Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
I. Charisma
1. Restaging the Charismatic Scenario: Fictions of African American Leadership
2. Leadership's Looks: The Aesthetics of Black Political Modernity
II. Contestations
3. Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Zora Neale Hurston's Gothic
4. Disappearing the Leader: The Vanishing Spectacle in Civil Rights Fiction
III. Curiosities
5. "Cyanide in the Kool-Aid": Black Politics and Popular Culture After Civil Rights
6. Claim Ticket Lost: Toni Morrison's Paradise and American Literature's Holy Hollow
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About the Author

Erica R. Edwards is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews

"In Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, Erica R. Edwards has constructed a radical re-imagining of black political culture and an alternative narrative of its historical emergence. By critically examining the myths of charismatic leaders as the singular progenitors of liberation, Edwards takes issue with the representations of the black freedom movement most frequently rehearsed by biographers, social historians, and political scholars of the modern era. The book is a powerful recapturing of lost words, lost worlds." —Cedric J. Robinson, University of California, Santa Barbara

"A critical read for anyone who is interested in the relationship between literature and real life scenes of black leadership—particularly as it plays out in the black political sphere in the post-civil rights era."—New Books Network"An insightful text in which Erica R. Edwards successfully presents an alternative perspective on black political leadership through an analysis of black literature and film, with the potential to offer alternative social realities for the African American community."—The Journal of African American History"An impressive, field-changing interdisciplinary study."—American Literature