The City on the Hill From Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956); Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 2. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner, 1962). Niebuhr located this blindness in the secular presuppositions of the American creed, not the culture’s theological presumptions. Yet, as I argue, the secular optimism of American political culture is an effect rather than a cause of the theological constitution of American political solidarity. Also see his The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner, 1960) and Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Library of Theological Ethics) (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). 3. The best intellectual histories of prophetic political critique are Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982). See also Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and more recently, Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 198 notes to pages 2–7 4. On African American prophecy as “vernacular political theology,” see George M. Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For a different conception of black prophecy as a mode of post-colonial black “political-intellectual” work, see Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003). A selective list of this rich and growing literature includes Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Barnor Hesse, Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, “Transruptions” (London : Zed Books, St. Martin’s, 2000); Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Katharine Lawrence Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship after Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 5. Eddie Glaude cautions against this danger as a particularly troublesome issue within contemporary African American political life. Advocating pragmatic interpretive strategies that highlight the tension between the exigencies of contemporary problem solving and the silencing that often attends the invocation of venerated historical figures, Glaude recommends a “post soul politics” that is more attentive to the contemporary references that inform and sustain African American cultural-political practices. I think there is a much greater role for veneration within contemporary black politics than he does, as I hope to make clear. Eddie Glaude, In a Shade of Blue. On the challenge of late modern acceleration of time on political reflection, political experience, and political action, see Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and more recently, Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 6. Nietzsche explicates this problem with characteristic rigor. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980). 7. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a good discussion of Winthrop’s...