Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.

Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. By Nikhil Pal Singh. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. [xii], 285. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-674-01951-2; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01300-X.)

The historiography of the civil rights movement expands and contracts its focus periodically. Whereas the executive and judicial branches of the federal government were once seen as central in that historiography, by the 1990s historians' focus fell much more often on the importance of grassroots organizing and activity. Nikhil Pal Singh's Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy reverses this trend by emphasizing the global dimensions of what Singh calls "the long civil rights era" (p. 8). According to him, the crucial historical development has been the post-1945 anti-colonial struggle, while the American state is now seen as the main obstacle to achieving a truly democratic society at home and abroad over the last half-century or more.

Analyzing the long civil rights era, which ran from the onset of the New Deal to the early 1970s, Singh examines the efforts of intellectuals, especially African Americans, to formulate ways to overcome black oppression in the United States and to relate to the struggles with, first, European colonialism and, then, American global domination. The crucial leitmotif running throughout Singh's book is "American universalism," which emerged with full force after 1945. Part of the complexity of Black Is a Country comes from the collision between two notions of universalism. One meaning of universalism refers to an autonomous set of Enlightenment-derived standards of freedom and equality, measuring sticks of how America's social realities or state ambitions matched its highest ideals. The other usage entails "color-blind universalism," which, however, is always implicitly white in conception (p. 12). Rather than offering an independent set of standards, this type of universalism equates with whatever policies the U.S. says it is pursuing. Another way of contrasting the two impulses can be seen in the different provenance of the concepts of human rights and civil rights. Or, suggests Singh, we should think through the differing implications of Henry Wallace's idea of the twentieth century as the "People's Century" and Henry Luce's celebration of an "American Century" (p. 129).

Beyond this, Singh devotes four difficult but often very interesting chapters to the ways intellectuals worked out their positions on the matters referenced above. One presupposition, as well as implication, of Black Is a Country is that to draw a rigid distinction between integration and nationalism, racial consciousness and color-blindness, reform and revolution among black twentieth-century African American intellectuals is a serious mistake. He deals with topics such as W. E. B. Du Bois's efforts to create a black public consciousness and "black public" in the 1930s (p. 61); Gunnar Myrdal's creation of a liberal nationalist ideology for postwar America; the emergence in the 1940s of "a black popular front," which included figures such as C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Paul Robeson, and Du Bois; and, finally, efforts during the 1950s and 1960s to recast African Americans as an "internal colony" (p. 222).

As an intellectual history of the black popular front, Black Is a Country is an important and provocative book. But in globalizing the long civil rights era, much of the specific, concrete meaning of the American civil rights movement is lost. Singh devotes more sustained attention to the Black Panther Party than to the southern movement itself, in large part because the Panthers took on the role of mediating between decolonization abroad and at home. Generally, the historical consciousness informing Black Is a Country is based on a presentist perspective that attributes to the American state well-nigh perfect awareness as to what it wanted and how it went about getting it. Thus American global hegemony since the early 1990s emerges in Singh's book as an inevitability rather than a deeply complex and uneven outcome, while the Soviet Union is barely a factor in the whole history of the Cold War. In the light of such historical inevitability, the possibility that African Americans or oppressed people will ever "overcome" seems an illusion.

University of Nottingham 

RICHARD KING