Anti-Feminism Black Sisterhood Kiana Fleming (bio) Anti-Feminism Black Sisterhood Leave your contradictions at the doorIn such a commandmy body is bareI am a feminist and I believeI believe in a woman's powerher gifts and her dreamstheir aspirations are mineI cradle them tenderly and they warm meWe are womenblackbeautifulintellectually inclinedIn this sisterhoodwe love one anotherwe nurture with laughs oils and bathswe soothe and hold secrets as if they are our ownIn this sisterhoodI wipe her tears and bask in her gloryshe is both my motivation and inspirationYet, she is my enemyIn this sisterhood, we share no blooddistaste leaves my parted lips stretching into spaces I do not seeall in the name of patriarchyI break themin the name of self-preservation our backs are against the wallhere she will join me in my state of nothingness to be desiredIn my quest for greatnessshe is my oppositionI wish her well and I wish for her demiseshe does not know my name but speaks on my behalfbound together merely by the color of our skinconnected by forebearers whose names we will never knowShe's with me in my stepwith her knowledge but not granted consentI look for spaces for us to survive togetherI am her keepershe is mine in returnwe hold one another upwe break one another downI leave my contradictions at the door [End Page 197] Kiana Fleming Kiana Fleming is a St. Louis, Missouri native. She received a BA in sociology from Spelman College and holds a dual Master's degree in global media and communications from the University of Southern California and The London School of Economics and Political Science. Copyright © 2019 Kiana Fleming

A Time to Break Literary Silence:Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam in Anthony Grooms's Bombingham Paul Tewkesbury (bio) Anthony Grooms's 2001 novel Bombingham opens in 1970 with eighteen-year-old Walter Burke, an African American solider serving in Vietnam, lying in a rice paddy outside the village of Thoybu. After watching his fellow soldier Haywood Jackson die by enemy fire, Walter must fulfill a promise he made to his friend: he would write a letter to Haywood's parents in the event that something happened to him. As Walter struggles to think of the appropriate words, his thoughts drift back to his childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, where, as an eleven-year-old boy, he participated in the famous civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the spring of 1963. Vietnam's weather on the day of Haywood's death triggers Walter's memories: "For a moment it seemed like a beautiful summer day. Blue sky. White billows of cloud. The rustle of a light breeze. It could have been Alabama" (7). Grooms thus links Vietnam and Birmingham in the opening pages and cues readers that Bombingham will interrogate relationships between the civil rights movement in the United States and the war in Vietnam. To tell his story, Grooms uses a frame narrative, alternating the first-person point of view of Walter the soldier in 1970 Vietnam with that of Walter the boy in 1963 Birmingham. Commenting on this frame narrative, the reviewer for Kirkus Reviews praises Bombingham for its "[p]owerfully crafted individual moments and honestly drawn emotions," yet ultimately concludes that Grooms "can't quite synthesize them into a unified whole." A close reading of Bombingham reveals, however, that beneath the seemingly disconnected episodes that jump back and forth across time and space lies a work suffused with thematic coherency. This essay examines the ways in which the complex moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. informs and connects the events in Bombingham. Grooms thematically links the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the same way that King links the two in his historic "A Time to Break Silence" address, delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. In this landmark speech, his first public criticism of President Lyndon B. Johnson's war policy, King identifies "seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of [his] moral vision" (232). First, King sees the war as "an enemy of the poor" because, "like some demonic destructive suction tube," it drains "men and skills and money" from the federal government's antipoverty program. Next, King denounces the government's "cruel manipulation of the poor" not only by "sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population," but also by "taking the black young men who had been crippled by [their] society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem." Third, King acknowledges his own moral inconsistency in condemning the use of violence during the civil rights movement at home while silently condoning the foreign policy of the United States, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" (233). King's fourth reason for opposing American involvement in [End Page 165] Vietnam is his determination to save "America's soul" before it "destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over" (234). From this point forward, King's focus moves from a specifically American context to a meditation on "allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions." He proclaims that his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964 obligates him to move "beyond national allegiances" and to work for "the brotherhood of man." Furthermore, his role as a Christian minister compels him to preach peace, to proclaim that "the good news was meant for all men—for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary...

