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This book is an important addition to the publisher's Comparative Feminist Studies Series. The six sections provide a devastatingly critical analysis of unwitting U.S. black and white male nationalists who have coalesced around a sort of phallic nationalism. Strategically, the book employs an eclectic analytical and methodological frame that combines thick narrative analysis with assorted interdisciplinary critical standpoints, including political science, women's studies, critical legal studies, cultural studies, and policy studies. Consistent with this multidimensional approach is a determination on the part of the author to further the implications of intersectional analytic frames in preference to a "postempiricist," "postpositive orientation." The forces shaping black women's experiences in U.S. society require a cultural studies frame that accounts for the "mutually constitutive" (p. 8) dimensions of black women's lives.
Nikol Alexander-Floyd theorizes the intersecting and shared spaces of the rights and rites of male privilege in the gender-innocent tropes of "community," "family," "responsible fatherhood," and disdain for pathological ghetto-dwelling black women (welfare queens) and their offspring (e.g., the endangered black male) that forge a virtual nationalist "Gentlemen's Agreement" concerning the black cultural pathology paradigm (BCPP). The BCPP centers black women as causes célèbres and black feminists and women generally as race traitors. The charge that warring black and white male nationalists forge a "wounded masculinity" alliance around single black female sourcing of underclass cultural and moral depravities is one of the boldest made in the book. Relying on Wahneema Lubiano's "brutally reduced" treatment betraying black nationalism's "statelike cultural 'work'," the book emphasizes the mimetic performance of black nationalist discourse in relationship to white nationalism. It passes, however, on identical intrafeminist critiques of U.S. black feminists concerning the metonymic ways in which "black" in feminist discourse resounds with a provincial "American" accent, marginalizing diasporic black feminist or womanist voices that led Naomi Pabst to note that "all the blacks are American" ("Mama, I Am Walking to Canada," in Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds., Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production...