| My dissertation brings a contemporary black feminist rendering to a rhetorical tradition that reaches back to the nascent days of the United States. This project is the first scholarly study to analyze the ways in which black women confront social injustices through a critical performance of the American Jeremiad, a "political sermon" whose historical location at the crossroads of politics and religious authority in the seventeenth century meant that this rhetorical tradition would be reserved exclusively for men. I argue that African American women in the post-Civil Rights era articulate a distinctive Black Female Jeremiad as a mode of resistive performance that operates on two critical levels. First, the Black Female Jeremiad offers a religio-political critique of one of the most foundational narratives of American identity---the belief in the United States as a "chosen" nation---by pointing out the discrepancy between an exceptionalist "City on a Hill" and a nation-state riddled with racial, economic, and gender injustices. Second, in performing a critique that calls into question the American national sense of self, the Black Female Jeremiad must negotiate what I term the maternal/militant bind of black women's subjectivity in the U.S. cultural imagination.;Because the Madonna/whore dichotomy of white femininity is not transferable to black women, whose bodies have always already been labeled as debased, I argue that a maternal/militant binary in which both sides are marked as pejorative is the racialized gender stereotype for African American women. While tropes such as the compliant mammy, the emasculating black matriarch, and the parasitic welfare mother plague representations of black maternity, a militant black woman faces ridicule for her inherent promiscuity, as the trope of the angry black woman is marked by the indiscriminate use of her words, deeds, and body. Ultimately, I argue that the Black Female Jeremiad is characterized by her ability to navigate both the maternal and the militant in previously unacknowledged ways and that this subjective hybridity leads to the Black Female Jeremiad's marginalization from mainstream discourse through dismissive charges of insanity, blasphemy, and/or treason to American ideals.;Moreover, the Black Female Jeremiad's mobility between bifurcated representations of black womanhood results in a vexed maternity and a generative militancy that complicates Black feminist thought's predominant articulation of black motherhood as a site of power and activism. Thus, my dissertation prioritizes a missing strand within contemporary Black feminist thought by analyzing often-overlooked texts such as Toni Morrison's Paradise , Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie, Octavia Butler's Parables series, and Lauryn Hill's live album, MTV Unplugged 2.0, while at the same time deepening our understanding of literary predecessors such as late seventeenth-century sermons and nineteenth-century abolitionist texts. |
