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