The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire

Erica R. Edwards

Published by New York University Press 2021

The Other Side of Terror

Black Women and the Culture of US Empire

Erica R. Edwards

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479808427.001.0001

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About this book

WINNER, 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association

HONORABLE MENTION, 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association

Reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power

The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the “imperial grammars of blackness.”

This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late–Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it.

The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on “the other side of terror”, which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.

Author / Editor information

Edwards Erica R. :

Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers University. She is author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012), which received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and co-editor of Keywords for African American Literature (2018).Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers University. She is author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012), which received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and co-editor of Keywords for African American Literature (2018).

Reviews

Erica R. Edwards presents a powerful analysis connecting politics and literature…This is a brilliant book that is likely to produce endless new insights.

In this highly informed and deeply researched interrogation of the global security state after 9/11, Erica Edwards asks us to read black women and black women’s expressive culture as both resistant to and complicit in American global power. To expose and critique the American security regime and the cultures of imperialism, Edwards turns to a tradition of black feminist radicalism and the insurgent texts of black feminists such as Alice Randall, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, and Nikki Finney. This is a brave and unsettling book, one that makes us think about black women not as fringe actors or minority figures, but as major players in the global arena.

Brilliantly maps the transformations in black women’s expressive culture in response to COINTELPRO, the war on drugs, and the long war on terror. A necessary, timely history of state power and black feminist radicalism, The Other Side of Terror is, at once, a critique of empire and its myriad violence, a refusal of servitude, and a poetics of dissent. As Edwards demonstrates persuasively and eloquently: radical black feminist thought is indispensable to our collective effort to survive.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: What Was to Come Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I Imperial Grammars
1. Inform Our Dreams Black Women and the Long War on Terror Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
2. The Imperial Grammars of Blackness Iraq War Circuits and the Picture of Black Militarism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
3. “What Kind of Skeeza?” New Black Femininity and the Seductions of Emergency Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
Part II Insurgent Grammars
4. Scenes of Incorporation; or, Passing Through Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
5. Perfect Grammar June Jordan and the Intelligence of Empire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	212
6. “How Very American” Black Feminist Literature and the Occult of Paranoia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	266
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	315
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	347
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	369
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	389