Black World Research Articles

The White Critic in a Black World

506 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 506-512© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 506 C. W. E. BIGSBY 507 Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 507 508 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 508 C. W. E. BIGSBY 509 Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 509 510 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 510 C. W. E. BIGSBY 511 Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 511 512 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Bigsby_Bigsby 2/14/2018 12:05 PM Page 512 ...

A Medal for Walter: Representations of Black Britons and World War I

A Medal for Walter: Representations of Black Britons and World War I

Launching Black American Literature Forum, the Progenitor of African American Review

Joe Weixlmann Launching Black American Literature Forum, the Progenitor of African American Review Although I write from the fledgling days of my retirement, recollections of my twenty-nine-year-old self’s assuming the editorship of what in the fall of 1976 was Negro American Literature Forum are vivid. Three years after receiving my Ph.D., and having completed a one-year term appointment at the University of Oklahoma and two years of a three-year term appointment at Texas Tech University, I was excited to be starting a tenure-track position at Indiana State University. To me, the demands of the job sounded more inspiring and challenging than onerous: successfully teaching three classes per semester (usually involving three different preparations), continuing to build my own scholarly reputation, and editing a journal —a task that I began with very modest institutional support and for which I had no preparation other than what I’d gleaned from the other side of the editor’s desk as the author of a book and a half-dozen lesser pieces of scholarship. Youth, for all of its inherent shortcomings, has decided advantages. A decade ago, in the last of a series of remarks that appeared under the title “African American Review at 40,” Jerry Ward enjoined me “to write an autobiographical biography” of the journal’s development from Negro American Literature Forum to Black American Literature Forum to AAR (14). But I would like to think that I have grown wiser since 1976,1 and so this short piece should not be misconstrued as an introduction to, or précis of, the magnum opus Jerry had in mind. Rather, the brief 1115 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 1115-1120© 2018 Saint Louis University and Johns Hopkins University Press At the editor’s desk, ca. 1979. Photo courtesy of Sharron Pollack. Weixlmann_Weixlmann 2/14/2018 5:51 PM Page 1115 reflections that follow are primarily intended to offer readers a glance at the very early years of the journal’s evolution under my editorship—years that paved the way for the publication’s development into the important cultural force it would become over the ensuing four decades. That Plaguey Name My first weeks as editor largely took the form of reading through every document in a deep, four-drawer file cabinet of the journal’s papers in an attempt to glean what I felt was necessary background information. Materials I understood to be significant for my purposes were reorganized and re-filed, and I concluded this chore feeling more prepared to undertake what I understood to be the real work of the position. The next task was twofold: suitably replacing the anachronistic title Negro American Literature Forum and attracting a working advisory board to the journal, principally to serve as manuscript evaluators, since one of the many things I learned in foraging through the files was that, while NALF possessed a respected advisory board,2 submissions had not been undergoing peer review. I envisioned this as a single, two-part task designed to upgrade the journal rather than two discrete tasks, because asking respected scholars to serve as board members of a publication with Negro in its title in 1976 seemed not just imprudent, but wrong. Not wishing to altogether abandon the journal’s identity, which had been nearly a decade in the making, I decided simply to replace Negro with Black3 and move into recruitment mode. Happily, this effort went more smoothly than I had anticipated it might. Virtually everyone I asked, including such established luminaries as Houston Baker, Dick Barksdale, Don Gibson, Jim Hatch, Phyllis Klotman, and Charles Nichols, generously agreed to commit themselves to the task of fulsome board participation, as did a number of promising young scholars including Bill Andrews (a former colleague of mine at Texas Tech who even then was becoming a star in his own right), Daryl Dance, and Chester Fontenot. The only notable solicitation which failed to bear fruit was that sent to Hoyt Fuller, the outgoing editor of Black World (formerly Negro Digest, the publication having changed names in 1970).4 In an extremely cordial letter, Hoyt responded to my invitation at some length...

