The Dialectic of Race and Nation

Abstract

Nikhil Pal Singh. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 304 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Nikhil Singh's Black Is a Country is an expansive study of black intellectuals and activists in the twentieth-century United States. The book examines the "long civil rights era"—a period that extends from the 1930s through the black nationalisms of the 1960s and beyond. This designation serves as an alternative to the conventional chronology of the civil rights movement and, more importantly, allows for investigations that detect continuities between different moments of black antiracist thought. For Singh, black writers as distinct as W.E.B. Du Bois, Chester Himes, and Leroi Jones espoused varieties of politicized race consciousness that comprised a "more or less consistent tradition of radical dissent" throughout the long civil rights era (p. 52-3). The tradition flowed from "the modern dynamic of black nationality" and included both antiracist and anti-imperialist demands. It is fitting that Singh takes his title from an essay by Jones. "'Black' Is a Country" (1962) articulated an antiracist and anti-imperialist black nationalism by describing nationalist movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America as models of political activity for blacks in the United States.1 Black Is a Country interprets the black nationalisms of the 1960s as the reworking of the social thought of earlier decades rather than as the dramatic break presented in many histories of civil rights struggles. Following Du Bois's critiques of liberalism in the 1930s, Singh begins with the claim that "modern racialism retained a cultural and symbolic logic of its own, with powerful social and political effects" (p. 90). The book presents race and nation as a perpetual interplay of forces, a contest in which the racist social order is, at turns, de-emphasized by the state and exposed anew by black antiracist activists. More significantly, Singh makes large claims for an active and constructive relationship between notions of racial belonging and black antiracist thought. The result is a history that focuses on black activists and intellectuals who "recognized that racial belonging operates at scales that are both larger and smaller than the nation-state" and therefore proceeded to [End Page 89] expand visions of social justice through understandings of racial belonging (p. 44). The book explores three periods of antiracism: the first corresponds generally with Du Bois's activist proposals from the 1930s, the second is based in the black wartime radicalism of the 1940s, and the third is comprised of the black power movements of the 1960s. Singh maintains that radical black thought during the long civil rights era provided "new universals" despite the "forcible enclosures of racial stigma" (p. 44). Singh argues that black intellectuals and activists purposely turned to racial particularity in order to expand the political effectiveness of struggles for social justice. The espousal of racial particularity contrasted markedly with the universalism associated with official American civic ideologies yet became a competing source of universal claims and political aspirations. Antiracist intellectuals believed in working with rather than against the logic of racial particularity because "racial oppression had a material and symbolic specificity that had to be addressed on its own terms" (p. 75). Singh's contention that the social visions of black thinkers posed consistent challenges to compromised civic ideologies based in the political universality of the nation has at least two purposes. He sees that argument as connected to a project of historical reconstruction and as a means of developing critical perspectives on current invocations of American universality. He asks: "If the radically open-ended vision of civic-nationalism has been repeatedly undermined from within and without by cultural continuities of whiteness as a supremacist discourse, what does this tell us about the vaunted universalism of the United States" (p. 35)? It is thus from a position of resolute skepticism toward the history of civic nationalism that Singh's narrative on the dialectical relationship between...