The Audacity of Hope Jones

This chapter analyzes the specific representation of Barack Obama as a fictional character in Alice Randall’s 2009 novel Rebel Yell. This chapter argues that Randall’s fictional representation of Obama as a post-racial figure or “unhyphenated man”—meaning that he is not burdened by double consciousness—embraces his election as a moment of transformative change. Randall’s novel utilizes Obama as an almost mythological character—he is, in fact, never named in the novel—to imagine a racial self-consciousness detached from structural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and absent, as well, from the proscriptive burdens of both the Civil Rights and post-civil rights eras. The chapter shows how Randall’s refusal of a racialized present echoes concepts such as post-Blackness and post-soul aesthetics.