, xviii, 2 Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, 25, 200n12, 209n23

245

racial: capital, 6, 118, 129, 188; capitalism, 10, 15, 25, 28; difference, 71, 110, 117–18, 122– 24, 127, 169; deviance, 71; injury, xvi, 139, 193; justice, 213n92; paranoia, 193, 231n16 racialized surplus populations, 139, 222n17 Raiford, Leigh, 26, 107, 112, 139, 219n18, 221n18 Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, xix Randolph, A. Phillip, 27, 39, 51 Ransby, Barbara, 51, 107, 110–11, 145, 215n23 Rashkow, Ilona, 85 Rasmussen, R. Kent, 68–69, 213n100 rationality, 13–14, 37, 50–51, 57, 59, 65, 69–73, 78–80, 83, 101; black progress and, 50; capitalist modernity and, 144; extrarationality as, 13; hyperrational and, 69–70; irrationality and, xvi, 14, 37, 70– 71, 123; prerationality and, 13 Rayner, Alice, 223n5 Reagon Johnson, Bernice, 145 realism, 162, 225n69, 225n72 reason, 67–71, 95–96; reification of, 69; return of, 67–69 “Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, The,” 10 Rebecca, 86 Reconstruction, ix, xvi, xix, xx, 3, 5–7, 24, 37, 50, 61, 175, 193, 203n24; and post-Reconstruction, 3–9, 24, 35–36, 42, 172, 202n14 redemption, 42, 228n43; racial, 142 Redmond, Shana, 209n23 Red Summer, 38 reductio ad absurdum, 62–63, 69, 158, 161 Reed, Adolph, 24, 141, 143, 226n77 Reed, Christopher, 9

246

Index

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 163 regime, 16–20, 117, 136, 187; colonial, 108; cultural, 20, 23, 70, 136, 184; Jim Crow, 116; narrative and performative, xv, 3, 19, 35, 72, 167, 179; post-Reconstruction ideological, 8; of representation, 129; storytelling as, 16, 35 religious studies, xviii; black, 21 Remnick, David, 230n6 representation, xv, xviii, 51, 112, 118, 122, 128–30, 162; of African American identity after slavery, 8; black manhood and, 144–45, 221n56; black political, xviii, 36; of black savagery, 9; of divine chosenness, 175;as frame, 112, 119–20; mass media and, xviii; punctuation and, 229n57; as representational complex, 36, 90– 91, 168; subjection and, 116, 201n1; Vertretung and Darstellung, 203n24, 208n104 representivity, black male, 37, 105–6, 192 resistance: black, 15, 19, 73, 81, 105– 7, 115, 117, 119–20, 137, 149, 151–52, 154, 193; collective forms of, 19, 109, 123, 131, 209n23; erasing of women’s radical resistance from, 145; grassroots forms of, 112; to Italian aggression in Ethiopia, 214n106; masculinist myths of, 121; Obama candidacy as result of, 190; radical forms of, xxi, 107, 219n32; to terror, 41, 105; to white supremacy, 6, 193; workingclass, 218n4 respectability: black American, 10; bourgeois, 202n14; politics of, 5, 7; Victorian, 51 restaging, ix, xxi, 22, 26, 32–33, 50, 52, 74, 83, 106, 112, 131, 136,

140, 181; black women’s, ix, 77–78, 86; comic, 147; gothic, 86–87, 103 revolution, 57, 59, 62–73, 82, 85; art for, 60, 66; black internationalism and, 53–54; messiah of, 60 Richmond, Virginia, 7 Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, 26, 207n89, 209n23 Rise and Fall of Modern Black Leadership, The, 25 Robeson, Paul, 43 Robinson, Cedric, 15, 22, 71, 118, 145– 46, 151 Robinson, Jo Ann, 145 Robnett, Belinda, 107, 128 Rock, Chris, 142–43 romance, xvii, 47, 53–54, 61, 82–83, 86, 91, 185, 213n92; conventions of, 82, 86; gothic, 86; heteronormative revolutionary, 73; national forms of, 78; political forms of, 53– 54, 61, 78, 86 Romano, Renee, 139, 222n18 “Rosa Parks” (song), 154 Ross, Marlon, 10, 42–43 Rustin, Bayard, 215n23 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 117 Salt Eaters, The, 108–9 Schiffer, Irvine, 23 Schuyler, George, xvi, xx, 33, 36–37, 45, 50–53, 62–73, 79, 83, 106, 137, 146, 171, 194, 211n63, 212n69, 213n100 Schweitzer, Albert, 23 Scott, James, 107, 218n4 Seale, Bobby, 224n52 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 19–20, 173 segregation, xvii, xxi, 24, 110, 187; life after, 166, 171; segregationists and, xxi Selma, Alabama, 140

