Rewriting Exodus

Anna Hartnell

Description

Exodus, as a powerful narrative of liberation, has been a central imaginative touchstone in the black American struggle against US racism. This book traces the concept in a number of pivotal black thinkers, and explores its signficance for contemporary America.



The exodus story is a fitting allegory for the painful experience of exile that disproportionately afflicted African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it also provides compelling imagery for the triumphant election of Barack Obama in 2008. Building around these themes, Anna Hartnell traces the intellectual development of one of the defining narratives of black American thinking on social justice in the United States.



In placing black America at the centre of the study of US culture, Rewriting Exodus suggests new ways of thinking about America's relationship with the Middle East and the wider postcolonial world. Hartnell's groundbreaking contribution marks a vital new chapter in American cultural and political history.
Acknowledgements

Introduction – Rewriting Exodus

1. Re-reading America: Barack Obama

2. Double Consciousness and the Master/Slave Dialectic: W.E.B. Du Bois

3. Excavating the Promised Land: Martin Luther King

4. Reclaiming ‘Egypt’: Malcolm X

5. Transcending the Nation: Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Conclusion - Exodus and Return in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Notes

Bibliography

index

Sujets

• Minority Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• USA
• United States of America
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 06 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849645904
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Rewriting Exodus

Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons Series editors: Ramon Grosfoguel (University of California at Berkeley), Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University) and S. Sayyid (University of Leeds)

Since the end of the Cold War, unresolved conjunctures and crises of race, ethnicity, religion, diversity, diaspora, globalisation, the West and the nonWest, have radically projected the meaning of the political and the cultural beyond the traditional verities of left and right. Throughout this period, Western developments in ‘international relations’ have become increasingly defined as corollaries to national ‘race relations’ across both the European Union and the United States, where the reformation of Western imperial discourses and practices has been given particular impetus by the ‘war against terror’. At the same time, hegemonic Western continuities of racial profiling and colonial innovations have attested to the incomplete and interrupted institutions of the postcolonial era. Today we are witnessing renewed critiques of these postcolonial horizons at the threshold of attempts to inaugurate the political and cultural forms that decolonisation now needs to take within and between the West and the ‘nonWest’. This series explores and discusses radical ideas that open up and advance understandings of these politically multicultural issues and theoretically interdisciplinary questions.

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REWRITING EXODUS

American Futures from Du Bois to Obama

Anna Hartnell

First published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Anna Hartnell 2011

The right of Anna Hartnell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2956 7 978 0 7453 2955 0

Hardback Paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth, EX10 9JB, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

Contents

Series Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction: Rewriting Exodus 1 Rereading America: Barack Obama 2 Double Consciousness and the Master/Slave Dialectic: W.E.B. Du Bois 3 Excavating the Promised Land: Martin Luther King 4 Reclaiming ‘Egypt’: Malcolm X 5 Transcending the Nation: Toni Morrison’sParadise Conclusion: Exodus and Return in PostKatrina New Orleans

Notes Select Bibliography Index

vi x

1 17

66 98 133 171

215

241 266 275

Series Preface

Writing about Barack Obama is no longer novel. Since 2008 the number of books published about the first African American US president have begun to resemble a veritable cottage industry among political commentators. Summarizing crudely the focus of this cottage industry seems inclined towards texts that involve either the renarration of Obama’s racial personal and political biography or the reevaluation of the liberalism, pragmatism or populism of his administration. Nevertheless, whether romanticized from the Left or denounced from the Right, the seductive narrative effect of the Obama political phenomenon has been a conventional American story of exceptionalism. The postcolonial patriotic story of a once racially blighted democracy ultimately redeemed by Obama’s election; a story of ever increasing and expansive American freedom, visualized, told, written or read from the perspectives of a hegemonically white America. Breaking with this parochial American approachRewriting Exodussituates the political phenomenon of Obama within the prefigurations and inheritances of African American political and religious discourses convergent around the trope of Exodus. This metaphorical analogy with the freedom aspirations of the ancient Hebrews under Egyptian slavery has long exerted a searing rhetorical influence on the critical imaginations of previously and formerly enslaved black populations. It is the narrative pivot on which the significance of this book turns. In this senseRewriting Exodusis a timely and compelling reminder that there have always been two antagonistic narratives of freedom in the United States, both intensely racialized, one hegemonic and the other disavowed. Ever since the United States was established initially as a settler colony and a slave society, its historical institutions of race and governance have been discursively repressed, only surfacing intermittently in public discourse as the exception proving the rule of a nation founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Traditionally what is officially remembered and popularly recited in the US as emblematic of its institutions are the underwriting of the protection of personal freedom, the promotion of economic opportunities and the valorisation of political democracy. These memories and recitations have routinely

