Rewriting the American Jeremiad
Rewriting the American Jeremiad
On Pluralism, Black Nationalism, and a New America
Sacvan Bercovitch's influential account of the American Jeremiad swallows the African American jeremiad whole. This chapter argues that Du Bois's African American jeremiads—in their conception of America without divine guarantee and riven with dissent, and of African Americans as a distinctly chosen people within America at large—represent a swerve from the Puritan form. First, Du Bois's jeremiads try to imagine a new type of America, a pluralistic democratic America that does not suppress dissent or its fraught history. Du Bois's jeremiads reject the idea of America's divine guarantee, as they reject a steadfast optimism and unshakeable faith in the American experience. The second critical way Du Bois's jeremiads disrupt Bercovitch's norm is in the way he uses them to establish and consolidate what Du Bois calls “A Negro Nation Within the Nation.” Du Bois does not mean by “nation” a separate political entity of African Americans, but a type of cultural, political, and social solidarity within America. For Du Bois, this emphasis on the integrity of black American culture represents a form of black nationalism that extends itself toward a larger pluralistic America.
Keywords: African American jeremiad, American jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch, black nationalism, democracy pluralism, nationalism
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