Index serial novel, xvi–xvii, 50, 52–53, 62, 68, 70, 83, 213n100. See also Black Empire sermon, black, 5, 19, 31–33, 39, 81, 140, 180, 184, 191, 209n15; sermon chant, 204n46; sermonette, 140; as sociopolitical gesture, 170 sexuality, xix, 14, 22, 54, 72, 78, 169; heteropatriachal policing of, xix, 78, 85; nonnormative forms of, xvii, 78 Shakespeare, William, 109 Shange, Ntozake, 108 Sharpton, Al, 143, 154 Shelley, Mary, 95, 217n57 Sherrod, Shirley, 231n16 Shockley, Evie, 91 signifying, 65, 147, 155–58, 162, 199n4 silence, xiv–xv, xvii, 20–21, 90, 102, 106, 109, 113, 117–18, 147; historical forms of, 229n52; performative acts of, 117–18; radical forms of, 117–18, 131; subaltern forms of, 107, 117 Simmons, Russell, xiii Singh, Nikhil Pal, 4, 139 slavery, xiv, 5, 15, 24, 35, 42, 46–47, 78, 85, 100, 102, 189, 202n5; black life after, xiv, 4–6, 8, 12, 35, 171 Smiley, Tavis, x Smith, Joseph, 101 Smith, Philip, 23 Smith, Robert, 25, 100 Smith, Theophus, 84, 101, 215n30 Smith, Valerie, 137 socialism, 124 social movements, xv, xviii, 4, 24, 71, 110, 117, 194–95, 229n56; black, xiii, xvi, 3–4, 12, 16, 20, 26, 39, 72, 80, 83, 107, 128–29, 131, 152, 164, 200n8, 201n14, 204n sociology, xviii, 15, 22–25, 71, 101, 119 Sohm, Rudolph, 12–13

247

song, ix, xi–xv, 33, 72, 81, 102–3, 154; black love, 199n4; protest, 135 soul, 148; as culture of black modernity, 59, 148, 154, 163; era, 148, 155, 163 Souls of Black Folk, The, 27–28, 46 South, the, xxi, 7, 27, 35, 38–39, 41, 78, 105–11, 120–22, 136, 140, 187 South Central, 141–42 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 109 sovereignty, xvi, 6, 15, 37–38, 113; institution of, 168 space: communal, 153; discursive, 32, 155; gendered binary of, 182–83; hauntological, 174, 179 interstitial, xiv; liberatory, 184–85, 194; queer, 178, 182; time and, 19, 44, 136 speaking in tongues, 13, 39 speech, ix, xi–xiv, 9–10, 17–19, 32, 99, 111, 116–18, 122, 138, 140–41, 149–50, 159–61, 187, 189–90, 193, 204n53, 230n1; call and response of black political, 27; improvised, 18–19; inspired (prosthesis), 31–32, 204n46; miracle of, 9; mystical power of, 31; ordered, 116; prophetic, 18, 31, 150; spectacle of, 160; stump, 189–90; withheld, xvii, 117–18; woman’s, 168 Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership, The, 23 Spillers, Hortense, 31–32 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 208n4 spokesmen: black male, 7–8, 11, 47, 109; as civilized exemplars, 7–8; divinely ordained, 135; white liberal antiracists and, 109 Star of Ethiopia, The, 39, 42–43, 45–48, 54, 60 state, the, xix, 4–6, 38, 112, 117–18, 167–68; black love song as critique

248

Index

of, 199n4; nation-state, 5; necropolitical workings of neoliberal state, 168; postracist promise narrative of, 167; radical critiques of, 168; U.S. racial state, xxi Stewart, Jacqueline, 38–39, 208n9 Story, Tim, 33 St. Paul, 13, 29, 119 Street, The, 90 struggle, 4–5, 8, 10; anticolonial forms of, 124, 129; discursive, x, xxii, 32, 136; for liberal rights, 109, 119; against white oppression, 40, 60, 73, 129, 168–69 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 112 subjection, 15, 116–17, 122, 125; blackness as, 127; gendered, 28, 128–29; racialized exclusion and, 14, 42, 221n56 Sula, 170 Sundquist, Eric, 45 surrealism, 131, 229n56 Sweeney, Megan, 185, 228n43 Tate, Claudia, 30, 54, 56, 61, 212n70, 213n92 Taylor, Diana, ix, xv–xvi, 16, 209n22; and un relajo, ix Taylor, Paul C., 205–6n17 temporality, xxi, 44, 141, 144, 190–91, 230n8 Ten Commandments, 29 Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, The, 22 terror, 7, 15, 35, 38, 41, 90, 105, 126, 140, 167, 169, 173–74, 177, 187– 88, 193–94, 218n4; of Western modernity, 4 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 28–29 Theory of Social and Economic Organization, The, 13, 22, 71 Thompson, Mark Christian, 36 “Time’s a Wastin,” ix–xiii

