Introduction

The No-Man’s-Land of the Blacks

On March 13, 1957, E. Frederic Morrow arrived in Khartoum, Sudan. The first African American to work in an executive capacity at the White House, Morrow arrived in that East African country as a member of Vice President Richard Nixon’s delegation. In his diary entry for that date, he described the Sudanese as “a very reserved people” and noted, “[They] have enjoyed freedom for only a year … [and] are wearing it with dignity and a deep sense of responsibility.” Beyond a brief description of the delegation’s accommodations overlooking the Nile, pleasantries with local Sudanese chiefs, dinner with the Sudanese prime minister, and a travel snafu with their Tripoli-bound plane, Morrow’s recordings of the Sudanese portion of his voyage are brief.¹

Such was not the case, however, with his recollections of their stop in Ghana. “There has been much excitement in the Negro world over the birth of the new nation of Ghana,” Morrow wrote on February 14, 1957. “Large private delegations are planning to go to [Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah’s] inauguration, and great pressures have been put on the White House and the State Department by prominent Negroes, asking to be named to the official delegation from the United States.” Morrow put his hat in the ring, and—to his pleasant surprise—he was granted permission to travel with Nixon for the festivities. (Ghana was one of the eight countries on the vice president’s African itinerary.)² Morrow provided a vivid description of his stop in Ghana. He noted the beautiful hotel built in Accra for the independence celebration, his experience meeting Nkrumah, the enormous stadium where a celebration was held, and the Duchess of Kent’s grand entry replete with a Rolls-Royce, footmen, and outriders. In his diary entry for March 5, 1957, Morrow recorded his observations of the University College where a convocation ceremony was held and, on their departure from the college, a chance encounter with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King (made awkward by the fact that King had been trying to meet Nixon for several months). After visiting a village where a paramount chief danced to honor Nixon, Morrow accompanied the vice president to a reception hosted by the Speaker of the House (Parliament). That midnight, Ghana became free. “I could hear the thousands of cheering voices,” Morrow wrote. “And it was a strange and stimulating feeling to lie there in the darkness and realize the significance of this moment in the history of man.”³

Morrow’s diary entry concerning Ghana stands in marked contrast to his accounting of Sudan. Sudan had officially augured decolonization in British sub-Saharan Africa when it became independent on January 1, 1956. Yet, writes the historian Patrick Manning, “Sudanese independence has gained little attention of the African diaspora, perhaps because it has been considered as an exception rather than the norm.”⁴ By contrast, the historian Kevin Gaines has noted that Ghana’s 1957 independence gave momentum for freedom and self-determination for those of African descent around the world. Its independence, he further asserts, heralded the downfall of dominant racial and colonial systems established in the United States and Africa in the late nineteenth century.⁵

What racial, religious, and other historical factors might have attracted African Americans to one African nation in a way that did not manifest with another?⁶ Mahmood Mamdani has noted that the trans-Atlantic slave trade racialized notions of Africa and fueled the conceptual tendency to envision the Sahara as the continent’s dividing line, a “civilizational barrier,” below which lay “Negro Africa,” “true Africa,” “real Africa.”⁷ Hegel’s writings exemplified the emphasis on slavery’s role in demarcating the separation, deeming “Africa proper” the land where slaves were captured, Northeast Africa as “the land of the Nile” (which he linked with Asia), and North Africa as “European Africa.”⁸ Under such delineation, the boundaries defining “true Africa” are historical and defined by the legacies of slavery and race. Writing in his 1939 Black Folk, Then and Now, the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois noted that historians had generally isolated the Nile Valley from African history and that most denied any connection between the two. Du Bois countered this fallacy: “In what is known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, we have pre-eminently a land of the black race from prehistoric times; and yet today … the Sudan is left as a sort of historical no man’s land, and is regarded now as Arabian, now as Egyptian … and always as not worth careful investigation.”⁹

The World Bank, the Office of the US Trade Representative, and the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner do not list Sudan as North African, while news organizations CNN, the Guardian, and the Associated Press do. For those with the Hegelian propensity to detach North Africa from sub-Saharan Africa, lack of consensus regarding Sudan’s regional positioning is complemented by Sudan’s dual Arab and African heritage. In northern Sudan, incoming Arab traders intermarried with indigenous Sudanese to produce a genetically mixed African-Arab populace. Francis Deng has noted that the resulting racial traits mirror those of all African groups stretching across the continent from Somalia to Senegal. However, unlike most of those other countries (where people self-identify as African), Deng has suggested that northern Sudanese not only generally classify themselves as Arab; they vehemently deny African elements of their physical features. Most northern groups who claim genealogical Arab ancestry believe that, complemented by Islam, they are culturally and racially Arab. Farther south, African identity has racial and cultural connotations.¹⁰ “Virtually all ethnic groups in the [Sudan] have their primary roots in the black African tribes,” Deng writes. “Evidence of this fact is still visible in all the tribes, including those in the North who identify themselves as Arabs. Their identification with Arabism is, however, the result of a process in which races and religions were ranked, with Arabs and Muslims respected as free, superior, and a race of slave masters, while Negroes, blacks, and heathens were viewed as a legitimate target of slavery.”¹¹

