Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature (Clemson University Press: African American Literature)

Cohen, Joshua Laurence

ISBN 10: 1949979911 / ISBN 13: 9781949979916

Published by Clemson University Press w/ LUP, 2021

About this Item

In English.

Seller Inventory # ria9781949979916_new

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature (Clemson University Press: African American Literature)
• Publisher: Clemson University Press w/ LUP
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1949979911
• ISBN 13: 9781949979916
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New
• Weight: 1000 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses’ loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

About the Author

J. Laurence Cohen is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in English from Emory University. His book, Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature, shows how Moses evolved from an icon of race loyalty to an avatar of authoritarianism. He is the author of “Exodus and Typological Plasticity in Delany, Melville, and Stowe” published in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture and “Shining Inward: The Blind Seer, Fanny Crosby, and Education for the Blind” published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.