Charisma and the fictions of Black leadership / Erica R. Edwards.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Edwards, Erica R. (Erica Renee)

Series:

Difference incorporated

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

Black people in literature.

Leadership in literature.

Charisma (Personality trait) in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xxii, 249 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2012]

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Restaging the charismatic scenario: fictions of African American leadership

Leadership's looks: the aesthetics of black political modernity

Moses, monster of the mountain: gendered violence in Zora Neale Hurston's Gothic

Disappearing the leader: the vanishing spectacle in civil rights fiction

"Cyanide in the kool-aid": black politics and popular culture after civil rights

Claim ticket lost: Toni Morrison's Paradise and American literature's Holy hollow.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Winner, 2012

ISBN:

9780816675456

0816675457

9780816675463

0816675465

OCLC:

747331806