Rewriting Exodus: American Futures from Du Bois to Obama

296 Pages·2011·4.345 MB·English

by  Anna Hartnell

Rewriting Exodus
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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.
Also available
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Islam and the Political
Theory, Governance and International Relations
Amr G. E. Sabet
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REwRiting Exodus
American Futures from du Bois to obama
Anna Hartnell
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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 978 0 7453 2956 7 Hardback
isBn 978 0 7453 2955 0 Paperback
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Contents
Series Preface vi
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: Rewriting Exodus 1
1 Re-reading America: Barack Obama 17
2 Double Consciousness and the Master/Slave Dialectic:
W.E.B. Du Bois 66
3 Excavating the Promised Land: Martin Luther King 98
4 Reclaiming ‘Egypt’: Malcolm X 133
5 Transcending the Nation: Toni Morrison’s Paradise 171
Conclusion: Exodus and Return in Post-Katrina
New Orleans 215
Notes 241
Select Bibliography 266
Index 275
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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 approach Rewriting Exodus situates 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 sense Rewriting Exodus is 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
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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
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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 the constitutive outsides of 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 Exodus is 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 Exodus challenges us to engage
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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 Exodus exemplifies 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
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