Black nationalism has featured prominently in twentieth-century African-American social and political thought and refers to a set of ideologies that concern the relationship of people of African descent to the US nation state. This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

Locating a pedagogical impulse in the Reconstruction texts of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Madison Bell, and Albery Whitman, Stephanie Farrar’s “Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry during Reconstruction” identifies an emergent form of Black poetry pioneered in Reconstruction that has previously gone essentially unrecognized: long narrative verse that thematizes and analyzes the formation of Black citizenship. In laying claim to a form deeply linked with both national identity and whiteness, the chapter suggests that Black writers seized the cultural power of narrative verse to force a reckoning with the ongoing impact of slavery and the new mechanisms of racial hierarchy that replaced it. It draws attention to the form’s multiscalar cultural work as an analysis of, history of, didactic model for, and even enactment of modes of citizenship for Black Americans, and it illustrates the special role of the AME Christian Recorder in promulgating this poetry as an instrument of Black nationalism, attempting to counter attacks on black social and political life during Reconstruction and to theorize the conditions and components of freedom itself.

“The slaveholders,” Frederick Douglass said in 1849, “are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes.” American readers in the 1850s were captivated by such apocalyptic imagery. As the crisis over slavery developed—from the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) to the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854) to the Dred Scott decision (1857)—many became increasingly convinced that their world would, like Pompeii in the first century, come to a fiery, apocalyptic end. But debates arose about how and why the United States might come to an end and whether this end could be prevented. While abolitionist writers often described slavery as a sin, others thought of slavery as a national pathology that might be cured or, at the very least, managed. This chapter explores the apocalyptic dimensions of the period that has long been called the American Renaissance.

“The Universal Wilderness” argues that environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution constitute a uniquely universal form of identity politics. It does so by situating these appeals in the context of identity-based movements that flourished in the 1970s through a reading of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). The novel pointedly juxtaposes two characters: one who caricatures the era’s Black nationalism and another who identifies with the ecological intricacy of his environment. This arrangement effects a comparison between two accounts of authenticity: the racial and the ecological, the particular and the universal. Such a reading enables a reevaluation of certain facets of postwar environmentalism. Appeals to self-dissolution join the rhetoric of authenticity that characterized Black Power with the sort of political universalism that such movements called into question. However, though Morrison represents ecology as a universal condition, she also critiques the notion that it might constitute an identity position. That position might serve only to enshrine as universal the colonial attitudes of white men, erasing the perspectives of women and people of color.

As the global Movement for Black Life continues its demands to end state violence in the USA and abroad, black feminists have cast motherhood as a radical site of political resistance. This chapter historicises popular and scholarly rhetorics of black mothering by returning to earlier black feminist voices from the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, this chapter points to the theoretical contours and elisions undergirding canonical and contemporary black feminist treatments of motherhood and family. Through close reading of personal reflections by black mothers and writers Martha Southgate and Alice Walker, the author argues for theorists to reassess motherhood’s celebrated status in black feminist discursive landscapes and begin rethinking motherhood as a burdensome site of gendered labour and psychic antagonism in the intimate spheres of black women’s lives.

Chapter 7 explains how African Americans and Mexicans, especially Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and Miguel Covarrubias, looking to make blackness socially visible, articulated two disparate definitions of what and who was authentically African-descended. With the nation’s African heritage outlined by 1946, ethnographers and cultural producers began to identify African-descended communities in the contemporary ethnographic landscape, thereby integrating the descendants of African slaves into the political debates about mestizaje, socioeconomic modernization, and social justice nationally and regionally. To render blackness socially visible, a Mexicanized variation of the black body, usually the racially and culturally mixed mulatto, emerged in the national imaginary and in specific locales in Veracruz and along the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Conversely, among Black Nationalists in the United States, Mexico blossomed into an archeological, historical, and ethnographic site for the study of Afro-diasporic peoples and cultures. Concerned with the silencing of black cultural ingenuity and historical agency globally, they articulated a vision of racial identity oriented more toward a corporeal definition of the black body than the cultural constructions of social visibility expressed by Mexican social scientists and policy makers.