Salamishah Tillet's Sites of Slavery brilliantly explores aesthetic and political appropriations of chattel slavery by “African American writers, artists, and intellectuals” in “the post–civil rights” era. Tillet theorizes how these figures address a contemporary “crisis of citizenship by revisiting the antebellum past” (3). The “democratic aesthetic” they enact “consider[s] the demands of a post–civil rights political project.” These culture workers face a political predicament somewhat different from that of “their antebellum predecessors who shaped their rhetoric around the demand for legal freedom” (4). Post–civil rights cultural productions carry “a lingering DuBoisean ‘twoness’ at the dawn of yet another century,” oscillating “between the pessimism of civic estrangement and the privilege of African American legal citizenship” (4). African American artists and intellectuals return to “sites”—texts, images, and locales—from the slave past in order to redefine America's “civic myths.” I will restrict my comments to pointing out how this study raises new questions for novels, past and present.For Tillet, the novel in the post–civil rights era revises the legacy of Sally Hemings, now well known for her relationship to Thomas Jefferson as chattel, lover, and the mother to several of his children. Their relationship raises stinging questions regarding nationalism, genealogy as a mode of national belonging, and the blurred lines between coercion and consent (which, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, is yet another sign of the devaluing of black womanhood). Tillet argues that several texts, among them Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Sally Hemings (1979), recast Hemings “as America's founding mother, a crucial symbol of the constitutive relationship between slavery and the formation of the American nation-state in which black women, not the founding statesmen, emerge as the true progenitors and guardians of democracy” (23). Works like Chase-Riboud's and other recent fictionalizations of Hemings's life provide a “model for post–civil rights civic membership” that confirms the authority and trustworthiness of black counternarratives of America's founding over and against the mainstream denials of Jefferson's legacy. The implication is that the novel remains central to national founding as an ongoing, uneven process engaging texts open to reinterpretation, as opposed to a battle already won and based on an uncontestable authoritative source.If there is one novel crucial to the mainstream production and understanding of American civic myths, Sites suggests it would be Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Hence an epigraph to one of Tillet's chapters is drawn from Leslie A. Fiedler: “[F]or better or worse, it was Mrs. Stowe who invented American Blacks for the imagination of the whole world” (51). The post–civil rights imagination takes Uncle Tom's Cabin as a serious portrayal of the evils of slavery that also naturalizes black accommodation to oppression. While the rewriting of Hemings stresses alternative genealogies of national belonging, Uncle Tom's Cabin must be revised to acknowledge the affective toll black Americans continue to pay for living in a social space that assumes their compliance and then punishes them for feeling or doing otherwise. Tillet analyzes several works, with an emphasis on Ishmael Reed's novel Flight to Canada, that revise the black characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin associated with subservience. Given that they reveal the “political ineffectiveness of white liberal guilt,” Tillet applauds these works for not condemning such characters to the dustbin of history (91). What is more, she finds another communal dimension of critique through this rethinking of Stowe's novel. Reed's novel also offers alternatives to the strict limits that the Black Power movement placed on black identity. With regard to Flight to Canada, Tillet claims, “ironically, Reed responds to this post–civil rights racial pessimism by creating a new mythology, not of American founding narratives, but one in which the civil rights movement is a model for American democracy and Uncle Robin [a version of Uncle Tom] its new icon” (68). In becoming the rare Black Arts/Black Power figure who overcomes that era's identity politics, Reed sets a model for today.While praising the post–civil rights era for engaging America's foundational narratives and countering the divisive political effects of demonizing “Uncle Toms,” Tillet also exposes the limits of this generation's internationalism. Consider her intriguing chapter on African American tourism at slave castles throughout West Africa. In her view, this tourism turns black diasporic sites into narrowly conceived African American heritage landmarks. To retain their value for African Americans, these sites have to be untouched by the many political, legal, economic, and cultural processes of contemporary Africa. The reality of today's Africa distracts these tourists from enjoying Africa as a fantastical site of past belonging and present redemption. What Brent Edwards calls “the practice of diaspora” disappears from view. Although Tillet makes her argument largely through slave-castle photography, readers of Novel should consider how this critique might alter the way we read several African American novels, including The Color Purple, a novel that offers only a limited view of Africa through the fictional “Olinka” village. “I do not know from what part of Africa my African ancestors came and so I claim[ed] the continent,” Alice Walker confessed years later in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). The contradictory temporality of Walker's recovery of her African ancestry arguably fits Tillet's critique: “I suppose I have created Olinka as my village and the Olinkans as one of my ancient, ancestral tribal peoples” (Walker 285). Thus the Olinkans are part of the novel's present day (between 1910 and 1940) and represent “ancient” precolonial African life, even though Celie's knowledge of Africa comes entirely from letters written from a Christian missionary trip undertaken by her sister Nettie, whose own potentially colonial role goes unquestioned. But even this confirms Tillet's critique: questioning the missionary trip would undermine Nettie's internationalist profile and, by extension, Celie's access to an enriching fantasy of Africa.One point of ambiguity in Tillet's theorization of the post–civil rights era deserves special attention: is the periodizing term “post–civil rights” really synonymous with “post–Black Power”? Certainly, in some cases, the civil rights and Black Power movements would share a critique of post–civil rights aesthetics and politics. On the whole, neither civil rights nor Black Power internationalisms render Africa a monolith in the way today's slave tourism does. Then again, Tillet's several references to hip-hop hint at the musical genre's carrying Black Power sentiments into the post–civil rights era. No final verdict on the relation between these intellectual, aesthetic, and political periodizations can be offered, of course. I am proposing that Sites be read as inviting more intricate investigation into how periodization makes particular temporal continuities and ruptures productive.More than that, just as Sites captures an era's struggle with civic estrangement, so this book also captures a particular intellectual formation of African American studies. To that extent, it also marks the step beyond that lends new relevance to the civil rights and Black Power movements in a post–civil rights political era. