Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership

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 Epilogue 187 dream, brings national identity into florid articulation, and redeems the past while ushering in the new. Butwhenlonging for charismaticleadership takes the place of social movementhistory andwomen 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 forbuilding 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 publiclife 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...