In search of the Promised Land: Tracing the evolution of the Exodus narrative in African American rhetoric

Theon Edward Hill, Purdue University

Abstract

Throughout American history, the Exodus has served as a discursive site for crucial issues of identity, ideology, and purpose to be articulated, negotiated, and disrupted. The narrative has been utilized by a wide variety of groups including English settlers, the Founding Fathers, Hollywood movie producers, comic book writers, and African slaves. Within the African American community, the Exodus functioned as shorthand for the prophetic tradition, a form of political engagement rooted in stories of Old Testament prophets speaking truth to power. During his 2008 campaign for president, Obama deployed the Exodus metaphorically to situate himself discursively as an extension of the prophetic legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. During the Civil Rights Movement, King drew on the Exodus and prophetic tradition to inspire radical stances against injustice, inequality, and oppression in society. In this project, I engage in a comparative analysis of King's and Obama's metaphoric uses of Exodus. Specifically, I argue that Obama's uses of the Exodus suggest an ideological solidarity with King that is not reflected in his policies. In this project, I trace the history of American, and specifically, African American uses of the Exodus as a means of understanding the relationship between the Exodus and the prophetic tradition. During slavery, Blacks deployed the Exodus as crucial source of identity, ideology, and purpose in the midst of a nation that denied them humanity, freedom, and a future. Discursive uses of the Exodus developed into the prophetic tradition. This tradition is a Theo-political ideology that operates from the premise that God is on the side of the oppressed. Therefore, it is the responsibility of prophetic voices to speak truth to power, to call society to repent of pervasive forms of oppression, and to endure persecution in defense of the values. The prophetic tradition functions as the counterpart of political strategy in that it seeks to hold political powers accountable to sacred values of freedom, justice, and equality. King drew on the Exodus to articulate a dialectical perspective of history. That is, he argued that the past placed responsibility on the present to transform the future. In addition, King's uses of the Exodus reveal his prophetic concern for all people, not just African Americans, and his commitment to forms of political activism that evolved with an ever-changing sociopolitical sphere. Obama's uses of the Exodus drastically differed from King's. While King utilized the Exodus to speak out against forms of oppression, Obama utilized the Exodus to defend his African American identity and to present himself as a deliverer when he spoke at a Selma March memorial. He positioned himself as a contemporary Joshua or bureaucratic prophetic to King's established identity as the Moses of the Civil Rights Movement. This identification served to legitimize differences between King and Obama that threatened the candidate's support in the African American community. At King's former church, Obama offered a postmodern interpretation of the Exodus free of the more controversial elements of the narrative so as not to disrupt the broad-based coalition that he had established throughout his campaign. That is, he rearticulated the Exodus as a non-threatening narrative that did not call people to repent of social sin. Unlike King, who called people to unite on the basis of shared sacred values, Obama's version of the Exodus positioned unity as the sacred value of singular importance. While Obama's identity as deliverer was affirmed by many African Americans who believed that he would lead them into the Promised Land, completing the work left undone during the Civil Rights Movement. Not everyone in the Black community hailed the new president as a contemporary deliverer. During his first term in office, several African American leaders challenged the notion that Obama was a deliverer in the prophetic sense. His identity as a prophetic deliverer, in their opinion, silenced other prophetic voices responsible to hold him accountable to the values of the prophetic tradition. Having examined the differences between King's and Obama's uses of the Exodus, I conclude this project by examining the rhetorical (in)adequacy of the Exodus narrative as an interpretive framework in various sociopolitical contexts. While scholars acknowledge its pervasive influence on American social life, I question the utility of the narrative in providing people with a pathway to closure within its interpretive framework.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Boyd, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Rhetoric

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