The art of the Black essay: From meditation to transcendency

Traditionally, literary scholars have treated the African American meditative essay strictly as a documentary, and therefore non-literary modality that reflects the real-world as envisaged by the essayist herself. As the problematic of race often is central in African American cultural treatments, and as the essays often are designed to preach and persuade, the artistic and rhetorical genius of the essay often is overlooked, and the political preacher (rather than artist) is reductively ridiculed and praised. Focusing upon the twentieth century essays of W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Stanley Crouch, and Alice Walker this dissertation, The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendency, argues for an examination of the relationship between public and private dimensions of the essay and reads the speaker as brilliant artist who expresses political passions via craft. More specifically, this dissertation examines and demystifies the power of narrative to influence thought patterns, the philosophic or ideologic perspectives of readers, by addressing the problematic features of and therapeutic value in the double-consciousness psychic condition. Particularly, it identifies the interpellating power of the African American meditative essayistic text as the vehicle most used by Black intellectuals to inspire social change and political action in America. It is a form that assumes the most effective route to social change is through the psyche of the individual; it incites social change one person at a time. This dissertation posits theories of the uncanny moment, transcendency and mindfulness, theories which describe the complexities of intentionality and rhetorical strength in African American intellectual thought. They are theories which attempt to demystify and describe the inspiriting and interpellating power of the African American meditative essayistic text. It is a text that strives to document the author\u27s journey to psychic freedom and to instigate such a journey in a community of readers. This dissertation reads double-consciousness, the theory posited by W. E. B. DuBois in 1903, as a stultifying psychological candition experienced by African Americans as a result of their submergence in a racially hybrid and hierarchized America. It recognizes that most scholars associate the concept with the complexity of dual identity, of being, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body (The Souls of Black Folk). It identifies the double-consciousness condition as one of psychic oscillation, a stage of psychic stagnation, movement without progress, through which the African American subject attempts to resolve the conflict of two warring American ideals, the ideals of democracy and caste, in order to find peace of mind and acceptance of self. Resolution, psychic freedom, may be found through the experience of transcendency. Widespread social change may be effected through the power of word, the mastery of influence