All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

Black is a Country: race and the unfinished struggle for democracy

By NIKHIL PAL SINGH(Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004), 285pp. $29.95.

This is an intelligent and inspirational book. It is also intellectually challenging. Yet it is ultimately frustrating, because the writer himself is so dissatisfied, even discombobulated, by finding that he cannot provide any answers to questions about the contemporary lack of vibrant or meaningful radical African American leadership. During the course of an extensive exploration of the demise of highprofile black activism in the United States, Nikhil Pal Singh provides fresh and illuminating analyses of the ideological and political contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Huey Newton. He also links his arguments about the ‘specifically’ black as well as ‘universally’ American dichotomy of the African American experience with the art of Jacob Lawrence. The social vision behind the vibrant, saturated colours and sharply defined shapes of this influential black painter is interpreted as providing a universalist answer to American racism. Lawrence is seen as an identifiably African rooted artist who could also be accepted as fully representative of the aesthetic taste of the United States. This provides a fresh approach to Du Bois’s concept of ‘double consciousness’, which more usually focuses on music as the primary source of cultural identity and appropriation. Music itself is not discussed and the Lawrence example is complicated by the fact that the artist was not fully accepted or admired until after his death, at the time of which his work in progress was an incomplete project entitled ‘Struggle’.

The intellectual engagement with the struggle for racial equality in Black is a Country seems at times overly concerned, even sidelined, by the preoccupation with universalism. The author frets more than once that: ‘the idea that American universalism, and the moral and political primacy it attributes to individual freedom and civic egalitarianism, have worked to overcome racial divisions and racism, is faulty – not merely an apology for racist practice, but implicated in creating and sustaining racial division.’ Who would disagree? What is more problematic is the failure to move on from simplistic judgements to the kind of deconstruction that can lead to positive rebuilding. Instead, there is a concentration on descriptions of institutionalised marginality coexisting with the apparent dominance of anti-racist universalism. Singh describes the US as possessed by a national schizophrenia which subsumes racial difference into an imagined national unanimity and he simultaneously defines black intellectuals as drawing on universal American religious and political values and blending these with aspects of Third World ideology. The incoherence of modern black politics is held to be a consequence of this confusion.

Yet, as this intellectually adventurous book proceeds, it develops a far more sophisticated re-evaluation of the black radical tradition. Singh feels vital aspects of the ideological imperative driving a succession of influential minds, from Du Bois to Huey Newton, have been underestimated. The fluidity with which anti-capitalist socialism was combined with the specificity of race, without discarding consideration of the needs of those discriminated against by gender or class-driven poverty, is seen as a template that the Black Panthers provided for the evolution of future black political movements. Ultimately, Singh discards universalism as a chimera. Instead, he lauds the struggles of the radical black leaders of the twentieth century as ‘worldly, heterogenous, insurgent, participatory, and disorderly’, an inspirational reminder ‘of the radical threshold of true democracy: the needs and aspirations of an ineluctably differentiated humanity’.

Keele University MARY ELLISON