Black charisma
Subtitle: fictions of political leadership
By: Erica R. Edwards
Series: Difference incorporated
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 249
ISBN-13: 9780816675456; 9780816675463
Subjects: Blacks in literature; Leadership in literature; African American authors; Charisma (Personality trait) in literature; History and criticism; American literature
Description: "Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership--this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition. By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, Edwards brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, Edwards demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics."--Page 4 of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Restaging the charismatic scenario: fictions of African American leadership; title: Leadership's looks: the aesthetics of black political modernity; title: Moses, monster of the mountain: gendered violence in Zora Neale Hurston's Gothic; title: Disappearing the leader: the vanishing spectacle in civil rights fiction; title: "Cyanide in the kool-aid": black politics and popular culture after civil rights; title: Claim ticket lost: Toni Morrison's Paradise and American literature's Holy hollow.