Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership by Erica R. Edwards (review)

One cannot enter into Erica R. Edwards’s substantive theorization of black charismatic leadership without thoughtful consideration of the current moment in presidential history. In many poignant ways, Edwards’s Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership implicitly captures the dissonance between the ascension of America’s first black president and the black politicos and progressive activists who continue to be disenchanted with the centrist brand of singular black charismatic leadership that President Barack Obama has proffered thus far. That said, Edwards’s intellectual and political timing is but one important consideration among many when reading her work and engaging her sophisticated theorization of the challenges that charismatic leadership presents to the history and historiography of black leadership.

Edwards first primes her readers with her powerful rationale for why and how African American literature and literary studies must intervene in the historical narratives of black charismatic leadership. She notes that there is a tendency to narrate the history of black socio-political struggle as being organized according to a “top-down” model, led by one singular leader after another. According to Edwards, “African American literary texts . . . de-familiarize charisma while gesturing to its alternatives: raucous collectivity from below rather than ordered political direction from on high[,] . . . an insistent fugitivity rather than an orchestrated telos” (xvii). Thus, Edwards’s primary intervention in her theorization of black leadership is to offer an understanding of charisma as having multiple axes.

Edwards incisively defines charisma as “an ideal that situates authority, or the right to rule, in one exceptional figure perceived to be gifted with a privileged connection to the divine.” In this sense, the archetypal black charismatic leader is both “gifted and a gift himself” with respect to the collective or community for whom his exceptionality is a marker of both fortune and ideological force (16). For Edwards, this model of black leadership does not emerge only from the historical narratives that benefit most from the reduction of history into a template of exceptional leaders and largely inactive, invisible followers. Rather, the origins of this model, for both history and historiography, reside in a rhetorical moment: a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Douglass’s performance, in conjunction with his already established persona of black leader, “enforce[d] the rhetorical performance of spectacular, singular male leadership as the prima facie tableau of the coming century’s black politics” (10).

To explain the nuances of the charismatic regime in black politico-historical culture, Edwards details the effects and affects of the “charismatic scenario,” a mobile set of iterative speech events: “march, rally, convention speech.” These events, replete with their socio-political predicates—“scarcity, suffering, lack”—are completed by a range of compellingly repetitive gestures, interlocutions, and other affectively discursive turns (17). Marcus Garvey’s regularly repeated, militant pomp and circumstance, as well as his constituents’ responses to his gestures and sartorial splendor, is one of many examples of the charismatic scenario in black American history.

Still, Edwards makes an important theoretical move when she argues that the charismatic scenario is not a closed system. Although it is both a function and a socio-communal byproduct of the “narrative convenience of black exceptionality” (11), the charismatic scenario can also disrupt these reduced histories. They can be the place and space where the singularity of black charismatic leadership is critiqued. Particularly in literary texts, the charismatic scenario will occasionally be the locus of indeterminate discursive practices that destabilize the reductive master narratives of black political leadership.

The dominance of charisma in the narratives of black leadership is not without several tangible consequences upon the Realpolitik of black experiences and the lived realities of black folks. Edwards outlines at least three forms of the “violence of charisma.” The first form of violence is the silencing of the collective, the activists and socio-political agents who do not fit the charismatic model or are relegated to the...