4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Empowerment in African American History, July 25, 2009
This review is from: The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) (Hardcover)
Steven Hahn's new book, "The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom" (2009) is based upon the Nathan L. Huggins Lectures Hahn delivered at Harvard University. The Huggins lectures are designed to explore important themes in African American history. Hahn is Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. His best-known work, "A Nation under our Feet" (2004) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History. The book tells how rural southern African Americans took steps towards their own political empowerment beginning with the period of slavery and continuing through the Great Migration northward beginning early in the Twentieth Century.
Hahn's new book continues the theme of "A Nation under our Feet" by examining how African American history illustrates the ideals and goals of "self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense". (Preface, xvi) Hahn wants to show how African Americans took control of their own destinies and tried aggressively to define their own characters beginning in the days of slavery. Hahn wants to counter what he perceives as received accounts that African Americans tended to respond reactively to slavery and segregation. He also emphasizes the separateness of African American political activity as African Americans attempted to find their own way and not simply seek equal rights in the larger society. Hahn's approach sympathizes with modern forms of African American political activity such as Black Power and the Black Panthers. It is somewhat critical of more mainstream approaches which emphasized the integration of African Americans as citizens with full rights and equality in American life. This approach sees African Americans as shared partners in the American dream rather than, perhaps, as having a separate dream. The approach Hahn questions is, I think, exemplified by the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, especially in his "I have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. A recent book on King's speech, "King's Dream" by Eric Sundquist, which I have reviewed here on Amazon, emphasizes the manner in which King's dream was part of a shared American vision. While not entirely disagreeing with this account, Hahn tries to supplement and qualify it.
The book consists of three dense and detailed lectures on empowerment in African American history. They are written in a scholarly yet provocative manner as Hahn tries to challenge received accounts and tries to explain why other accounts have had difficulty receiving a hearing. At times in the lectures, especially when he examines African American activity during the Civil War, Hahn seems to suggest that the evidence will support various competing accounts. At other times, he seems to me unduly dogmatic and insistent upon his own reading of events.
The first lecture, "Slaves at Large": the Emancipation Process and the Terrain of African American Politics" is the most difficult and challenging of the three. Hahn attacks the view that there were two emancipations in American history: the emancipation of slaves in the North which was completed in the early part of the nineteenth century and the emancipation in the South which pitted the sections of the United States against each other in the Civil War. Hahn sees emancipation as a single continuous political process which effected the United States in its entirety. He compares free blacks in the North to maroons (communities of escaped slaves), who worked with and shared the fate of enslaved blacks in the South; and he argues that blacks in the North remained almost as much in need of emancipation as did those blacks still subjected to slavery. For Hahn, emancipation was an international political movement which began in the 18th Century (where historians tend not to look for it) and which still continues.
The second essay, "Did we Miss the Greatest Slave Rebellion in African American History" argues that African American activity, in escaping from slavery and fighting in the Union Army, among other things, constituted a still-unacknowledged slave rebellion. Hahn draws parallels between the activities of African Americans during the Civil War, and the rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint L'Overture in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Hahn tries to examine why Americans have, from the Civil War onward, avoided characterizing African American activity during the war as a rebellion against slavery. Hahn argues that African Americans were seen as dependent and passive and that the image of rebellion contradicts this. But Hahn seems himself to step back from a full characterization of the Civil War as a slave rebellion. He admits that the evidence may be viewed as equivocal and could be interpreted in other ways.
The final essay deals with "Marcus Garvey, the UNIA and the Hidden Political History of African Americans." Garvey (1887 - 1940) was a Jamaican who attained a large African American following in the United States in the early 1920s. Garvey was a separatist who advocated a separate country for at least some African Americans in Africa. In some respects, Garvey's programme was similar to that of the American Colonization Society. W.E.B. DuBois denounced Garvey, and Garvey was ultimately deported from the United States. Hahn examines Garvey's movement, which remains alive in the United States today, and its followers. He tries to rehabilitate and defend Garvey's movement by finding in it a source of African American strength, distinctiveness and empowerment that had and continues to have an important impact on how many African Americans see themselves.
Hahn has written a challenging book that will encourage its readers to examine their assumptions about both the African American experience and the American experience.
Robin Friedman
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