When the Walls Came Down

When the Walls Came Down

Capturing the likeness of Henry I of Haiti (1805–1822)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role played by representations of General Henry Christophe, later King Henry I of Haiti, in relations between Great Britain and the section of independent Haiti he led in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In these early years, when France threatened to try and recover its former colony by force, relations with Great Britain were essential to the survival of the new country. Led by those British merchants who had early built commercial ties with Haiti, Great Britain looked with a mixture of wariness and interest on Haiti at large and Henry in particular. This article argues that English representations of Henry in turn gave the Haitian leader cues as to how to portray himself for British audiences. In order to gain diplomatic recognition, Henry I of Haiti self-consciously made himself recognizable to British eyes, playing up those aspects of his persona most palatable to the English. Henry’s exchanges with England have often been seen as proof of genuine Anglophilia on his part; this article analyzes them as a strategic effort dedicated to swaying English public opinion in his support by portraying him as a product of English influence. The discussion of a lost portrait of the king – rediscovered in archival research – demonstrates that domestic representations of King Henry appealed to profoundly different expectations. Drawing on the latest works in Haitian Revolutionary Studies by Deborah Jenson and Chris Bongie, this article contends that with his portraits Henry of Haiti pieced together a complex, ambivalent political bid by which he hoped to gain the recognition of England while retaining that of the black world.

Risk analysis and Black Swans: two strategies for de-blackening

With his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim N. Taleb brought the Black Swan metaphor to the center of risk analysis debates. His main thesis is that the course of the world is determined by the sudden coming of a small number of high impact events whose occurrences are detectable only through hindsight. When relying on prediction, risk analysis is doomed to fail. The standard route of refutation and rehabilitation of predictive practices has been to oppose Taleb’s worldview. In this article, we develop an alternative route of refutation in which we separate Taleb’s claim of unpredictability from his worldview. Moreover, in our justification of the possibilities of predicting in a Black Swan world, we favor an extension of the Black Swan domain so that it includes unknown knowns in addition to unknown unknowns. The article advocates for a bridging of perspectives in which predicting not only involves the sphere of knowledge, but also the sphere of imagination, bringing the risk communication to the fore. Related to the analysis of extraordinary high-impact events, the merits of an imaginative perspective on prediction is illustrated by the terrorist attacks in Norway on July 22 2011, and some key challenges for further developing such a perspective within risk analysis are sketched.

Representing Haiti: Postcolonial Discourse and Aimé Césaire's La tragédie du roi Christophe

IN An inteRview with chARLes RoweLL in 1989, Aime Cesaire frames his representation of Haiti's King Henry Christophe in the following terms:The difference between my 'vision' of Christophe and that of my predecessors is that they see only the ridicule, the Bourgeois gentilhomme aspect, the 'Negro vanity' aspect that abounded in the white racist and colonialist literature. But I want people to go beyond this. What I mean is that behind Christophe's ridicule there is something pathetic, and it is this pathos that European historians never perceive. It is the pathetic dimension of a man who comes out of slavery and wants to raise his people, and raises himself to an extraordinary kind of mystique. He uses all the means available to him in his time; but these means were not always the best ones.1Cesaire's representation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, and his attempts to humanise Henry Christophe in La tragedie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe)2 and to debunk the Eurocentric discourse to which he alludes, are all too clear in the above excerpt from the interview. His literary vehicle - the dramatic genre - is deliberate and crucial to our understanding and appreciation of the play. He recasts Christophe as a tragic figure, a persona that redeems him from the ridiculous king of history books, and thus prepares the reader/audience for pathos, fear, admiration, fate, death, and inevitability, which are necessary ingredients of a tragedy.3 playwright expressed his pride, interest, and respect vis-a-vis in another interview with Rene Depestre:After my discovery of the North American Negro and my discovery of Africa, I went on to explore the totality of the black world, and that is how I came upon the history of Haiti. I love Martinique, but it is an alienated land, while represented for me the heroic Antilles, the African Antilles. I began to make connections between the Antilles and Africa, and is the most African of the Antilles. It is at the same time a country with a marvellous history: the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians, people like Toussaint l'Ouverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, etc. is not very well known in Martinique.4To argue that the first Negro epic was written by men like Louverture, Christophe and Dessalines, not only qualifies the play as an epic, but also endows these revolutionaries with heroic qualities. In his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Cesaire proclaims as an embodiment of and a precursor to Negritude ideology when he writes, in reference to the Haitian Revolution, Haiti [is] where Negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity5 - an indication that Negritude encompasses more than a literary and an aesthetic phenomenon.The Tragedy of King Christophe bears resemblance to metadrama,6 in that it is self-reflexive and its characters are conscious of their theatricality, of being on stage. As Christophe's secretary Vastey aptly points out, The whole world is watching us, citizens, and the nations think black men have no dignity (1.2, 18). thus represents the stage on which the drama of the challenges of decolonisation and nation-building is played out; and Christophe stand in for more than a geographic location and an individual. As Cesaire asserts in reference to another historico-political drama of his, A Season in the Congo, Lumumba is not the man Patrice Lumumba; he is, before everything else, a symbol of a man, a man that identifies with Congolese reality and with Africa of decolonisation, an individual that represents a collectivity.7 Christophe and Haiti, then, become prototypes and symbols of black emancipation, and a blueprint for the task inherent in nation-building in post-emancipation/independence nations in the black Atlantic world. deployment of metadramatic techniques has prompted critics to stipulate that the play characterises as a theatre state. …

