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A SUSTAINED ENGAGEMENT with the multifarious experiences, perspectives, movements, stories, and players that make up the contemporary history of black American movements for social change and political progress requires both historicizing and disposing of the fiction that social transformation is impossible in the absence of singular charismatic leadership. Charisma is a political fiction or ideal, a set of assumptions about authority and identity that works to structure how political mobilization is conceived and enacted. This fiction is staged in real time and in media playback: its narrative thread is woven into the fabric of what might be called the charismatic scenario, which has throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries taken forms as diverse as United Negro Improvement Association parades, the Million Man and Millions More marches, and the various scenes that make up the historical imaginary of the civil rights and Black Power movements. In African American political culture since Reconstruction, charismatic leadership has been a fraught discursive compact—a narrative and performative regime—that has had to contend repeatedly with the contestations of performing artists, writers, social critics, and activists, such that while the presumption that charismatic leadership is the beginning of black politics might be conceived as the macrofiction of twentieth-century African American culture, the microfictions that have restaged the movements toward black citizenship and radical social transformation make up an essential repository for the imaginings and counterimaginings of contemporary black politics. More fully understanding contemporary African American narrative means considering how it has functioned as such a repository. The aims of this chapter are thus to situate the twentieth-century cultural complex of black charismatic leadership within the making of post-Reconstruction black political culture; to analyze how the charismatic scenario, as a challenge to and compromise with the post-Reconstruction containments of Chapter 1 Restaging the Charismatic Scenario Fictions of African American Leadership 3 black mobility and political expression, is structured in specific forms of ideological and material violence; and to inaugurate a discussion of how African American literature throughout the twentieth century served as an archive of contestation where these forms of intraracial violence would be reimagined and redressed. Charisma, more than a static social structure or universal phenomenon of social and political movements, has to be understood in African American cultural history as a complex of ideological, kinesthetic, narrative, political, and psychosocial responses to the containments and terrors of Western modernity, a complex composed of both compromises with and radical challenges to those containments and terrors. If African American literature has worked to contest charisma as a structuring narrative of black politics, a cultural studies model attuned to the workings of narrative might best suit the study of charisma as the animating fiction of modern, and now postmodern, black political life. The tangle of freedom and captivity for black Americans after slavery— what Saidiya Hartman calls the “double bind of freedom,” in which former slaves were “free to exchange one’s labor and free of resources”—was the originary condition for the forging of black citizenship and the terrain upon which black culture came to articulate charisma, after the end of slavery, as a politicocultural ideal or “structuring structure” of black political modernity .1 By black political modernity, I mean to signal a period, beginning with emancipation in 1865 and ending in the late twentieth century, when globalization, multiculturalism, the end of affirmative action, and the rise of a new “postsoul” black cultural formation occasioned the end of modern black politics. I also mean to signal a set of cultural ideals, practices, and structures of feeling that defined black American culture’s relationship to modernity and its emerging discourses on the one hand, and its own politics of liberation on the other. As Nikhil Pal Singh points out, American “black modernity,” figured as the access to the rights and processes of citizenship within the modern democratic state, did not begin to actualize until at least the mid-1930s, when it was precipitated by “increasing heterogeneity and political radicalism of black freedom struggles.”2 However, the struggle to reconcile the promises of liberal democracy with the very processes of brutalization that conditioned the entry of black peoples into the modern, “civilized ” world preceded the New Deal era and gave rise to a set of cultural milieux that might rightly be understood to correspond with this struggle for modern citizenship.3 This set of cultural milieux includes Du Boisian double consciousness, an investment in what Paul Gilroy classically named the...

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