Date of Award
2013
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Graduate Group
Africana Studies
First Advisor
Guthrie P. Ramsey
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the narrative strategies and performative devices of African-American politics in the post-civil rights era. My inquiry focuses on demagoguery--a term dating from classical antiquity--in order to implicate it in African-American political discourses, in particular those of Tavis Smiley's former State of the Black Union, 2000-2010. Indeed, I posit that Smiley's former annual event is an important site for thinking about modern black demagoguery and the aestheticization of black politics. Through close readings and original transcriptions of Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933), Cornel West (b. 1953), and Michael Eric Dyson (b. 1958), I show that the inevitable practice of demagoguery--what the dissertation theorizes as the "allegorical," "epideictic," and "polytropic" modes of emplotment--now threatens to undermine the political opportunities afforded by the success of the modern civil rights movement, even though it sustains the illusion, today, of an autochthonous black public sphere.
Recommended Citation
Bertholf, Garry, "Black Sophists: A Critique of Demagoguery" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 736.
https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/736