The Anti-idealist Black Feminism of The Other Side of Terror

Abstract

The Anti-idealist Black Feminism of The Other Side of Terror Roderick A. Ferguson (bio) Erica R. Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire, New York: NYU Press, 2021 Erica Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire is a book that provides a necessary interpretation of African American women's literature within the context of twentieth-century U.S. imperial ventures. If it just did that, that would be enough. In providing this interpretation, it has helped us understand the impressions that war and conflict have had on African American cultural production and how some of its most celebrated producers—Black feminists—have responded powerfully to the imprint of state violence. As important as that intervention is, the book does even more. It uses the long war on terror to initiate a critique of the worrisome idealisms that currently constitute many of the conversations around Blackness, idealisms that conceal Blackness's relations with what Edwards calls "imperial grammars" and "the scenes of incorporation," relations that align Blackness with imperial violence and incorporate it into regimes of dominance. Situating her investigation in the span of time between the rise of U.S. counterinsurgency in the 1960s and the years of the Obama presidency, Edwards defines the "imperial grammars of Blackness" as "the codes of cultural production and public discourse in linking the rationalization of US imperial violence abroad to the US public sphere's manipulation and incorporation of Blackness as the sign of multicultural beneficence" (21). As such, the book theorizes Blackness as existing in a dialectical relationship with U.S. empire in that it has been both the critic and the supplicant of U.S. imperial formations. In this, the book rejects Blackness as an idealism that is always the antithesis of dominant forms of power. Instead, the book favors a historically and politically grounded engagement with [End Page 211] Blackness, determining its vulnerabilities to empire as well as its possibilities for anti-imperialist insurgency. The imperial grammar of Blackness has direct bearing on the institutions that constellate the book—literature, the university, Black studies, and Black feminism. Those institutions set the stage for Blackness's incorporation into and rebellion against empire. About the scenes of incorporation, she writes the following: I wager, then, that the scenes of incorporation that tell the story of Black women's passing through the very fields through which I now pass—Black studies and literature in particular, universities and literary culture in general—might highlight a contradiction at the heart of contemporary Black (literary) studies, at the heart of English, at the heart of this book: that Blackness is as intimate with empire as the reader is with the book on-screen or on her lap, that the Black cultural text is, in other words, a transfer point, a too-short bridge, between the long war on terror's brutal practices of counterinsurgency and its smooth calls of advancement, inclusion, celebrity, and celebration. (188) The contradiction that she wrestles with in the book is the one that designates Black people, Black literary studies, Black feminism as entities simultaneously minoritized by the U.S. nation-state and activated by U.S. empire. For her, Black womanhood is not free of these contradictions. As she argues, "That Black women were both the targets of state defense initiatives and authors of a national narrative of democratic righteousness meant that they were positioned along the fault lines of competing nationalist discourses" (58). As Black women were occupying these fault lines, Black feminism developed practices to assess and confront those contradictions. This necessarily means that the book promotes and constructs a Black feminist archive that opposes the concealments of liberalism. Here, she points to the ways that liberal ideologies and apparatuses facilitate and obfuscate social violence by proclaiming the state's benevolence. As she says, "I will continue to call Black feminist literature—the work we might gather not as a collection of singular texts by great writers but rather under the banner of a collective project of marshaling the embodied practices of reading, writing, hearing and performing literature in the...