Reviewed by: Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd Ronald B. Neal Vincent W. Lloyd. Black Natural Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. 180 pp. $55.00. [Erratum] Vincent W. Lloyd's Black Natural Law is concerned with the state of black politics in contemporary America. In Black Natural Law, Lloyd argues that contemporary black politics suffers from a loss of purpose and direction in relation to the condition of the black majority in the United States. He contends that the black political class has gotten lost in the machinations of current electoral politics and the race-neutral ideological agendas of liberals and leftists, multiculturalism, and secularism. In a word, present-day black politics has no depth or foundation, and worse, no future to propose to many black Americans in the United States. In Lloyd's account, so dire is the state of black politics, that even the two-term electoral achievement of the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama (a risk-averse president along the line of race), was reflective of the impoverished state of black political life in America. If there is a single social phenomenon that points to this crisis, it is mass incarceration. Unlike the institutions of slavery and [End Page 212] de jure and de facto Jim Crow, legal segregation, the problem of mass incarceration has not yielded a robust movement of dissent on the part of the black political class. In Lloyd's account, where the black political class is concerned, there is no consensus on the gravity of mass incarceration as an urgent political interest. More profoundly, beyond mass incarceration, there is no agreement on what counts as the shared condition among black Americans. What Lloyd calls "black natural law" attempts to overcome this dilemma. According to Lloyd, black natural law is a tradition of natural law with a unique outlook on human nature, which was employed by black political elites from the antebellum period to the civil rights era. Through a close reading of the lives and legacies of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd identifies a tradition of natural law, represented by these figures, in addressing the condition of the black majority during their lifetimes. In each chapter, Lloyd outlines the distinct manner in which each figure employed black natural law. Lloyd delineates black natural law in terms of three distinct themes: reason, imagination, and emotion. These themes, which are also universal human faculties, were integral to a metaphysical, legal, and existential attack on the culture and institutions of segregation. Being denied legal recognition as citizens of the United States and recognition as human beings, Jim Crow-era elites had to appeal to a higher law—the law of God—to champion the cause of black freedom. The appeal to the law of God was inseparable from the creative use of reason, imagination, and emotion. Lloyd contends that black natural law is an unacknowledged tradition that is related to yet distinct from the mainstream traditions of Catholic natural law. Although related to Catholic natural law writ large, black natural law, in its engagement with race, goes beyond the Catholic theological mainstream. As Lloyd argues, "black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone. It is the approach that ought to be taken. The black natural law tradition addresses the same problems addressed by other natural law traditions, but it offers more coherent and compelling responses" (ix). For Lloyd, this tradition warrants serious consideration in the resuscitation of black politics in the United States. Black Natural Law offers an incisive critique of the current political mood of the United States and more significantly, that of the black political class. Its invocation of higher law (God's law) and the primacy of reason, emotion, and imagination in political discernment, is a direct challenge to a political class that is fragmented in terms of identity and ideology. It is a rebuke of political relativism in light of the persistence of antiblackness and racism in the United States, mass incarceration being one of its most visible outcomes. Overall, Lloyd attributes the weakness of black...

Percival Everett's Glyph (1999) is a bitingly comical and theoretically challenging satire narrated by Ralph, a black baby genius, who writes fiction and his own theory thereof. The novel, this article argues, can be read as a satiric commentary on the establishment of African American literature as an object and discipline of literary inquiry. With a rich institutional subtext, the text's playfully emancipatory agenda centers on the expressive principle on which this literary institutionalization was based: the black vernacular. Ralph's lack thereof defines Glyph's programmatic ambivalence as a "black" text that categorically questions the ways we read (for) race.