While the history concerning the interplay of Sudan’s African and Arab heritages is fascinating and relevant on its own, the way African Americans have approached the Sudan stands to shed light not only on African American engagements with Africa but with the Arab world as well. Given Sudan’s mixed racial and cultural heritage, the following questions arise: What factors determined when African Americans framed Sudanese as Black, Arab, or both? How did racial solidarity and/or Pan-Africanism change as Africa transitioned from European imperialism to independence?

These questions are particularly important when considering the current Movement for Black Lives—the contemporary moniker for US-based resistance efforts against anti-Black racism that exploded in the 2010s. Anthropologist Krystal Strong has observed that Africa has been absent from the analysis and concerns of this movement. Strong contends that this absence exists even though Africa has similarly experienced an increase in popular resistance. “I make the case,” she writes, “for more meaningful engagement with contemporary scholarship and struggles in Africa and other global contexts, in the interest of research and solidarity practices that have as their aim the full valuation of Black lives everywhere.”¹² How have African Americans integrated Sudan and South Sudan into the Movement for Black Lives? How and/or why have those two countries been denied such integration? The answers to these questions are not only informed by the ways African Americans have historically engaged with the Nilotic Sudan. They also shed light on African American perceptions of themselves and others in the global African diaspora.

Beginning with the early twentieth century and continuing through Barack Obama’s presidency, Bounds of Blackness explores the history of African American engagements with modern Sudan. Black Americans connected with modern Sudan through a series of literary, cultural, and diplomatic endeavors. In the process, they played a pivotal role in the construction of early independence in Sudan and South Sudan. Sudan also figured into African American conceptions of racial pride and consciousness through a sense of shared struggle. While ancient Sudan was central to the development of Afrocentrism, African American engagements with modern Sudan reveal that colonial Sudan and postcolonial Sudan are integral in the history of Pan-Africanism. (As defined by AU Echo, Pan-Africanism is “an ideology and movement that encouraged the solidarity of Africans worldwide, … [Pan-Africanism] asserts that the fates of all African peoples and countries are intertwined.”)¹³ But African American engagements with Sudanese ranged from supportive to antagonistic at different times.

The guiding question animating this book is how modern Sudan informed African American conceptions of Black self-definition, consciousness, and solidarity. This book frames Sudan as a signal example of how malleable transnational racial solidarity can be when sociopolitical changes occur in a single place over time. While Sudan was under England and Egypt’s colonial yoke, African American newspapers often framed Sudanese as Black kin under race-based state oppression. However, after independence in 1956 and the outbreak of civil wars between the Arab-dominated northern government and Black rebels to the south, African Americans framed northern Sudanese Arabs as oppressors and southern Sudanese Blacks as oppressed. In the African American purview, Sudanese colonialism and independence presented racialized heroes and villains. This development is not only important for understanding the paradoxical relationship that African Americans have had with Sudan but also points to the capricious nature of racial solidarity and Pan-Africanism’s relationship to Arabism.

If the early kingdom of Kush emerged in Nubia toward the end of the third millennium BCE, a revived Kushite kingdom reappeared several centuries later. Having conquered Egypt around 720 BCE, the Black Pharaohs established an Egyptian capital at Memphis. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has noted that African Americans have long been attracted to Nubia as the locus of power before the onset of transatlantic slavery. African American authors, particularly in the nineteenth century, looked to ancient Kush and Nubia as important to understanding their cultural predecessors. This ancient history of power gave context for those African American authors who claimed the right to possess civilization, culture, and learning (countering the narrative of slavery and humiliation).¹⁴