Holiness and Worldliness

What was truly distinctive about the black Gospel music style of the Sanctified Church was its extensive use of musical instruments previously associated with “the world.” Yet, this fact presents a theological conundrum. The very churches that were so enthusiastically “embracing” the Gospel style were, at the same time, ardently emphasizing strict moral living and the repudiation of all things carnal. In this article, I suggest lines of theological reasoning that may have informed early black Holiness and pentecostal Christians in their widespread liturgical use of the Gospel style. Drawing on primary source material from COGIC founding Bishop Charles Mason, I expand Lawrence Levine’s model of the relationship between early black Sanctified churches and the secular black musical world and argue that a more nuanced conception of the Christ-world relation than is generally assumed may have undergirded Sanctified development of early Gospel music.

New Bourgeoisie, Old Bodies: Performing Post–Civil Rights Black Privilege in <em>Tar Baby</em> and <em>School Daze</em>

New Bourgeoisie, Old Bodies: Performing Post–Civil Rights Black Privilege in Tar Baby and School Daze Candice M. Jenkins (bio) When African American narratives take up the matter of black class privilege, they frequently make recourse to the trope of a “black” body infiltrated by whiteness.1 Consider Lawrence Otis Graham’s revelatory book about the African American elite, Our Kind of People (1999), in which Graham describes his experience of a college party by outlining the hierarchy of skin color and hair texture that structured the campus’s black social scene: With long, streaked, straight—or straightened—hair flying behind them, the Sisters of Ethos were running in and around the tall French doors, inspecting college IDs as they approved or turned away male partygoers who either passed or failed the ubiquitous “brown paper bag and ruler test.” . . . As I circled the room, I saw reminders of my childhood. The “dark outer circle” was very much apparent. . . . [It was] where one found the geri-curled [sic] guys and the dark-skinned women with “bad hair” and bad weaves.2 Graham differentiates baldly between the bodies of the light-skinned, straight-haired women at the “creamy center”3 of this culture of privilege, also literally the gatekeepers at its doors, and those of the group on the periphery. This corporeal distinction is one of aesthetics, but also of social class. Those bodies that most visibly display marks of Caucasian ancestry seem, by this logic, to have a special claim upon intraracial class privilege. Or, in Graham’s words, “[I]t was a color thing and a class thing. And for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together.”4 [End Page 621] Graham attends to a particular history of black American affluence—one tied to intraracial distinctions rooted in slavery and to the rule of hypodescent that has governed definitions of blackness in the United States since the seventeenth century.5 Significantly, most of Graham’s examples have to do with the female body, highlighting that what Harryette Mullen calls the “color capital” of the miscegenated body has particular consequences for women and, indeed, that gender structures the way that such capital is evaluated.6 In the elite black world that Graham describes, the materiality of the body has always been central; its shades and textures matter, in specific and historically predictable ways. Indeed, the corporeality of class status, for Graham, has to do with not simply aesthetic manipulations of the body, such as hair styling and straightening, but the raw text, so to speak, of the body itself: skin and eye color, the hair’s “natural” kink or wave.7 Of course, these two concepts are related; the perceived success of aesthetic manipulation depends on how accurately it mimics the “natural” appearance of miscegenation. Graham emphasizes this even in his description of the Sisters of Ethos, with use of the word straightened—this term implies heat processing or chemical processing of curly hair to achieve a flat texture that some possess by birth. Even the mention of “bad weaves” implicates the Sisters. Presumably, some of them sport good weaves, undetectable precisely because they approximate the “long, streaked, straight” hair of the most privileged. But while the figure of the privileged black subject as a corporeally whitened one draws upon historical realities with contemporary consequences, it also reflects a problematic assumption about which bodies are classed and, indeed, about what material privilege signifies for African Americans. It should perhaps go without saying that bodily marks of miscegenation are not reliable indicators of black class privilege, even as they have taken on figurative meaning as classed signs. While a “mulatto elite” with roots in the U.S. domestic slave system may be the basic foundation for the black elite that Graham describes, Karyn Lacy reminds us that this elite saw their standing, which was based on “family name and ancestry,” diminish significantly in the early twentieth century, as they were supplanted by “black professionals and small business owners, the parvenu.”8 Lacy goes on to note that “[e]ducational attainment” set this “emerging black middle class apart from the mulatto elite,” an effect that became even more...