Reviewed by: Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century by Fred Carroll, and: The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox by Gerald Horne, and: Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations by Burnis R. Morris Kinohi Nishikawa Fred Carroll. Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2017. 278 pp. $95.00. Gerald Horne. The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2017. 272 pp. $95.00. Burnis R. Morris. Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2017. 192 pp. $65.00. Scholarship on the black press is undergoing a great revival. While newspapers and magazines have long constituted a valuable resource for African Americanist scholarship, few researchers had devoted critical attention to the primary sources themselves. Until recently, black press studies had been a niche interest of scholars in journalism and library science. All of that began to change with the early twenty-first century's wave of digitization. Scores of newspapers were made available on ProQuest and other databases, while the archive of John H. Johnson's family of publications found an online home with Google. Now scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have access to materials once confined to scarce physical copies and the dreaded microfilm. That expansion of access has brought interdisciplinary research questions to bear on black press studies. Of these, none is more compelling than how the black press shaped and contributes to our understanding of the everyday reading practices of African Americans. That question animates the three titles under review here. The first, Burnis R. Morris's Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations, adds a new dimension to the biography of one of the towering African American intellectuals of the last century. As the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) and its scholarly organ Journal of Negro History (now Journal of African American History), Woodson aimed to legitimate an oppressed people's history by professionalizing its academic study. But his advocacy did not end there. Woodson proved to be a talented self-promoter, advancing his institutionalizing efforts by turning to an existing institution—namely, "the weekly newspapers, among the oldest and most powerful organizations in the black community" (xix). The black press, Morris argues, played a pivotal role in popularizing Woodson's belief that black history was extant and valuable. Revealingly, when the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History ventured something called "Negro History Week" in February 1926, Woodson brought the academic message to the masses in a column that appeared in the black press. The idea of celebrating black achievement during a specified period was novel; the mode of disseminating it across the country was not. Negro History Week lay the foundations for what we know today as Black History Month. Carter G. Woodson draws on the more than 200 syndicated columns Woodson wrote for African American newspapers between 1926 and 1949, as well as press coverage of his and the Association's activities and achievements. Rather than mine [End Page 303] these materials for their content (or what they were "about"), Morris approaches them, individually and in the aggregate, for what they tell us about Woodson's promotion strategies. He concludes that Woodson was as savvy a public relations agent as he was a historian and educator. Although Woodson "prided himself on not profiting from his newspaper column" (101), his popular writing elevated the Association's status while making it a household name. Negro History Week was the perfect encapsulation of this dual function. In turn, the black press benefited greatly from Woodson's crusade to legitimate black history. Journalists regularly participated in Association meetings, newspaper publishers sat on the group's Executive Council, and some news stories recirculated verbatim in the pages of Journal of Negro...

This essay analyzes two works of historical fiction about abolitionist John Brown and his followers: James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (2013) and Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter (1998). Both texts decenter John Brown from the raid on Harpers Ferry and examine how his followers, historical and imagined, made the choice to participate in violent resistance. Both authors use the metaphor of castration anxiety to depict their protagonists' relationship to Brown: his leadership leaves them "unmanned" and destabilizes their identities. I argue that, while Banks's text reinforces traditional notions of masculine leadership and privileges the story of his protagonist's white male maturation over the politics of abolition, McBride more genuinely focuses on the contributions of women and people of color in the abolitionist movement. In doing so, he tears down the Freudian notion of "normal" development and celebrates the possibilities of being "unmanned." For his character Onion, losing a stable male identity allows him to build solidarity and empathy with women and to reject stereotypical assumptions about what it means to be a man.

Scholarly and literary interest in African Canadians in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has centered on Africville, a segregated community eventually destroyed by urban renewal. But this emphasis on Africville obscures the normative experience of Black Haligonians, who historically lived in greater numbers in an integrated neighborhood. Using the stories of three Haligonians after the Halifax explosion of 1917, this article explores themes of the historical Black Haligonian experience lost when authors focus on Africville: transnational migration within North America, a politics embedded in the British Empire, and continual racist discrimination even while living in integrated neighborhoods.

Reviewed by: The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century eds. by Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel Michael Germana Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel, eds. The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. 360 pp. $27.85. Ralph Ellison's œuvre and scholarship on his life and work have each grown considerably since his death in 1994. Previously uncollected and/or unpublished essays and works of fiction by Ellison have appeared in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), an edition of the Book II typescript of Ellison's unfinished second novel, Juneteenth (1999), Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), and the most complete version of Ellison's second novel manuscript yet to be assembled, Three Days before the Shooting… (2010). Interest in Ellison among literary scholars has similarly increased in recent years. As a consequence, more books and essays about the author have appeared since the turn of the millennium than were published in the preceding five decades. Twenty-first-century scholarship on Ellison hasn't been entirely encomiastic, however. A small but influential chorus of critics remains fixated on the author's shortcomings, whether real or imagined, as a writer and an activist. Foremost among these critics are Arnold Rampersad and Barbara Foley whose critical works, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) and Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (2010), respectively, express disillusion with, if not disappointment in the author. Together, they make a Procrustean bed for the National Book Award winner. Foley contends that Ellison, the author, abandoned a more pointed (and, in her estimation, more empathetic) materialist critique in Invisible Man when he revised the novel into its published form. Rampersad, by contrast, faults Ellison, the man, for not being expansive enough in his social interactions with and encouragement of black artists and intellectuals. Each takes a negative and fundamentally myopic view of the author's life and work. Foley dismisses Ellison's shift from proletarian realism to "depoliticized mythic individualism" (83) as a sellout to Cold War liberal ideology in general, and to its literary critical adherents in particular. Rampersad, in turn, (ab)uses Ellison's social calendar to draw misleading inferences about the author's perceived lack of political engagement, and to suggest that Ellison was too busy smoking cigars in the Century Club and currying favor with powerful whites to fulfill a legacy that the publication of Invisible Man (1952) ought to have inaugurated. Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel's The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century constitutes a collective rejoinder to these views—views that, as Robert Butler and Ross Posnock show in their contributions to the collection, dogged Ellison even at the pinnacle of his success. Rather than take the author to task for what could or should have been, the volume's contributors portray Ellison as a visionary, not only of the post-segregation period, but also of twenty-first-century American society and culture. The result is an ambitious collection of essays that, in the esteem of its editors, "represent the most far-reaching and original assessment of Ralph Ellison's entire career and body of work ever published" (30). [End Page 151] This is a bold claim, but it is also an accurate one. Indeed, The New Territory is an important work of Ellison scholarship that evinces a generosity of scope, sense of possibility, and complexity of analysis befitting of the author's corpus. It promises to do for Ellison's reputation what Foley and Rampersad have done to it. The fourteen essays that comprise the collection are, with the exception of John Callahan's speculative but rewarding conclusion, divided into three parts: one on new approaches to Invisible Man, a second on Ellison's unfinished second novel, and a third on Ellison's transhistorical view of American culture. The collection is worth obtaining for the essays on Three Days alone. Here, for the first time, is a substantial cross-section of work by scholars earnestly grappling with Ellison's unfinished tome, posthumously...

