George Shulman American Prophecy; Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (2008)

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.The Lincoln who condemns Brownis soon called Abraham by self-declared Isaacs, and he endorses self-sacrifice to redeem the crime of slavery and give the union a new birthof freedom.Thoreau s prophetic legacy thus appears not only in crit-ics who use moral witness to stand against the state and with those itdominates, but also in self-declared sons who endorse violence and re-demptive self-sacrifice to regenerate their freedom in the father s house.88 Thoreau, the Reluctant ProphetWalden then reminds us of the value of using poetry to inflect the officeand genre of prophecy.These idioms of prophecy are drawn on and transformed one hun-dred years later during the second Reconstruction: Chapters 3 and 4trace how Martin Luther King Jr.and James Baldwin inflect the Protes-tant and romantic registers that Thoreau reworked in tandem and ten-sion.Assuming the office of moral witness and taking on the Protestantidiom of devotion to a cause and redemptive sacrifice, King authorizesblack struggle against white supremacy.Baldwin, raised in the biblicallanguage of the black church, works the idiom of prophet as poet tofashion an existentialized and queer prophecy that decisively breaks thebond linking purity and redemption.InterludeFrom Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King Jr.and James Baldwin:Race and ProphecyIt can happen that a man will rise above prejudice of religion, country,race.but it is not possible for a whole people to rise, as it were, above itself. Tocqueville, Democracy in AmericaIf America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by thepresence of the black race.they will owe their origin not to the equalitybut the inequality of conditions. Tocqueville, Democracy in AmericaWhen life has done its worst, they will be enabled to rise above themselves andtriumph over life. James Baldwin, Stranger in the VillageMartin Luther King Jr.and James Baldwin came toprominence during what many scholars now call the second Recon-struction, from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, and each figurehas been domesticated since this project of democratization was aban-doned.King now is a national icon, cast as a figure who embodiedwho lived and died for the American Dream; he is contained by anAmerican exceptionalist story of a nation whose progressive telos is tofulfill its founding principles.Baldwin, too, has been made into a criticwho stands up for the universalism latent in a national consensus, toredeem a specifically American promise.Richard Rorty thus celebrateshim for and reduces him to the goal of achieving America. Kingand Baldwin now appear as models of Michael Walzer s internal critics,who protest practices they construe as violations of core values, so thatthey begin in revulsion but end in affirmation, as he puts it.Their criti-cisms, it is widely claimed, embrace what Gunnar Myrdal, at the outsetof this second Reconstruction, called the American Creed. King andBaldwin are then incorporated within Bercovitch s ritual of consensus,8990 Interludeas commentators solicit our (belated) recognition of their belonging to our community.1Readings that sanitize King and Baldwin to preserve political (andnational) innocence also domesticate the meaning of prophecy.Forif, as Hebrew prophets were the first to argue, nations (or groups) areformed by forgetting, by closing the gap between who they are andwho they say they are, then the office of prophecy is to expose that gap.Prophets thus reveal a divided personal and political subject, a subjectwhose disavowal of division is both generative and crippling.To testifyto division as disavowal, to use acknowledgment of disavowal to reconsti-tute personal identity and political community, to bear witness in wordand deed both to reconstitution as a possibility and to a redemption(finalized by some, not others) that is lodged in it this is the propheticpractice that King and Baldwin take up and revise.By it, they trouble thefalse comfort false prophecy? in stories of an exceptional nation andits progress.As we trace where their thinking goes, we will see both figures criti-cize liberal political thought, for two reasons: because it understates howracial categories are instantiated and replenished by market forces, stateinstitutions, cultural expression, and political rhetoric; and because itoverstates the capacity of the nation-state to achieve a universality thatovercomes racialization.Each moves beyond a liberal politics as he ex-poses the inequality that law cannot reach and as he testifies that rationaldeliberation cannot dissolve white supremacy.Both critics thus showhow antiblack racism is crucial to creating American citizen-subjectsand forging a national subject.But both still appeal to the universalizingrhetoric of American nationhood, to enlist it on behalf of black struggle,while both also imagine a collective black agency that reaches beyondthe national form.In the trajectories of their prophecy, both use andtrouble but then despair of national allegiance as a resource to advancethe promise of freedom for all.As they struggle to name the agents andmodel the practices that are the predicates of redemption, they make ita question impossible to avoid.2Chapters 3 and 4 recapture the truth that canonization obscuresthat the prophetic practices of King and Baldwin live in creative (and in-creasingly profound) tension with liberal political norms and redemptiveAmerican nationalism.But King and Baldwin do not practice prophecyin the same way, and those chapters also identify and assess that differ-ence.It appears in the different ways they inflect the prophetic idiomsInterlude 91they inherit and take up, and in the different ways they negotiate with adominant culture.In both regards, they are related to Thoreau s literaryand political example in illuminating ways.Begin with registers of voice and their inflection.One path fromThoreau to King appears in theist faith, moral witness, corporationswith a conscience, and civil disobedience, the register of prophecy bywhich militant Protestantism elevates or intensifies the democratic ele-ments in a Puritan and liberal culture [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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