Thousands of years after the rule of the Black Pharaohs, the region formerly occupied by Nubia found itself under the weight of British imperialism. After the Anglo-Egyptians defeated the Islamic Mahdiya in 1898, Sudan entered the British empire as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. Bordered by Egypt to the north, the Congo to the west, Ethiopia to the east, and Uganda and Kenya in the south, the Condominium was a massive territory linking North Africa, the Horn of Africa, East Africa, and Central Africa. A diverse mix of predominantly culturally Arab and religiously Islamic populations inhabited the northern expanses of the region, while a host of Black African ethnic groups lived farther up the Nile in southern Sudan. With the locus of colonial power rooted in the northern Sudanese city of Khartoum, a sizeable socioeconomic chasm separated the North and the South. In 1956 the Condominium decolonized to become independent Sudan. In becoming sovereign, Sudan earned the distinction of becoming the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence from Britain after World War II.¹⁵ While African American attachments to Nubia have been traditionally strong, there is also a significant yet comparatively unknown history of Black American engagements with modern Sudan. As historian Patrick Manning has asserted, “Sudan must be seen as having an importance in the history of Africa and the Old World diaspora for the twentieth century that equals its importance since the days of Nubian kingdoms and Nilotic migrants.”¹⁶

In the twentieth century, African Americans continued to show interest in the ancient Nile Valley. Some examples that are included in this study include the Chicago Defender invoking the ancient past when Sudan became independent, Langston Hughes including the aged Nile in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and a young Barack Obama’s vision of pyramids and pharaohs when he learned about his father’s Luo ancestry. Each demonstrated the persistent interest and relevance of the Nile Valley’s ancient history for Black Americans during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Thus, rather than being a study that is focused on Black American engagements with modern Sudan in contrast to (or distinct from) ancient Nubia, I show that the afterlives of the ancient past percolate throughout the modern period in meaningful ways. African Americans did not approach Sudan through a zero-sum calculus, consistently choosing to either invoke the past or connect with the present. They did both at the same time, refusing to keep Africa and Africans in a noble past as contemporary developments beckoned. In doing so they showed that modern Sudan—and the continent more broadly—had (and has) immediate import for Black America and the greater African diaspora.

Several figures of varying renown figure prominently in this exploration, ranging from Booker T. Washington to Percival Prattis, Joel Augustus Rogers, Eslanda Robeson, Andrew Brimmer, Robert Kitchen, Malcolm X, Valerie McCaw, Elton Fax, Louis Farrakhan, Susan Page, and Susan Rice. During modern Sudan’s complicated political history, such individuals interacted with the Sudan in varying capacities. Tuskegee Institute men participated in a colonial cotton cultivation project in Zeidab in the early twentieth century. Following World War II, editorials in Black newspapers opined on colonial Sudan’s uncertain political future. As Sudan emerged onto the world stage as an independent nation, Black US foreign service members worked in the capital, Khartoum. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan supported President Omar al-Bashir’s controversial regime, and, when South Sudan became independent in 2011, an African American woman, Susan Page, became the first US ambassador to the new nation. Such individuals notwithstanding, African American organizations have also been important actors in Sudanese social, political, and diplomatic histories. These groups include the likes of the Tuskegee Institute, the Nation of Islam, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

While Black Americans had a variety of experiences with and approaches to Sudan, the question of US power served as a unifying thread connecting the embroidery of African American engagements with the country and its people. How, one might ask, did Black Americans position themselves in the broader relationship between the world’s most powerful nation and colonial Sudan, postcolonial Sudan, and postcolonial independent South Sudan? Often, African Americans like Andrew Brimmer and Susan Rice were official representatives of US power operating in the Sudan on official state business. In the case of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Black Americans used Sudan to critique US foreign policy. At all times, African Americans have been vocal about the US state’s culpability in sponsoring, protecting, or otherwise supporting systemic racism. Within the context of these swirling dynamics, the reality of US power is inextricably linked to Black America’s interactions with Sudan and—more generally—discussion of how the bounds of blackness are defined, distributed, and dismantled at home and abroad.

Within the ecosystem of Black internationalism and US power lives the aged colossus that is the Black press, neither mainstream nor marginal. I approach African American newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and the Final Call as the richest sources to explore Black opinion on Sudan. Historian James H. Meriwether has noted that the Black press is possibly the most important source for understanding the gamut of African American views during the mid-twentieth century.¹⁷ To this end, the significance of Black newspaper coverage concerning Sudan raises important questions. Why would the everyday African American reader be interested in Sudan in the first place? What guided the way Black periodicals framed Sudan at any given time? What makes certain African countries or stories marketable to African American audiences at any given point in time? Bounds of Blackness shows that African Americans branded Sudan in Black newspapers, other periodicals, and websites to provide a particular definition of what it meant to be Black in the diaspora and, with it, a broader story about Black struggle, pride, and consciousness. Whether stateside or abroad, in print or on the ground, during segregation or colonialism, African Americans on micro and macro levels have shown that their connections to Sudan extend beyond the ancient Nubian past and stretch into the eras of Jim Crow, African colonialism, African independence, and Black Lives Matter.