The Myth of Black and White Modernism: Color Photographs and the Politics of Retrojective Looking

Black and white photographs have long been blamed for the widespread misconception that modern architecture was an entirely monochromatic style. Framed as the result of excessive faith in the truthfulness of photographic documentation, this line of reasoning holds that viewers mistook black and white pictures for representations of a black and white world. I argue, however, that misinformation regarding modernist monochromy did not arise solely from naive interpretations of the pictures themselves. Rather, this false impression of a stark, black and white style was promoted by popular postwar critics eager to distinguish emergent American modernisms from European precedent. The distinction was made visible in print by equating architecture with its documentation: color photographs for the new, black and white for the old. Long excluded from serious architectural scholarship, vintage color photographs have recently resurfaced in books and museum exhibitions where their unique material and chemical properties are now used to signify the historicity of California modernism.

Guest Editors' Introduction: African American Print Cultures

Toni Morrison’s words in the epigraph above delineate some of the multiple people and practices associated with the production and promotion of a single publication. Her words speak to various and imbricated cultures employed by an author interested in producing and promoting a book, a black book, THE Black Book, directing herself to the majority black readership of Black World magazine. When she wrote “Behind the Making of The Black Book” in 1974, Morrison was working as an editor at Random House, a white-owned publishing house; her metanarrative, then, assures readers that she was mindful about employing the services of a black “production man” and a black printer. Although her exclusion of a racial signifier for the book’s designer could suggest that this person was not black, there is no disputing that she had deliberately involved black professionals in the production of The Black Book and was now reassuring the readers of Black World of that deliberate choice. Morrison’s essay ran under a byline noting that she was a former teacher at Howard University

A Collection Remembered

Before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (we call it “The Storm” in New Orleans), I relished collecting manuscripts, books, and magazines. The historian/poet Julius E. Thompson and I joked about our passion for books, congratulating ourselves that between us we had at least eighty percent of the African American poetry broadsides, chapbooks, volumes, and anthologies published since 1960. We were assiduous in buying the output of Broadside, Third World, and Lotus Presses; in having complete collections of Negro Digest / Black World, OBSIDIAN, Sagala, American Rag, First World, Callaloo, Hoo-Doo, Drumvoices Revue, Umbra, and The Black Scholar; and in treasuring our autographed books by Margaret Walker, Richard A. Long, Haki Madhubuti, Angela Jackson, Mari Evans, Sterling A. Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Kalamu ya Salaam, Tom Dent, Kiarri T-H. Cheatwood, Sterling D. Plumpp, Lance Jeffers, Harryette Mullen, Audre Lorde, Jay Wright, Michael Harper, Julia Fields, Carolyn Rodgers, LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Etheridge Knight, and such Mississippi writers as L. C. Dorsey, C. Leigh McInnis, Theodore Bozeman, Charlie Braxton, David Brian Williams, and Otis Williams. I tried to buy all the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker published and all the recordings of Cassandra Wilson, Isaac Hayes, and Esther Phillips. Julius bought hundreds of books on African American and Southern history. The two of us were like kids in the candy factory with regard to all the reprints of black materials during the 1970s. Collecting was more than a simple matter of acquisition. It had practical uses. Having an extensive collection at hand made it easier to co-edit Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays (1992) with John Oliver Killens, to compile Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997), to write literary criticism, and to share insights about black literature and culture with my students at Tougaloo College and Dillard University. Julius used his collection to write important books on Dudley Randall and Broadside Press, lynching in Mississippi, and