Reviewed by: The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya Kami Fletcher Micki McElya. The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. 416 pp. $29.95. Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery traces the founding of Arlington National Cemetery by examining the geographical landscape—most notably the enslaved population that served as its first occupants—and the politicized military climate that shaped burial policy, defined national mourning, and determined who was to be buried, honored, and nationally remembered. While 1864 is the official date given for the founding of the cemetery, McElya, like any good researcher of cemeteries, takes her start date from the earliest land ownership and land use on which the cemetery still stands. Constructed in 1778 under the ownership of his father, John Parke Custis, George Washington Parker Custis (also adopted grandson of first president George Washington) first established a plantation that housed Custis’s immediate family along with enslaved men, women, and children as a “shrine to George Washington . . . broadcast[ing] his family’s lasting significance to the nation and its leaders in the capital.” To this, McElya is quick to point out that it was the enslaved women of the plantation who kept and preserved the land on which Arlington National Cemetery currently sits, and have “molded the land there, buried their dead . . . their sweat blood and tears had already sanctified that ground long before 1864.” From the beginning to the end, the author challenges the origin of Arlington, but, more important, challenges the narrative put forth of who should be nationally honored and memorialized. McElya’s research illustrates how the national cemetery reflects a narrowed and purposefully limiting view of American identity. It is an identity that negates the condition of African Americans and puts forth a more reconciliatory national character of black and white. What the author is resisting is the notion that death became the great equalizer for those who lost their lives serving this country. Their headstones might be the same, but if one peers closely enough, the military dead are bordered off and segregated in interment and memory. Once the Civil War ensued and the United States Colored Troops (USCT) fell as casualties of war, they were given segregated burial in the commonly called “Lower Cemetery.” [End Page 66] “Buried at the far northeastern edge of the plantation,” McElya paints the spatial and racial segregation of these fallen heroes, as “[the USCT] joined other black people who died in [the] Washington-area and perhaps a few from Freedman’s Village [reconstructed living and working quarters for black persons in Union custody at Arlington], thus initiating the racial segregation of the national cemetery that persisted well into the twentieth century.” The “Lower Cemetery”—initially labeled “Contraband Cemetery” because during the war years, when enslaved persons under Union possession were branded contraband—was equipped with a black sexton and continued the racially bordered burial practices of slavery. All black people regardless of military status, service to one’s country, or heroic act were interred in this segregated site. McElya brings this point home by saying that not only were 600 Confederate soldiers buried within Arlington’s principal cemetery but also that the Lower Cemetery was utterly disregarded during Decoration Day (the ceremonial decorating of military gravestones). By simultaneously using slavery and the politics of war, the author uses death and burial to show how the contours of race greatly affected the origin and existence of Arlington National Cemetery. Midway through the book, McElya questions for whom Arlington is a national cemetery and carries this theme to the end. For example, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, established in 1921 with the elaborate ceremonial burial of an unknown American World War I soldier, is turned into a teaching moment about national exclusivity. African Americans were segregated in military service and discriminated against during these war years. Yet the celebration of the unknown World War I hero is positioned as memorial for national belonging for our hero. McElya puts it within this context, forcing readers to understand the whiteness that undergirds the patriotism. McElya even brings up...