vi

SERIES PREFACE vii

foreclosed from any legitimate enunciation all but the merest traces of the longevity underlining the unrealized freedoms of both African Americans and Native Americans. Such foreclosures have enabled the most remarkable declarations to be made politically on behalf of the US as if it was unmistakably a global lighthouse of freedom. During the First and Second World Wars the US could still claim to be making the world safe for democracy, despite its earlier nineteenth century continental, imperial westward expansion and ‘Indian wars’; its establishment of Jim Crow racial segregation; and its imperial annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. If that was culled from a white hegemonic perspective of freedom, a black subaltern perspective was gestated in the long civil rights movement mobilized by African Americans from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. Although this critically expanded the meaning of American democracy, inexplicably it has never been represented as part of US iconography in these terms. As the twentieth century drew to a close it became increasingly evident to scholars in African American studies, Ethnic Studies, Sociology and Political science, that the legislative successes of the civil rights movement coexisted with highly disproportion ate racial disparities in poverty, HIV infections, unemployment, educational qualifications and incarceration rates affecting primarily African Americans and Latinos. However, these protracted ‘facts of blackness’ were not necessarily translatable either through activism or scholarship into the sound bites or headlines of a 24hour news media. Indeed public indictments of racism were now becoming exclusively assigned to sensationally exposed locutions, featuring the tyranny of the verbal epithet or the textual insult. Once exposed mass media outrage and condemnation ensured they were treated as extreme interruptions of the accommodations achieved in media dis seminations of cultural diversity. Although this projection of cultural diversity seemed very distant from racially segregated cities, racial profiling, racially punitive criminal justice and racially authoritarian immigration laws, it nevertheless could be found in the digital mediascapes that had not only witnessed but finessed the rise of commodified black popular culture from the early 1990s. The hyper visibility of particularly African American males in sports, popular music and movies, spawned spectacles of corporate conviviality (especially in the commercial branding of blackness as the urban cachet of conspicuous consumption) that had never been greater or indeed more limited. Even though it seemed Black America in the twentyfirst century had become symbolically more associated with

viii  REWRITING EXODUS

the prominence of its celebrities, upper middle class and wealthy role models, it was also unspeakably more threatening in the greater urban accumulation of black people among the disenfranchised, the criminalized, the segregated and the poor. If the meaning of cultural diversity seemed obsessed with the allure of rapprochement between urbane blacks and whites, relegating ‘ethnic others’ to the position of unused extras, acute anxieties unleashed by the devastating impact of 9/11 and the ‘war against terror’; as well as racial profiling mobilized in the virulent opposition to illegal immigration across the Mexican border, managed to consolidate and yet unsettle the exclusive racial grammar of the nation. Somehow an ‘imagined community’ of diverse American citizens could also find its unifying element against theconstitutive outsidesof the ‘Muslim’ and the ‘Mexican’. Nevertheless this denouement of race, more from national habit than critical analysis, still seemed to silently signify and stigmatize predominantly African Americans in public discourse, leaving untouched and uncriticised the hegemonic culture of whiteness. The first decade of the twentyfirst century confirmed the resilience of a consensus in US public life regarding the unspeakability of race in politics and social stratification. But this was a consensus whose firmness became flimsy with the advent of Hurricane Katrina. The destruction of New Orleans in 2005 which decimated thousands of lives and homes throughout the coastal region brought to national TV screens images of destitute black people normally associated in the Western mind with the ‘Third World’. These were black people who did not have the economic means to escape; black people whom the national media had difficulty acknowledging as socially neglected; black people who feeling disregarded and forgotten challenged insatiable broadcasters and newspaper reporters with the angry yet poignant lament, ‘we are citizens, not refugees’. It was a stark if not sustained reminder of what was once described as ‘The Two Americas’. Rewriting Exodusis a powerful evocation of this contextual trajectory. It locates the phenomenon of Obama between the unspeakability of race in civil discourse and a new hypervisibility of race inscribed on the corporeality and comportment of the US president that takes up permanent residence in political discourse like the proverbial elephant in the room. If anything, this is because the Obama phenomenon is also embodied in the imperfect union of a colonial and a liberal heritage shared ironically if unceremoniously with the nation itself.Rewriting Exoduschallenges us to engage

SERIES PREFACE ix

critically and reflexively with these racial thematics, analysing the intellectual, political and conflictual African American historical landscape to which current discussions of the Obama phenomenon owe their unacknowledged emergence. Perhaps its signal achievement is the calibration of a critical anamnesis of the nationally disavowed intellectual discourses of African American political and religious culture arising from the twentieth century, rewriting them as forms of histories of the racialized present, as well as contemporary commentaries on the contested and shifting meanings of freedom in the US.Rewriting Exodusexemplifies the best of interdisciplinary scholarship in African American studies and Postcolonial studies, combining analyses of the ‘fierce urgency of now’ (Martin Luther King) with equally pressing problematizations of the contemporary ‘quarrel with history’ (Edouard Glissant). Throughout we are obliged to reflect on how Obama’s bipartisan inheritance of presidential Americaness is also, like the nation itself, complicated by interruptions from the conflicting racialized traditions of Exodus in which all American intellectual, political and religious formations are deeply mired. Anna Hartnell has provided a memorable postcolonial prism through which to explore the postCivil Rights era’s complexities, highlighting Obama less as a proper name and more as a political phenomenon; inscribing the latter in intellectual discourses and debates emanating from the twentieth century archives of Black America that are all too often dismissed, euphemized or pathologized by recurrent obsessions with that momentous US presidential election of 4 November 2008.

Barnor Hesse Chicago February 2011