ABSTRACT
Harold Cruse noted in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that African Americans have always oscillated between the integrationist strain and the separatist strain, a tension often referred to as the push-pull dynamic of African-American culture. The most celebrated rhetorical expression of the integrationist strain has been through the African-American jeremiad, whose celebrated practitioners have included David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Michelle Alexander. Notable separatist arguments have been made by Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. Using as a starting point Sutton Griggs’s Imperio in Imperium, perhaps the classic “rhetoric novel” in the African-American literary tradition, one that incorporates both integrationist and separatist impulses, the authors map the push-pull of African-American rhetoric from the nineteenth century to contemporary times.
