American Prophecy Race and Redemption in American Political Culture George Shulman		$25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-3075-2 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-3074-5
The political meaning of prophetic language in America. Prophecy is the fundamental idiom of American politics—a biblical rhetoric about redeeming the crimes, suffering, and promise of a special people. Yet American prophecy and its great practitioners—from Frederick Douglass and Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison—are rarely addressed, let alone analyzed, by political theorists. This paradox is at the heart of American Prophecy, a work in which George Shulman unpacks and critiques the political meaning of American prophetic rhetoric. In the face of religious fundamentalisms that associate prophecy and redemption with dogmatism and domination, American Prophecy finds connections between prophetic language and democratic politics, particularly racial politics. Exploring how American critics of white supremacy have repeatedly reworked biblical prophecy, Shulman demonstrates how these writers and thinkers have transformed prophecy into a political language and given redemption a political meaning. To examine how antiracism is linked to prophecy as a vernacular idiom is to rethink political theology, recast democratic theory, and reassess the bearing of religion on American political culture. Still, prophetic language is not always liberatory, and American Prophecy maintains a critical dispassion about a rhetoric that is both prevalent and problematic. “This is the grand book on the American prophetic tradition of thought and action we’ve been waiting for! Shulman’s subtle theoretical analyses, sophisticated historical narratives, and progressive political project brings new life to a set of issues and figures—such as race, empire, and democracy in the texts of Thoreau, King, Baldwin, and Morrison—that either we honestly face or we sadly succumb to, to our destruction.” —Cornel West George Shulman is associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and the author of Radicalism and Reverence: The Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley. 320 pages | 6 x 9 | August 2008