| My project examines the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on contemporary African-American culture. Specifically, I demonstrate that there exists a corresponding relationship between African-American history and identity so that the revisioning of history influences our understanding of racial identities and vice versa. Identifying three epochal shifts---the Middle Passage, emancipation, and the 1960's Civil Rights Movement---I illustrate how contemporary African-American historiography embodies a Christian, messianic chronometry that promises liberating, apocalyptic rupture that undoes the binds of race. Like a coiled spring, this chronometry is at one and the same time linear and circular. Characterized by a progressive quest for freedom that, as first established in slave spirituals, is rooted in a messianic sense of deliverance, each epochal shift in African American history echoes the transformative experience of the Middle Passage. Simply put, in the three aforementioned shifts, there occurs a transformation of identity from slave to free person to a fully enfranchised citizen. Focusing primarily on this latter shift, the Civil Rights Movement, I show how the convergence of three interrelated social forces in the late 1950s and early 1960s---the Black Arts Movement's revalorization of "folk" culture; the specific political changes stemming from the Civil Rights Movement; and most importantly, the coming of age of a generation of African Americans who had little to no direct contact with former slaves---has brought about a radical rupture not only in American racial politics but identity, a rupture of which we are still struggling to make sense. |
