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Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jat114

1945-2314

William L. Van Deburg,

Race, History, and American Society

Like other historically marginalized groups, African Americans have struggled mightily to achieve psychological liberation from mainstream stereotypes and expectations. The right to define oneself as black and beautiful, cultured, creative, and capable has never been granted willingly or without great cost. Both the modern civil rights and black power movements generated numerous accounts of race champions who sacrificed all for this cause. Because freedom is a constant struggle, contemporary analogs are easy to find and hard to dismiss. Contained within the less familiar chapters of this contested racial history are the stories of those black artists, activists, and intellectuals who sought to think globally and to form spiritual and political alliances with other oppressed communities. Sohail Daulatzai's Black Star, Crescent Moon explores selected aspects of this material via five wide-ranging yet interconnected essays. Chapter 1 focuses on the Nation of Islam's Malcolm X, detailing the way his “unfolding narrative of resistance and internationalism” was shaped by Cold War–era anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia (p. 2). Chapter 2 traces the impact of this cross-cultural dialogue on the political formulations and cultural productions of the black power era. Case studies of the revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon, the novelist Sam Greenlee, and films such as The Battle of Algiers (1966) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) reveal how black American activists were “provided an alternative grammar of resistance and a unique language of revolt” through their contacts with the Muslim Third World (p. 49). In chapter 3 Daulatzai explores the relationship between African American radicalism, black Islam, and the lyrical hip-hop narratives created by artists such as Rakim Allah, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and Mos Def. Chapter 4 employs the political and cultural history of the boxing icon Muhammad Ali to chart the ever-shifting relationship between black Islam and American national identity. The concluding essay on trends in global incarceration since September 11, 2001, makes telling connections between mainstream conceptualizations of black criminals and Muslim terrorists. Daulatzai maintains that purposeful fear mongers have collapsed the two categories into one. Viewed through the racialized lens of criminality, black Muslims have become “homegrown terrorists,” subjected to differential treatment by the establishment (p. 172). A brief epilogue ties past to present and makes a final case for Malcolm X as the most estimable champion of the Muslim International—an imagined community composed of multiple, overlapping diasporas that encourages and facilitates shared struggles against “racial terror, global capital, patriarchy, and war” (p. 195).