Toote, Fred A., 44 Torres, Sasha, 110 Trafton, Scott, 81 Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, 25 transcript: hidden, 107, 131, 218n4; public, 107, 113, 130 Trouilliot, Michel-Rolph, 20–21, 30, 126, 184, 207n95, 229n52 “Truth According to Eddie, The,” 148– 49, 154–55 Tubman, Harriet, xix, 21, 215n30 Turner, Nat, 46–47, 210n41, 219n32 twentieth century, x, xvii–xxii, 3–5, 8, 11, 13, 16–20, 25–28, 33, 35–43, 45, 48, 50, 61, 72–73, 77, 79–82, 91, 103, 105–6, 129, 136, 146, 172, 186, 192, 202n14, 209n13; archive of black cultural production in, 105; early, 54, 209n15; end of, 137; first half of, 72, 117, 148, 167, 220n38; late, 4, 83, 169; latter half of, 84; long, ix, 11, 146 2000s, 139, 142, 145, 212n70; early, 143 “Tyrone,” xii uncanny, the, 91, 173, 216–17n50 United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), xvi, xx, 3, 18, 27, 31, 39– 40, 43–45, 81, 207n102, 209n23; parades, of xx, 3, 18, 27, 39 unity, xiii; black national form of, 47; cross-racial forms of, xi; intraracial forms of, 9; psychospiritual forms of, 55; social forms of, 33 uplift ideology, xiv, 7–9; racial uplift, 25, 51, 123, 161; black middleclass uplifters, 52–53; neo-uplift narratives, 147 Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, 26, 202n14, 208n8

Index urban blacks, xx, 35–36, 42, 52–53; culture, 38–39; gangster film and, 225n52; migration and, 38; modernity of, 208n10; politics, 40–41; populations, 41; rebellions, 52; in urban centers, 36, 38; as urbane and primitive, 72 “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, The,” 79–80 utopia, 26, 93, 101, 119, 172, 182; antiutopian story, 162 vanishing: point, xxi, 107–8, 115, 117, 127, 130–31, 218n4; spectacle, 106, 113–14, 117, 121, 125 Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 71 verbal display, 38, 42–43, 208n10 vernacular, Southern African American, 78 Vesey, Denmark, 210n41 Vibe Magazine, 145 Victorian: era, 86, suit, 146 violence, xv–xvi, 4, 7, 12, 20, 67, 73, 89, 95, 128, 169, 171–75, 184; black freedom struggle as, 171; black leadership and, 127–28, 169; black radical tradition and, 118, 219n32; black solidarities and, 171; charismatic forms of, xv, 20–22, 26, 33, 101, 191;epistemological, xv, 19; gendered, xx, 21, 26, 73, 77, 81, 83, 89, 128–29, 140, 151; historical, xv, 19–20, 26, 73, 146, 218n4; intraracial forms of, 4, 78, 169; masculinist forms of, 127; racialized slavery and, 42; as retreat from democracy, 73; social forms of, xv, 19, 21; undemocratic forms of, 93; white supremacist forms of, 8, 169 Virginia, 7, 60 visibility, 106; black men and, 105–6; politics of, 110

249

Walker, Alice, 108–9 Walker, David, 210n41 Walker, Wyatt, 19 Wallace, Maurice O., 199–200n6, 201n1 Walters, Ronald, 25, 100 Walton, Jonathan, 13 Walzer, Michael, 83–84 Warren, Kenneth, 143, 206n78 Washington, Booker T., 10, 28, 50 Watkins, Mel, 155 Wattstax, 168 Weber, Max, xx, 13–16, 22, 71, 82, 101, 119, 129, 223n33, 224n43; theory of modernity, 14–15 Weems, Renita, 86–87 We Have No Leaders, 25 Weheliye, Alexander G., 208–9n11 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 60 Wells-Barnett, Ida, 9–10 West, Cornel, x, 146 White Boy Shuffle, The, xvi–xvii, xxi, 62, 83, 137, 146, 157–66, 171 white supremacy, 6, 81, 108, 116, 123, 165, 169, 184 Williams, Juan, 143 Willner, Ann Ruth, 23, 222–23n26 Winfrey, Oprah, 187–90, 193, 230n1, 230n5; Oprah culture industry, 230n1 Woods, Clyde, 226n1 World’s Fair, 8–10, 27 World War I, xv, xviii, xx, 5, 12, 27, 38, 41–42, 194; black nationalism after, 27 World War II, xx, 12, 37, 71, 103, 117; post–World War II, xx, 11–12, 73, 87, 107–13, 117, 131, 135, 138– 39, 146, 175

ERICA R. EDWARDS is assistant professor of English at the University of

California, Riverside.