Introduction: Moses in African American religious culture -- Mosaic subjectivity in David Walker and Frances Harper -- Typological plasticity in Martin Delany, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Moses vs. the masses : Alain Locke,...
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Introduction: Moses in African American religious culture -- Mosaic subjectivity in David Walker and Frances Harper -- Typological plasticity in Martin Delany, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Moses vs. the masses : Alain Locke, Aesthetic Uplift, and Zora Neale Hurston -- The end of Exodus? : the dissolution of Mosaic leadership in Ralph Ellison and William Melvin Kelley -- Ralph Ellison and the dangers of the Moses complex -- The end of Exodus? : the dissolution of Mosaic leadership in William Melvin Kelley -- Conclusion: Moses eternal. "Excavating Exodus examines adaptations of Moses' story in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of race loyalty, Excavating Exodus traces how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership"--