Toward a History of Black Nationalist Religious Rhetoric. (2018) Directed by Dr
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COLLINS, ARMONDO, Ph.D. The Black God Trope: Toward A History of Black Nationalist Religious Rhetoric. (2018) Directed by Dr. Nancy Myers and Dr. Noelle Morrissette. 199 pp. This project theorizes the Black God trope as a rhetorical strategy used by many African-American rhetors across the history of African-American letters. The Black God trope is a linguistic, imagistic, and embodied rendering of religious concepts, such as God is Black, to create associations of meaning that foreground racial uplift. The Black God trope is a rhetorically constituted phenomenon created through resistance strategies that target African-American audience members, but are also accessed by anyone culturally rooted in the terms of the conversation. First, I demonstrate how Black rhetors writing about a Black God creates a language system that reflects African-Americans’ shifting subjectivity within the American experience. Offering examples from Ethiopianism to rap music, I focus on the Black God trope from the 1950s to the 1990s. Across these examples, I provide evidence of linguistic, imagistic, and embodied rhetorical resistance to white western patriarchy. Finally, I examine the Black God trope as a gendered critique of white and Black western patriarchy to demonstrate how an ideology like womanism is voiced by authors using the Black God trope as a means of public address. This work is the beginning of a rhetorical history that understands a Black God and Black Nationalist religious rhetoric as central to conducting scholarship on the African-American experience. The project offers a pathway to new and creative teaching and research methods that engage diversity and multivocality. THE BLACK GOD TROPE: TOWARD A HISTORY OF BLACK NATIONALIST RELIGIOUS RHETORIC by Armondo Collins A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2018 Approved by Committee Co-Chair Committee Co-Chair This is for my mom, Kathleen Collins (1946-2016). ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Armondo Collins has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Co-Chairs Committee Member Committee Member Date of Acceptance by Committee Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my committee: co-chairs Nancy Myers and Noelle Morrissette, and committee members, Tara Green, Jennifer Feather, and Hephzibah Roskelly. Thank you for sharing your intellect, guidance, wisdom, and friendship. Special Thanks to my writing group who painstakingly offering feedback on draft-after-draft of this document: Drs. Shana Scudder and Kathleen Leuschen. The world is a better place because of you two scholars. To Ms. Olivia Wood, your ninth-hour heroics are forever appreciated. Additional thanks to UNCG’s University Libraries and NCA&T’s Bluford Library staffs and faculty for their diligent research assistance, expertise, and comradery. Especially, the Digital Media Commons staff (past and present), the best group of co- workers I could ever ask for. A final ‘thank you’ to my family and friends who have helped this come into fruition. There are too many to mention so this representative few will have to suffice: Daijara Collins, Anyah Collins, Donyea Collins, Lindsay Sabatino, Anjan Basu, Lorenzo Meachum, Matthew Johnson, Noel Bost, Steven Cureton, Tania Price, Al Price, Erick Hunt, J Lamont Tucker, Sheldon Cuthrell, Merido Rodriguez, Treva Boone, Herbert Allen, Leechann McManus, Miguel Reynoso, Reginald Mathes and the brothers of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. THE BLACK GOD TROPE AND ENTHYMEMATIC BLACKNESS ............ 1 II. A MESSAGE TO THE BLACKMAN IN AMERICA: ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S INFLUENTIAL RELIGIOUS RHETORIC....................37 III. CLARENCE 13X’S BLACK GOD ETHOS AND THE RHETORICAL CHALLENGE OF THE FIVE PERCENT ....................................................... 70 IV. THE BLACK GOD TROPE IN THE NOVEL: A MESSAGE FROM THE BLACK WOMAN IN AMERICA ....................................................113 V. ALICE WALKER’S WOMANIST BLACK GOD TROPE AND THE COLOR PURPLE ...............................................................................147 VI. THE BLACK GOD TROPE AS BLACK NATIONALIST RELIGIOUS RHETORIC ................................................................................................173 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................189 v LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. “Soapbox Orator” ..................................................................................................3 Figure 2. “Malcolm Teaching” ..........................................................................................76 Figure 3. “Deconstructing ‘Negro’” ..................................................................................76 Figure 4. “Black Christ” ..................................................................................................112 vi CHAPTER I THE BLACK GOD TROPE AND ENTHYMEMATIC BLACKNESS In 1952, Ralph Ellison and photo journalist, Gordon Parks, traveled to Harlem to visually capture the cultural elements of urban Black life as they appear within the pages of Ellison’s magisterial novel Invisible Man. The photos were to appear in a Time magazine article on the novel, and the premise of the pictures was that they would give white readers a better understanding of the Harlem about which Ellison so skillfully wrote. The pictures were to be used as a way of speaking about the Blackness Ellison writes about. One group of pictures that did not make the final article, but are integral to understanding the Black urban space Ellison writes about, is a set of three pictures, all focused on an unnamed Soapbox Orator. The preacher, it can be assumed, symbolizes Ras the Exhorter, the Jamaican activist who plays the foil to Ellison’s protagonist. An analog or not, what is important about the street preacher photos is a close-up picture of the speaker holding up a newspaper. The image on the newspaper is a full-page picture of Jesus, depicted as an African-American (see figure 1). The photo is telling for two related reasons. The first is that the picture of Jesus with African facial features demonstrates the commonality of the image within the African-American community, even before the Black Power movement. The second is that the picture is being held by a street 1 preacher exhorting Black pride to African-Americans. This demonstrates that Black Nationalist religious movements communicated their ideologies orally, visually, and textually as a common rhetorical practice well before the 1960’s. Taken together, these two clues support my claim that religious images have been used by African-Americans as a means of producing Black Nationalist rhetoric since slavery. Black people’s conversations about God and/or religion are usually also conversations about the material aims of African-American people as a social-political bloc. This discourse, when found in a Black Nationalist rhetorical context, most often evokes a message that runs explicitly counter-culture to the white western aesthetic that undergirds the cultural logic of white American nationalism.1 An examination of how Black Nationalism operates as rhetoric in African-American writing demonstrates that language about God and/or religion is often a resistance strategy that tells a deeper story of African-American history and the discursive logic that history still attempts to redress. Blackness and religious rhetoric act not only as logos (the logic of a communication act), but just importantly as ethos (the material artifact and representation of a communication act), and pathos (the emotional appeal of a persuasive act to a presumed audience).2 This examination of how several writers have used God’s Blackness as a refracted image of the human self demonstrates shifts within the African-American worldview about the relationship of self to society. For instance, Alice Walker’s protagonist Celie in The 1 For a discussion of the racial logic undergirding American nationalism, see Mills 1-8. 2 The use of ethos in this fashion denotes audio, visual, and written communication. This use is not entirely unique to this study, but it should be noted that this diversion from more conventional uses of the term is intentional. A more pointed explanation of ethos appears in the definitions section of this chapter. 2 Color Purple echoes her sentiments about the centrality of personal experience over and against institutionalized experiences like the African-American church. In addition, the rhetoric of these various Black worldviews, as materially constructed, express how the cultural practice of writing God is a modality for discursive resistance. Figure 1. “Soapbox Orator” Enthymematic Blackness In this study, Blackness is a rhetorically constituted phenomenon created through rhetorical strategies that target African-American audience members but are also accessed by anyone culturally rooted in the terms of the conversation. These strategies 3 are mapped out by examining the language rhetors use to communicate with their presumed audience. Blackness is conceptualized here as a field that allows rhetors and their African-American