A Call to Consciousness and Action: Mapping the African-American Jeremiad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Many scholars of the African-American jeremiad have argued that it is influential in Black protest as a rhetorical device. David Howard-Pitney concludes that the rhetoric of the American jeremiad ultimately developed into something distinctively African-American because it called for social prophecy and criticism. This essay seeks to expand Howard-Pitney’s assertions as I examine the African-American jeremiad’s conception in the early republic. While Howard-Pitney argues that some Blacks used this prototypical form of rhetoric in ‘‘its pure form’’ (Afro-American 15), I believe that early African-American writers also employed the religious aspects of the jeremiad to develop a sociopolitical consciousness in their writings as well, making the African-American jeremiad the first literary development of African-American writers in antebellum America. This essay argues in favour of the continuity of African-American jeremiadic rhetoric in other forms of African-American protest (slave narratives, poetry, pamphlets, etc.). Overall, I suggest that the distinctiveness of the African-American jeremiad’s poetics indicates its enduring impact on the development of an emerging African-American literary tradition as it became the foundation for Black civil rights movements on a massive scale and was clearly a leading force in the Black community during the early republic. Highlighting how the usage of the genre changed during America’s early developmental years, I focus on the complexities of African-American jeremiadic rhetoric in its initial years of evolution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".