Black Seminoles: the maroons of Florida

Maroon communities and slave revolutions in the Black Atlantic world are well known and well documented. Surinam, Jamaica, Cuba, Guyana, Venezuela, Columbia, Haiti, and Brazil had large numbers of enslaved fugitives who fled the plantations, armed themselves, and defended their human right to be free against national and local military forces. Much less is known about the maroon tradition in the United States where there has been a concerted effort to suppress information on slave revolts and maroon activity. The publicized rebellion of Nat Turner and the planned rebellions of Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey that never got off the ground are highlighted, it seems, in order to obfuscate the more successful maroon activities. Tagged as the largest slave rebellion in the United States, the Nat Turner rebellion did not even come close to achieving what some of the revolts waged during the colonial period achieved. There were three epicenters of maroon communities in the United States: the Dismal Swamp of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina, southern Louisiana, and north-central Florida and the Everglades, home of the Seminoles. This paper will examine the Black Seminoles, fugitive slaves who formed a maroon community and became part of the Seminole Confederation that fought three wars against the United States. The Seminole maroons’ century-long defense of their freedom far excelled the courageous revolt of Nat Turner and was by far the largest and longest standing military defense against the United States waged by an African or Indian group.

“Harlem is the Black World”: The Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Grassroots

“Harlem is the Black World”: The Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Grassroots

Red and Black World

The red and black formed in Egypt a système antinomique (B. Mathieu). Desheret (the desert) represented the sphere of the wild and the natural, while kemet (alluvial land) signified cultivated and civilised areas. These were not the only opposites involved. The red desert was seen as the source, base and place of origin of the black land and its inhabitants. This could also be compared to the raw vs worked (natural vs artificial) relationship. At the same time, it reflected the relationships between Seth and Osiris, evil and good and chaos and order. In developed Egyptian cosmology and eschatology, red represented Ra, day, life and activeness against black, which represented Osiris, night, death/rebirth and potential states. From these connections, red/divine and black/royal connotations emerged. Examples of the use of red and black can be found in both architecture and art from Naqada I vessels through to New Kingdom obelisks. This reflects the fundamental ideology of these colours.

Back to Black

AbstractThis is a brief sequel to Max Black's classic dialogue on the Identity of Indiscernibles. Interlocutor A defends the bundle theory by endorsing the (by now popular) view according to which Black's world does not contain two indiscernible spheres but rather a single, bi‐located sphere. His opponent, B, objects that A cannot distinguish such a world from a world with a single, uniquely located sphere, hence that the view in question adds nothing to A's original response to Black's challenge. A is simply denying that there can be worlds with two or more indiscernible entities.

“Africa is our Fatherland”: The Black Atlantic, Globalization, and Modern African Christianity

This essay makes the case that in the nineteenth century extensive migration and interactions among Africans in the black Atlantic world provided strong impetus for the growth of African Christianity. The relocation of huge segments of the African population (to regions of Western Europe and the Americas bordering the Atlantic) represented a major strand of globalization processes. This development was no less significant than the intercontinental economic system that produced unprecedented African dispersion in the first place. European aid and agency certainly played a crucial role in unfolding developments, reaching a crescendo in the late nineteenth century. But the transfer of people and ideas from the African diaspora, as well as the initiatives triggered by indigenous African responses, produced alternative and sometimes countervailing movements of extraordinary impact. These proved decisive for the spread of Christianity in Africa and beyond. As a symbol of massive migrations and transnational connections, the black Atlantic exemplifies the global–local interactions and the multidirectional processes that mark the worldwide expansion of the Christian faith.

