Is It Nation Time? (Reviews).

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., ed. Is It Nation Time?. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 269 pp. $49.00 cloth/$19.00 paper.

According to a 1990s' national survey of black Americans, approximately two-thirds do not expect to gain racial equality in their lifetime; fifty-two percent believe blacks form a nation within a nation; and one-half think blacks should organize their own political party. Given such widespread political alienation among black Americans, it certainly seems reasonable to ask what became of black nationalism? Is It Nation Time?, a collection of eleven probing essays that examine the legacy of the Black Power Era, attempts to answer this question.

The Black Power era, spanning nearly a decade from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, marked a watershed in the history of both the black American community and American race relations. For these reasons alone, assessment of its impact is overdue. But we should be under no illusions about the ease and manageability of the task. Strong emotional biases about the Black Power era still lurk, like the aftershocks of a trauma, beneath the surface of our race relations discourse, blurring memory and distorting assessments of its meaning and significance. In truth, that era constituted an extraordinary historical moment created by a unique conjunction of social changes, both within and outside the United States: the transformation of American society from a manufacturing to a post-industrial economy and the corresponding destabilization of the urban black working class; the civil rights reforms and the subsequent alterations of the black community's class structure; the anti-colonial revolts in the third world regions of Africa and Asia and the romanticization of national liberation movements; the Vietnam War protests and the weakened legitimacy of the mainstream culture. All coalesced into that extraordinary historical moment which fostered the largest, most radical, black political force in American history.

In light of this fact, it is hardly surprising that most essays in this book emphasize black nationalism's meaning as a political movement and as an oppositional cultural ideology. The several essays written from a leftist political perspective are most concerned with 1960s' black nationalism as a failed political movement which squandered a major opportunity for political change. By far the most jaundiced of these leftist assessments is the essay by Adolph Reed, Jr. ("Black Particularly Reconsidered"). Reed argues that the Black Power movement was based on faulty analysis, which was evidenced particularly in its mystification of the black community as a monolithic entity. Seeing Civil Rights reforms as having been part of the corporate liberal social agenda, Reed suggests that black nationalism's succession of the Civil Rights program led ironically to further consolidation of the management elite's hegemony within the black community. While Reed's ideas are sometimes provocative, this essay is so saturated with abstract generalizations and opaque leftist jargon (e.g., "managerial elite," "internal management elite," and "administrative elite") that it is often impossible to discern which concrete individuals or groups he is referring to.

Also written from a leftist perspective, Cornel West's essay ("The Paradox of the African American Rebellion") shares Reed's disdain for leaders of the black nationalist movement, who he terms "the petty black bourgeoisie." While conceding that the nationalists provided a powerful and progressive critique of American cultural imperialism, West argues that they hijacked the black freedom movement to serve their own anxiety-ridden strivings for personal status and personal power. He is also critical of their sexism and exclusion of women. Though he cites no positive legacy from the black nationalist movement, he ends on a hopeful, and somewhat utopian, note, calling for a democratic socialist revival of the freedom movement based on an inter-racial coalition.

Taking a leftist analytical approach more sympathetic to black nationalism, Robin Kelley ("Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter) Nationalism in the Cold War Era") recounts the little known but important story of RAM--the Revolutionary Action Movement--which began in Detroit and spread to several other major American cities. Kelley notes that RAM, which was strongly influenced by the ideas of Harold Cruse and Robert Williams, embraced a third world colonial model, which melded both nationalism and Maoist Marxism. While acknowledging RAM's positive creative and ethical qualities, he also notes its deficits in both gender composition and strategy. Despite its rhetorical emphasis on the masses, Kelley points out, RAM never developed a mass base, nor did it ever resolve the conflicts between its black nationalist and Marxist-internationalist followers, strains that played no small part in its failure as a radical movement.

In contrast to these leftist assessments, E. Frances White, in one of the collection's strongest and most incisive essays, critically examines that movement from a feminist perspective ("Africa On My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse, and African American Nationalism"). Highlighting what she terms the "Dialects of Discourse Struggle," White points out the pitfalls nationalists stumbled into. In their efforts to counter Euro-centric ideology, she notes, they embraced a mythical, ahistorical, static conception of African gender relations that privileged black male authority. Also, she like several other authors in this collection criticizes the black nationalist construction of a false black unity. While sympathetic to black nationalism as a world view, she expresses disappointment that it has yet to incorporate a non-sexist conception of gender relations. Philip Brian Harper, emphasizing the cultural manifestations of black nationalism ("Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s"), revisi ts the 1960s' Black Arts Movement, challenging the customary view that literature evoked of black unity; he argues it projected a rhetoric of division, which he sees as evidence of its ideological contradictions.

Not all the essays are retrospective. Focusing primarily on the contemporary ramifications of 1960s' black nationalism, C. Craig Watkins presents an insightful essay on this ideology from a popular culture perspective ("Black Is Back, and It Is Bound To Sell!"). His two examples of these influences are the message rap of Public Enemy and the black-oriented movies of Spike Lee. Public Enemy, Watkins argues, moved into the political void in the black community and used popular media culture to rewrite the historical memory of black figures typically omitted from narratives of American history. In contrast, he sees Spike Lee as the quintessential embodiment of the bourgeois tradition of nationalism, evoking nationalist pride (stay black) while commodifying nationalist loyalty (buy black). Acknowledging both the negative and positive aspects of the commodification of black nationalism in popular culture, he concludes his assessment on an upbeat, though ambiguous, note.

Any book examining a development as complex as the 1960s' black nationalist movement is bound to have some shortcomings. This collection should have included essays that discussed: (1) the recent social construction perspective on race and its implications for understanding 1960s' black nationalism; (2) the influence of this movement in generating a new, more positive conception of black ethnicity; and (3) the influence of the nationalist anti-assimilationist stance on other American ethnic groups and in helping to foster the conception of the United States as a multi-cultural society.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, this collection of essays make a valuable contribution by reviving discussions of the political and cultural ramifications of 1960s' black nationalism and highlighting the need for more scholarly explorations of its influences. In this sense, Is It Nation Time? is on time.