| Review of: | Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy by Nikhil Pal Singh |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Minkah Makalani |
| Reviewed in: | Peace & Change |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 32, Issue 04, Pages 590-612 |
Book Reviews
Scholarship on black radicalism in the United States has turned with increasing alacrity to consider how black activist-intellectuals related international liberation struggles to black liberation in the United States. Others have sought to rethink the historiography of Civil Rights and Black Power, especially its overly delimited periodization schemes that obscure the temporal, regional, and international breath of each. Nikhil Pal Singh's
Singh opens his work by offering that in Martin Luther King's 1967 opposition to the Vietnam War, scholars might see him as drawing on earlier Cold War-era black radicals, and "recognize how for a brief moment he opened a bridge between past and future black radicalisms and their more expansive dreams of freedom" (p. 4). That bridge reflects what Singh calls the "long civil rights era," an era bracketed by the New Deal and the Great Society, when black people's struggles for freedom were relentlessly global in scope and consistently challenged the racial logic of the United States.
The rise of a black public sphere, where black people could articulate their racial struggle for democracy, is central to this story. W. E. B. Du Bois is an important figure, for he represents an intellectual ferment that reveals "the most consistent and enduring strand of modern black activism has been the opposition to imperialism and colonialism" (p. 53). This black public questioned the narrative arch of a U.S. nation progressing providentially toward a universal democracy. Rather than see Du Bois as a doyen going it alone, Singh treats a broader activist-intellectual current that included people like Ralph Bunche, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, figures who cultivated a discourse and activism where race functioned as a political tool to expand the range of democratic theory and practice.
The concept of an "activist-intellectual" is central for Singh, but it could use further theorization. It is not entirely clear why he focuses on the people he does-largely men of letters and literary artists in the United States. Only in the penultimate chapter do black radicals in the African diaspora come into view, followed finally by the nonelite male intellectuals in the Black Panther Party. To fully understand the debates that surged in the black public sphere in the 1930s and 1940s allows for a rethinking of many standard assumptions about black intellectuals. For example, Singh suggests that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, generally treated as disillusioned anticommunists by the 1950s, were more importantly engaged in an effort to "articulate an independent and indigenous black radicalism" where black people were modern political subjects whose world views sought "a more enduring knowledge and practice of freedom" (p. 122).
The black public, thus, provided a space where fundamental questions about Americanism were raised not merely in terms of black freedom in the United States, but as a global problematic. Yet one wonders how such activist-intellectuals as Louis Thompson, Claudia Jones, and Charlotta Bass raised fundamental questions that might complicate the notion of a black public. Singh's basic claims for a black public as analytically important remain convincing. What is questioned, however, is how we hold this notion in tension, attending to its internal stratifications and hierarchies as much as we do its ideological complexity.
When the Cold War prompted people like Walter White to pursue a "strategy of de-linking questions of black equality from the critique of empire" (p. 139) and bolstered the anticommunism of A. Philip Randolph, Bass emerged as one of their fiercest critics. Thus, it is not at all clear that White or Randolph dictated the mood for the black public sphere. And might greater attention to the international dimension of a black public (or publics) have made for a slightly, but importantly different story? C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones, two radicals deported in the 1950s, but who continued to engage the United States, immediately come to mind. As does George Padmore, who appears only occasionally in
Singh is at his best when he juxtaposes debates in this black public to U.S. state policies and liberal-nationalist-intellectual projects. True to his conceptualization of the long civil rights era, he is concerned with how black activist-intellectuals consistently critiqued the American nationalist project. One does wonder, though, how Singh's narrative might look had he made the rise (and decline?) of a black public the periodizing frame for the long civil rights era, rather than state policies. A black public certainly emerges by the late 1920s, whose political formations impacted later black radical formations. As a heuristic, the notion of a long civil rights era helps bring the New Negro Movement into greater dialogue with what scholars traditionally understand as the civil rights and black power movements, and as Singh points out, this need not blur the distinctions between them. Still, as he describes it, the long civil rights era seems to delink the radicalism of a Du Bois in the 1930s (and the 1960s, more generally) from the radicalism of the 1920s. Mapping such a history would have required a social history-inflected intellectual history, which is not Singh's project. But there seem to be important insights to gain into the 1950s and 1960s by turning, for example, to debates around internal colonization that began as early as 1916. In his most compelling chapter, "Decolonizing America," Singh limns the international contours of a black public for the first time, and ultimately turns to the Black Panther Party, whose power and perceived danger, he argues, resided in their calling into question the state itself-both through Huey Newton's writings, their policing of the police, and their diplomatic relations with foreign governments.
In