A Westian Vision of the Role of Black Philosophy

The role of black philosophy? I believe Bro. Cornel West pointed us down the right path. In 1977 he wrote: “Afro-American philosophy is the interpretation of AfroAmerican history, highlighting the cultural heritage and political struggles, which provides desirable norms that should regulate responses to particular challenges presently confronting Afro-Americans.”1 Where he spoke of “Afro-American philosophy,” I would speak of Africana philosophy, a term I will treat as interchangeable with “black philosophy.”2 In what follows, I will use West’s defi nition to build a vision of the role of Africana philosophy in the intellectual life of the black world. I will also provide an example of what I would see as the fruitful development of the fi eld by briefl y exploring the prospects for increased work on the topic of Pan-Africanism. I would defi ne philosophy in a general sense as the activity of raising and trying to answer, in a refl ective and critical fashion, fundamental questions about the nature and value of things, about how we gain knowledge, and about how we ought to live our lives. Africana philosophy in the broadest possible sense is, on this defi nition, immeasurably old, as I see no reason to doubt that this activity has been carried out by people on the African continent for as long as our species has possessed the linguistic and cognitive capacities we associate with being human. Ancient Egyptian thought serves, I believe, as the initiating source of Africana philosophy as a historically ascertainable tradition, given the diffi culty of measuring the age of sources in the oral tradition.3 In the modern era, as Africans and African descendants confronted the slave trade, slavery, segregation, and colonization, Africana philosophizing developed a strong sociopolitical focus. The modern period also brings us the fi rst black professional philosophers, people like Anton Wilhelm Amo, from what is now Ghana, who received the equivalent of a doctorate in philosophy in Germany in 1730, and Thomas Nelson Baker, who became the fi rst African American in the United States to receive a PhD in philosophy in 1903.4 I shall concentrate here on Africana philosophy as a professional enterprise, that is, on the work of trained philosophers. I should explain right away, though, that I do not take all work in philosophy by black professional philosophers to count as black philosophy. I count only work that is distinctively Africana, in the sense that it is concerned with issues arising out of the black experience and/or it participates in a philosophical tradition associated primarily with black people.5 Works by black philosophers

An “Obedient Servant”

Throughout its history, the black press called for the liberation of communities of color worldwide and strived to establish an image of blackness that was counter to notions perpetuated in the mainstream media and society. In the early twentieth century, the Negro World, the official organ of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, played a crucial role in fostering black internationalism as a movement that had political, economic, and social implications for black communities worldwide. This article examines editorials published in Garvey's Negro World from 1924 through 1926 and argues that the newspaper called for the destruction of white capitalism and Western colonialism while simultaneously embracing Western ideals of advancement and applying those to communities of color around the world. Such messages provide insight into how a black newspaper embraced both a radical and pro-Western ideology (even while the newspaper's editorials condemned Western colonialism) in relation to the development of an early twentieth-century black internationalist movement. This study, therefore, contrasts with previous literature on the Negro World that positions Garvey's newspaper as an anticolonial media tool. Furthermore, it illustrates how black journalism in the early twentieth century promoted global solidarity among black people throughout the black Atlantic world.

“What the Eyes Did Not Wish to Behold”: Lessons from Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me

While many believe in and reproduce the narrative of the great black hope, and mourn the losses of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as the fallen kings who possessed the vision for a new black world, there have always been those who have challenged this. In Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, Erica R. Edwards traces an archive of literary contestations to charisma. Edwards’s notion of masculine authority is anchored in a cisgender male body. Here I examine what takes place in the charismatic scenario when its protagonist is a cisgender woman, a black female charismatic leader, Reverend Myrtle Black, from Ann Allen Shockley’s 1982 novel, Say Jesus and Come to Me. Shockley is a black feminist theorist, novelist, and librarian who has been relegated to the margins of the margins of American literature. Although there have been attempts to explore Shockley’s extensive contributions to black literature in general and black queer literature and politics more specifically, she and her work remain “seen but not seen because of what the eyes did not wish to behold.” What Shockley is referring to as undesirable here is a charismatic black leader who is a woman, a lesbian, and a self-proclaimed feminist but also a self-serving, womanizing alcoholic. A close examination of Shockley’s novel and the discourse surrounding it illuminates how social movements must have a clear grasp of the workings of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they structure our material world, while also being careful to not rely on the identities we embody to secure a certain kind of politics.