Description
Book SynopsisWINNER, 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 lateCold War campaign against organizations like the
Trade Review
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. * Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals *
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. * Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s *
Erica R. Edwards presents a powerful analysis connecting politics and literature…This is a brilliant book that is likely to produce endless new insights. * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
