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

Online ISBN:
9781479808410
Print ISBN:
9781479808427
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

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

Erica R. Edwards
Erica R. Edwards
Rutgers University
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Published online:
20 January 2022
Published in print:
10 August 2021
Online ISBN:
9781479808410
Print ISBN:
9781479808427
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

The year 1968 was the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and the beginning of a new era in Black studies and Black culture in the United States. It also marked a turning point for the global reach of US power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades consolidated the culture of US empire, with the imperial grammars of Blackness justifying the domestic carceral regime and US and US-backed wars and occupations abroad. This study reveals the troubling ways that the long war on terror relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalist democracy. With attention to the way government agencies, intellectual and political elites, corporations, and universities disciplined and surveilled Black women, but also included and celebrated them, it probes the intimacy between security and Black womanhood since 1968. It also carefully chronicles the collective craft of Black feminist organizing and writing on the other side of terror, which tracked the changes in racial power and transformed African American literature and Black studies. With analyses of writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Nikky Finney, June Jordan, Claudia Rankine, and Alice Randall and television shows like Scandal and HBO’s In Treatment, this book weaves together a Black feminist cultural history of the long war on terror.

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