Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin Eric M. Washington CONGO LOVE SONG: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State. By Ira Dworkin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2017. In Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Ira Dworkin, assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, presents a rich text about Black transnationalism building upon the important theoretical contribution of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). In this well-structured and well-argued book, Dworkin argues that African-American anti-colonialism found a straight channel to the Congo that also flowed to criticism of the whole of European colonialism during the twentieth century. The work begins with the writings of historian George Washington Williams and Presbyterian missionary William Sheppard, who both arrived in the Congo in 1890, thirteen years after Leopold II of Belgium claimed the Congo as his own personal real estate. Both men wrote of the atrocities committed under Leopold’s personal rule, namely the extraction of rubber using cruel means and punishment: chopping off of Congolese hands. The writings of Williams and Sheppard are the origins of African-American anti-colonial writing on the Congo. From this starting point, Dworkin masterfully analyzes Booker T. Washington’s protests of colonialism in the Congo, the translation work of missionary Edith Edmiston, the literature of Pauline E. Hopkins, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the African-American publication of the writings of Patrice Lumumba, and the speeches, interviews, and letters of Malcolm X. These sources all substantiate his argument that African Americans possessed transnational sensibilities when it came to protesting against colonialism in the Congo, and even the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961. One weakness in this study is Dworkin’s tentative engagement with Ethiopianism. In his chapter on Pauline E Hopkins, Dworkin discusses her use of the Ethiopian trope that reflects a tradition in African-American writing dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. Dworkin fails to define this literary tradition, though he relies somewhat on Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, which includes a robust discussion of Ethiopiansim. The strengths of this work far outweigh the weakness. Quite significant is Dworkin’s treatment of Washington’s transnationalism. Not only did Washington write in protest to the atrocities committed in the Congo, but he envisioned the expansion of the “Tuskegee Model” there. These insights challenge recent scholarship that has argued that Washington’s interest in Africa was “secondary” to his Southern concerns. Dworkin provides convincing evidence that Washington’s Southern commitments and African concerns worked symbiotically. Another strength of the book is the chapter on Langston Hughes that centers on his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Dworkin painstakingly engages a rich trove of evidence that leads to the conclusion that this famous poem contains anti-colonial references. This work adds to existing scholarship on African-American connections to Africa such as Campbell’s Songs of Zion and Middle Passages, and Kevin Gaines’ African Americans in Ghana. What this work does that is different from those historical monographs is that Dworkin is able to construct a corpus of African-American writings dedicated to the Congo crisis. This work should spark more scholarship on African-American discourse, both cultural and political, on Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [End Page 120] Eric M. Washington Calvin College Copyright © 2019 Mid-America American Studies Association