Many are invited, but few are chosen: Civil rights, historical memory, and the figure of the 'chosen' one in the African American literary tradition, 1971--1989

Many Are Invited, But Few Are Chosen: Civil Rights, Historical Memory, and the Figure of the 'Chosen' One in the African American Literary Tradition, 1971-1989 argues that contemporary (post-1965) African American literature provides a discursive space that identifies, critiques, and revises normative interpretations and usages of the Biblical metaphor of Chosenness, which, in African American struggles for Civil Rights, have understood the movements and their leaders as God-sent and God-protected. Ernest Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989) complicate normative notions of Chosenness, Chosen figures, and Civil Rights that characterize Civil Rights movements as struggles for racial enfranchisement only and the leaders of these events as male. In particular, this dissertation problematizes the normative gender and sexuality ideologies that traditionally have defined this triad. The analysis of Horace Cross, who is the protagonist in A Visitation of Spirits, as a gay male Chosen figure, for instance, challenges heterosexist formulations of Chosenness. In so doing, it expands the definition of what constitutes Civil Rights and activism, while simultaneously examining the metaphor's appropriation in contexts that may not seem explicitly related to a traditionally defined Civil Rights project. Acknowledging the significant political, material, and cultural gains that African Americans have experienced by employing the metaphor of Chosenness, my investigation elucidates how normative notions of gender and sexuality undermine its ability to consider gender and sexual rights as Civil Rights, thereby not grappling with the interlocking forms of oppression that keep African Americans disenfranchised. Positing a strategy for analyzing contemporary African American literature's preoccupation with Civil Rights, this project also foregrounds the reflexive relationship between the religious ideology of Chosenness and African American politics.