indefatigable commitment to antiracist and antiwar activism and to
the labor movement, and about his successful struggle to overcome
cancer. Wittner became a stalwart of SUNY’s faculty/professional
union and remains very active in the local AFL-CIO today. You can
read about the details in Working for Peace and Justice. Suffice it to
say here that Wittner’s autobiography shows that some American
lives, contra F. Scott Fitzgerald, have at least two acts—sometimes
more.
Doug Rossinow
Metropolitan State University
Sohail Daulatzai. Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim
International and Black Freedom Beyond America. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Black Star, Crescent Moon is heir to the writings of African American
radicals like W. E. B. DuBois and Malcolm X. Sohail Daulatzai offers
a sharp argument about Blackness, imperialism, and Islam in breath-
less prose. Malcolm X, a pole of “Black redemptive possibility” ossi-
fied by iconography, emitted an important yet understudied impulse
Daulatzai labels the “Muslim International.” A theoretically sophisti-
cated description of the “Muslim International” and its legacy drives
forward the narrative. Daulatzai brings voices as diverse as Edward
Said, Partha Chatterjee, bell hooks, Robin Kelley, and Asef Bayat into
the conversation as he dissects the thorny relationship between radical
international politics and American political culture.
As Old World colonialism and New World slavery shaped the
world community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black
activists and intellectuals waved the banner of international solidarity.
Black Star in particular covers that shared consciousness from the
1950s to the present. Malcolm X, the producers and directors of Third
Cinema, the author Sam Greenlee, the rappers Gang Starr and Public
Enemy, and others joined thinkers like Franz Fanon, Che Guevara,
and Aim�e C�esaire to forge and create a radical challenge to American
power, Daulatzai writes. The research conducted into the vision of
what Albert Memmi called “the constant gaze of the usurped” is
eclectic, tracing resistance from a number of artists, activists, and
movements. Their collective thought shaped a broader belief that the
Book Reviews 497
mythic idea of American exceptionalism had wrongly divorced Ameri-
can Cold War liberalism from European expansion and colonialism.
Daulatzai sets out to debunk that myth. Whether or not they agree
personally with the broader societal critique, humanists often criticize
theory-driven analysis for its lack of contextual nuance. In the case of
Black Star, some cultural historians of U.S. foreign relations will be
surprised to find such a deep-seated philosophical blueprint at the root
of the relationship between Black political culture and American
foreign policy in a period spanning the early Civil Rights movement to
the post-Cold War era. Was there no real dissent to the myth of
exceptionalism? For comparative historians of revolution, the link
between rhetoric and action may seem underdeveloped, the actual
urgency for such political thought absent. Area studies scholars may
bristle at the often-monolithic description of a “Muslim Third
World.”
Yet Daulatzai has also written an innovative and powerful narra-
tive. Black Star merits wide readership in the fields of transnational
history, media studies, and American studies. The first chapter situates
the political thought of Malcolm X in a broader tradition that
includes Du Bois, Fanon, Robeson, Nkrumah, Lumumba, and others.
The assassination of the last of these, the rise of Fidel Castro, the
Bandung summit, and uprisings and coups in Kenya, South Vietnam,
and Egypt affected Malcolm, who began to use race and imperialism
as dominant tropes in his political speech. Such speech was influential,
tapping into veins of both international thought and domestic senti-
ment. Malcolm organized a number of meetings on colonialism and
neocolonialism and met government representatives from the Middle
East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1950s. After-
ward, he began to consistently compare colonialism to American rac-
ism in a coherent “liberation theology” that warned its believers to be
aware of the “imperialist wolf” in all its guises.
The link drawn between African Americans and other dark people
led to an Afro-Asiatic diasporic radicalism within the United States.
Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver all claimed
allegiance to Malcolm. Importantly for Daulatzai, the grammar of
resistance moved past radical politics into culture. Lorraine Hansber-
ry, James Baldwin, and Sam Greenlee all invoked the language of
revolt—and the examples of Nkrumah and Fanon—to speak truth to
power. The insertion of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers
into the broader tapestry of Third Cinema and The Battle for Algiers
498 PEACE & CHANGE / October 2013
provides a neat example of how the intellectual culture of interna-
tional film shaped local ideas and practice. A novel by Sam Greenlee
set in 1956, Baghdad Blues, counterposes the traditional ethos of
Orientalism by linking the deep histories of racial exclusion and
anticolonial struggle. A black U.S. Information Bureau agent, Dave
Burrell, forms a close friendship with Iraqi nationalists. “They think
of you as they think of us,” his closest Iraqi interlocutor tells him.
“They despise us equally” (86).
Sharp’s historical quotes pepper the analysis. Sidney Poitier was
“a million dollar shoe shine boy,” the Black Arts theorist Larry Neal
wrote (62). According to Lerone Bennett, Melvin Van Peebles’s classic
Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song painted “a Rousseau-like image of
poverty as the incubator of wisdom and soul” (66). The final three
chapters move the story into the post-Cold War era of American hege-
mony. Activists and cultural icons continued to position themselves in
relation to anticolonialist politics. Hip-hop culture in particular
responded to the “hysteria-generating” and hypernationalist stances of
the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton policies that equated the Black criminal
to the Muslim terrorist.
Through a deep reading of the contrast between the current
cultural traction and the past politics of the boxer Muhammad Ali,
Daulatzai furthers the analysis. The political neutering of the radical
Ali, his refusal to discuss the history of Zaire or the politics of the
1974 “Rumble in the Jumble,” represents the full-blown ideological
replacement of the “Red Scare” of communism with the “Green Men-
ace” of Islam. The intimacy of characteristics between the domestic
prison complex and international “Black Sites” for terrorist detention
bears out the change. Stripped of their connection with Black political
culture through a process of alienation—“an alchemy of repression
that links Muslims, Blackness, prisons, and gang culture”—Muslim
internationalists have become “prisoners of the larger edifice of post-
Cold War empire building” (182, 167–168).What does it look like when the world is a prison? How does one
respond? Black Star captures the rhetoric and fears of radicals in an
era in which that belief is widely shared. Daulatzai has woven the
above strains of defiance into a treatise on radicalism with which a
broad readership will identify.
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Fordham University
Book Reviews 499