| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nikhil P. Singh. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. 285. $29.95.
Nikhil P. Singh takes up an important subject: the degree to which African American political thought has roamed free of the nation-state. Looking at what he calls the "long civil rights era," Singh shows how often intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois framed their call for citizenship in international terms as part of the anticolonial revolt of the 1930s to the 1970s. In so doing, black intellectuals offered an alternative vision to the nation-centered, liberal-democratic perspective represented by An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, a study directed by Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal and published in 1944. In asserting the power of the American liberal-democratic state to absorb African Americans, Myrdal attempted "to reassure the public that the period of black flirtation with the left was over." To the contrary, Singh argues that an "autonomous" black discourse continued to present African Americans as part of a world population of the oppressed and dispossessed.	1
In developing these and related ideas, Singh draws on a wide reading of articles and books by African American intellectuals. He has marshaled an impressive array of quotations that form a dense tapestry, although his analysis is sometimes muddied by cultural studies jargon and his selection seems somewhat idiosyncratic. The Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, for instance, looms larger than Malcolm X, yet James was a politically marginal figure in his American years, while Malcolm X was a giant and had a great deal to say on African Americans' ties with Africa.	. . .

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