Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 69

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, as domestic analogues to Fanon and Pontecorvo and Hadjaj’s work, as well as a critical counter-point
to the non-threatening, domesticated representations of black characters played by Sidney Poitier.
Highlighting the legacy of Malcolm X to the Black Power movement and rigorously historicizing the context of the Muslim International, the
author shows that activists, film-makers, poets, writers and artists within the Black Power movement “positioned themselves, their art, and their
politics in relation to the anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements” of the Cold War (p. 69). These acts of cultural positioning intended to
disentangle black identity from white majoritarian American culture and nationalism, realigning those “Black identities Diasporically and
internationally” more accurately in “relation to the popular struggles taking place in the Muslim Third World” (p. 69).
Chapter 3 provides an impressive mapping of the cultural dimensions of the Muslim International as it intersected with the hyper-nationalist postVietnam age when the figure of the “black criminal” synchronically arose with the figure of the “Muslim terrorist.” After the destruction of the
Black Power movement by the U.S. government and the subsequent post-Civil Rights era demonization of poor urban, black communities, “Black
Islam in hip-hop culture reclaimed the interpretative authority over Black destiny…and imagined a different community of belonging with very
different possibilities for freedom, in which Black people would be seen not as national minorities but as global majorities” (p. 97). Undergirding
hip-hop, the legacy of Malcolm X “deeply influenced a younger generation of activists” (p. 101) including the Black Arts Movement, which “was
inflected by ideas and symbols of Islam and the Muslim Third World, for the artistic and aesthetic tradition that it forged was a part and parcel of
the Muslim International” (p. 107).
If Malcolm X and the Black Arts Movement mobilized Islam, Third World, and international themes and motifs to forge narratives of liberation and
struggle, the “golden age” of hip-hop artists “sought to reclaim a history of Black radicalism and internationalism in the context of criminalization
of Blackness, mass incarceration” and the “rise of the carceral imagination of the United States” (p. 109). Daulatzai thoroughly documents the
Black Muslim and Pan-Africanist voices, nomenclature, themes and narratives of Black liberation, including those generated by the Nation of Islam
—and particularly Malcolm X—in artists ranging from Gang Starr and the Wu Tang Clan to Ice Cube, Rakim and Mos Def (Yaslin Bey).
Daultatzai’s assertions regarding the redemptive potentiality of political rap finds itself in, and adeptly draws from, an established scholarship on
hip-hop. However, he contributes to that canon by carefully historicizing a nuanced and intertwined trajectory of radical Black liberationist
narratives from Malcolm X, Fanon, Amiri Baraka and Patrice Lumumba to Afrika Bambaata to Public Enemy, “the benchmark of hip-hop’s
political radicalism” (p. 120).
Chapter 4 is a critical examination of the rise and transformation of Muhammad Ali as a radical political figure to a co-opted icon of liberalism in
post-Civil Rights America. Muhammad Ali’s “legacy is a lens through which to view the shifting ideological currents of American national identity
from the Black Power era and Vietnam through the post-Cold War 1990s and into the post-911 moment.” Again in the political context of “culture
wars” and the “clash of civilizations,” Ali was “transformed into an American hero” that assuaged the “bitterness of Black Power” and” the fears of
Black Internationalism” so that “the wounds of the past can be healed and American redemption can be the moral imperative for global dominance
in the new American century as Islam became the preeminent threat to U.S. national security” (p. 139).
As elsewhere in Black Star, Daulatzai seamlessly weaves primary and secondary sources into an analytic prism showing “Ali was an extension” of
“a tradition in which Black Islam saw the Muslim Third World…as deeply informing black liberation struggles,” which offered “a trenchant
critique of U.S. domestic racism and its imperial foreign policy...” (p. 166). However, the re-imagining of Muhammad Ali by mainstream American
media, sports, and Hollywood coincided with “the sense of collective triumphalism that gripped the nation” in the unipolar era (p. 149). This rewritten narrative erases the memory of America’s intervention in Zaire, Indonesia and the Philippines as well as ƞ(