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars premised the institutionalization of African American studies and, more precisely, its development in the humanities on a theoretical turn against the essentialism of the Black Power and Black Arts movements. It is a step beyond this turn against Black Power and Black Arts that Sites, however hesitantly, tries to think. Barack Obama's presidential administrations mark the culmination, the backlash, and the parody of the multiculturalism that takes political advantage of this distinction between civil rights and Black Power. To explain further, let me return to Tillet's interpretation of Reed:Although Reed's Black Power contemporaries categorized civil rights leaders as modern-day Uncle Toms because they refused to endorse strategic violence over civil disobedience, Reed defamiliarizes the Uncle Tom trope by making Uncle Robin the most successfully rebellious character in the novel. . . . Reed repositioned Uncle Tomming as a subversive performance used by African Americans to outwit and eventually defeat their racial oppressors. Through Robin, Reed not only revolutionizes the figure of Uncle Tom, but argues that post–civil rights racial equality entails a radical integration of American multiracialism, or what Reed notes as his “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” into our nationalist myths. (61)Tillet never clarifies which “Black Power contemporaries” or “civil rights leaders” she has in mind. Given that some representatives of Black Power continued looking to civil rights leaders for guidance, the break between the two generations of activists might also be considered a bridge. One must also consider how civil rights leaders had their own forms of self-policing. Arguably, one example would be the relative silence of civil rights voices when Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed American imperialism in Vietnam. Nor does the phrase “radical integration of American multiracalism” receive a sufficiently detailed explanation, since it complicates the liberal connotations of integration and multiracialism in the post–civil rights era.Would it be too far-fetched to trace the Black Power movement, in part, back to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) members Medgar Evers and Robert F. Williams, who called for armed self-defense of African American communities against indiscriminate racial violence? Despite the fact that the NAACP rebuffed them, the fact remains that their call emerged out of the best-known civil rights organization. While King critiqued the semantics of the slogan “Black Power,” he affirmed its emphasis on black empowerment: “Black power, in its broad and positive meaning, is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals.” He also said: “Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose.” With that qualification, King makes power “necessary” and not just “desirable” for “implement[ing] the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar oppositions. . . . What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic” (King 37).Of course, in examining these issues, we must also consider Barbara Ransby's account of Ella Baker's relationship to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). “As a SNCC adviser, [Baker] was revered,” and the organization's radicalization did not “sharp[ly] break [from Baker] but [signaled] a gradual drift and erosion of the relationship” (Ransby 345). “Baker was still a valued adviser” for several members of SNCC whom she mentored in the early 1960s. Baker “understood” Black Power's call for “self-determination,” because she had organized all-black cooperatives as early as the 1930s (346). Finally, Ransby quotes Baker saying that black folks must ally with “the impoverished white,” the “misrepresented Indians,” and the “alienated Mexican American,” but “[y]ou've got to coalesce from a position of power, not just for the sake of saying ‘we're together’” (347). Etymologically, “coalesce” connotes the organic growth of multiple forms of life alongside each other and together. Daniel Widener's study of the political implications of the Black Arts Movement in Black Arts West and Alondra Nelson's research into the Black Panthers' medical activism in Body and Soul indicate that, in some ways, the Black Power movement followed Baker's lead, seeing that these movements consistently facilitated cross-class, cross-racial collaborations that kept sight of empowering black people.What does it mean that King and Baker, two canonical “civil rights” leaders, provide definitions of “black power” equal to, though inflected differently from, the definitions offered by Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, or Angela Davis? I am not suggesting that we conflate the movements. But I am suggesting that new syntheses of the key principles and practices of these movements could result from our seeing how they read each other at their most rigorous and sympathetic. What can they tell us about problems impacting us today? How did the Black Power movement anticipate today's criminalization of protest and increased militarism? How did they challenge the ever-expanding surveillance of citizen and noncitizen alike? Why was the civil rights movement more successful at engaging legislation and electoral politics? How might the Occupy movement have flourished if it had more directly referenced Baker's “group centered leadership” and King's plan to occupy Washington? How did both movements lay claim to the college/university as a site of political struggle and social transformation?According to Fred Moten, bringing about a “fundamental reorientation” toward these canonical instances of resistance and social reconstruction requires imagination (99). Indeed, I believe, it cannot happen without the aesthetic. Just as Tillet identifies the space where black artists revise America's civic myths, so, I would suggest, the “black” novel can provide a space where mythic figures of resistance may be read anew. More pointedly, the “black” in post–civil rights era black novels provides an occasion not for policing “civic myths” but for imagining community from the fragments left by a “myth” interrupted (Nancy 43–70).