Narrating Clinton's Impeachment: Race, the Right, and Allegories of the Sixties

For almost ten years I have been thinking and writing about prophetic language in American politics. Building at first on Sacvan Bercovitch, I depicted the jeremiadic narrative as the dominant rhetorical form in american politics. Americans from Gingrich to King gain legitimacy by narrating the betrayal of the founding principles and national promise their movements will redeem. Following the prophets themselves, Americans practice social criticism by invoking the gap between an ideal nation and its corrupt or flawed actuality. As corruption is narrated as a deviation from founding principles and lodged in those depicted as alien and subversive, so redemption is lodged in those people and those actions that will close the gap and fulfill the special promise of a chosen people.

On the one hand, I argued, white supremacy and exclusionary nationalism have been authorized by such stories, which lodge servitude and corruption in non-liberal alternatives and racial others. In this way, prophetic language has been used repeatedly to voice the communitarian face of liberal nationalism, both its exclusionary logic and inclusionary promise. On the other hand, outcast or aggrieved groups recurrently contest exclusion and domination by speaking as keepers of a dream betrayed: social movements have criticized the practice of democracy by invoking an ideal America whose promise they will redeem.

At issue in the use of prophetic language is the framing of politics in specifically national terms, for legitimacy depends on invoking a special and ideal American nationhood and promise. But can nationalism be reworked without reiterating the history of its exclusionary practice? At issue, too, is framing politics in specifically redemptive terms, which fix what went wrong in the past to make good a people and their promise. But who must people become to act as protagonists in a redemptive story? To engage the political bearing of prophecy in America, then, meant thinking about narratives of nationhood and rhetorics of redemption. To explore these issues further, I want to consider how Toni Morrison (and other left intellectuals) conceived Clinton’s impeachment. But why Morrison?

Concerned that invocations of nationhood and promises of redemption inescapably bind critics to a history of domination and to practices of purification and self-sacrifice, I believed I had found in alternative in Morrison, who came to play an exemplary role in my thinking. She seemed to be doing in fiction what I thought necessary in the world: forging counter-national political bonds and working through redemptive longings. In my view, Beloved retold the redemptive narrative of deliverance from servitude that has been crucial to any version of racialized American nationalism but also to black nationalism.

In profound ways, she voiced and dramatized, yet stood aside from, the redemptive language that has always entwined white supremacy and resistance against it, the exclusionary violence of special nationhood and opposition to it. She never twinned the promise of democracy and the promise of America, but spoke from the position of outcast and refused the fantasy of inclusion represented by the national idea of more perfect union. She voiced a counter-national politics, but refused the romance of a redemptive counter-community lodged in outcasts. She stood with them but compassionately and yet relentlessly dramatized the dangers in their longings for redemption.

Since I felt that critics on the left cannot escape -and therefore must not ignore- the degree to which nationhood remains the organizing center of American politics, I used Morrison’s fiction and essays to analyze this attachment and form of belonging, this fantasy and ideal identity, to understand its persistent power, expose its dangers, and forge places to stand against it. But against the grain of her writing, I also asked: can a vigorous widely organized and broadly coalitional challenge to domination and inequality gain support without critically reworking languages of nationhood and rhetorics of redemption?

So I used Morrison’s Beloved to imagine a working-through, but also reworking, of the redemptive rhetorics always central to nationalism in American politics. Her novel provided a way for me to escape the simple alternative of repeating or refusing the redemptive language of nationhood, though I felt pretty...