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Is It Nation Time?

Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Power movement provided the dominant ideological framework through which many young, poor, and middle-class blacks made sense of their lives and articulated a political vision for their futures. The legacy of the movement is still very much with us today in the various strands of black nationalism that originated from it; we witnessed its power in the 1995 Million Man March, and we see its more ambiguous effects in the persistent antagonisms among former participants in the civil rights coalition. Yet despite the importance of the Black Power movement, very few in-depth, balanced treatments of it exist.

Is It Nation Time? gathers new and classic essays on the Black Power movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers who deal rigorously and unsentimentally with such issues as the commodification of blackness, the piety of cultural recovery, and class tensions within the movement. For anyone who wants to understand the roots of the complex political and cultural desires of contemporary black America, this will be an essential collection.

Contributors:
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Phillip Brian Harper
Gerald Horne
Robin D. G. Kelley
Wahneema Lubiano
Adolph Reed Jr.
Jeffrey Stout
Will Walker
S. Craig Watkins
Cornel West
E. Francis White

280 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2002

Black Studies

Culture Studies

History: American History

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Media Studies

Reviews

“This is the first book-length study to examine the complex ways in which the political choices and failures of the Black Power movement inform our nation’s racial landscape. Is It Nation Time? is a stimulating commentary on African-American cultural politics, and a thoughtful examination of Black Power’s legacy for the new millennium.”

William L. Van Deburg, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Is It Nation Time? provides a useful, original, and provocative overview of the historic roots and emergence of black nationalism and Black Power, calling for further historical reconstruction and critical re-examination. This volume will be an important counter to the critical discourse on black nationalism that regards the phenomenon as an expression of racial essentialism.”

Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Black Power Revisited
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
1. The Paradox of the African American Rebellion
Cornel West
2. Black Particularity Reconsidered
Adolph L. Reed Jr.
3. Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter)Nationalism in the Cold War Era
Robin D. G. Kelley
4. Reflecting Black: Zimbabwe and U.S. Black Nationalism
Gerald Horne
5. Conflict and Chorus: Reconsidering Toni Cade’s The Black Woman: An Anthology
Farah Jasmine Griffin
6. Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse, and African American Nationalism
E. Frances White
7. Standing in for the State: Black Nationalism and "Writing" the Black Subject
Wahneema Lubiano
8. Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s
Phillip Brian Harper
9. "Black Is Back, and It’s Bound to Sell!": Nationalist Desire and the Production of Black Popular Culture
S. Craig Watkins
10. After The Fire Next Time: James Baldwin’s Postconsensus Double Bind
Will Walker
11. Theses on Black Nationalism
Jeffrey Stout
List of Contributors
Index

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