Given the recent attention given to the global auspices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), its relative absence in the first ninety years covered in this study is significant and deserves some explanation. Carol Anderson has explored that organization’s role in liberating Africans and Asians as it fought American Jim Crow during the civil rights movement, while Jonathan Rosenberg has noted that its monthly publication, The Crisis, connected overseas developments and domestic reform.¹⁸ While it is not my aim here to repudiate the NAACP’s work or efficacy in the project of global Black liberation, Bounds of Blackness nevertheless shows that it did not play a significant role in the history of African American engagements with the Sudan until the turn of the twenty-first century, when the slaughter of Black Darfurians captured the world’s attention. While The Crisis does not figure prominently in this book, other notable African American print publications do. These include newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Final Call, magazines like Jet, and, more recently, the news and culture website The Root. In addition to such significant sources of circulating Black opinions and information concerning Sudan are those private and published memoirs written by African Americans who have traveled to Sudan since the early twentieth century. Published memoirs include those written by activist Eslanda Robeson, artist Elton C. Fax, journalist Keith Richburg, foreign service worker James Mack, and national security advisor Susan Rice.¹⁹ Private papers are scattered across the United States and can be found at archives at Stanford University, Tulane University, Howard University, and Harvard University. These sites contain the writings of such Sudan-associated African Americans as economist Andrew Brimmer, foreign service workers Robert W. Kitchen and Arthur McCaw, and radio host and abolitionist Joe Madison.²⁰ My aggregate use of these sources allows for analysis that should expand our knowledge of Black American engagements with Africa and especially those figures and organizations that have been marginalized in scholarship on the subject.

What are the bounds of blackness? Who is included and excluded? When are the bounds established, confirmed, or contested? With what consequences? Added to such whos, whats, and whens is this critical why: Why is Sudan of all places such a useful context to grapple with these questions? Sudan is the perfect place to pursue such questions because it so beautifully reflects the diversity of the Africana experience. Its geographic location—overlapping and wedged between North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Saharan Desert—includes a kaleidoscopic array of ethnic groups and languages. It is both Arab and not, with debates about whether the country is included in Middle Eastern studies work on “the Arab world.” It is an intersectional region, with Christian and Islamic histories dating back to the earliest centuries of those Abrahamic faiths but largely situated in different regions of the country. Like so many other countries in Africa and throughout the world, Sudan experienced slavery, emancipation, colonialism, postcolonialism, and the myriad joys and pains that have linked members of the Black world for generations, centuries, and millennia. Yet it is a particular place to examine the bounds of blackness because of the Nubian history and the modern state’s geopolitics that have brought issues of race, religion, and culture to the fore in ways that have commanded the world’s attention.

This book is informed by scholarly discussion concerning the meaning of blackness. Author Algernon Austin notes that racial categorization depends on several elements, including physical appearance, geography, ancestry, and racialized ideas of culture. The American system of racial categorization was historically assembled in response to social factors, and it continues to evolve. This categorization ignores physical appearance for many people because biology does not decide race. Austin, writes, “Whenever biology interfered with humans’ desired organization of people into races, biology was readily discarded. Human beings make races, not biology.”²¹ Race is ultimately sociohistorical. Blackness is about definitions and significance, which change over time and space, and entails social practices and identities informed by those ideas. Over time, the implications of being Black, white, or brown have shifted dramatically and carried cultural, political, and religious import. The racial structures that shape and confine Black life change over time and place, and Black folk’s understanding of who they are like and/or unlike also evolve.²²

For African Americans, the international political landscape has played a significant role in race’s sociohistorical narrative. African Americans’ political position as a racially oppressed group marked their approach to foreign policy issues. Indeed, their tendency to perceive global happenings through a racial lens resulted from the domestic color line and their hatred for racial inequality.²³ For example, in his study Mau Mau in Harlem? Gerald Horne explores the relationship between the United States and Kenya in the context of the fight against white supremacy in both countries. British-controlled Kenya was mired in racial segregation, with separate schools, neighborhoods, and the like, as in the United States. Horne proposes the connection between those two struggles, driven partially by a similar “black-white” dynamic that distinguished it from other African conflicts happening at the time.²⁴ While Horne may have been focused more specifically on the US-Kenya relationship, Jonathan Rosenberg has explored why American race reform leaders were more generally enraptured by world affairs and how they integrated their understanding of international developments into their US-centered reform campaign. Movement leaders, Rosenberg contends, displayed great interest in global affairs and made their understanding of the world foundational to their message. Reformers were convinced that developments abroad could provide traction for the cause. “Although it has become a commonplace to observe that the United States has had a profound impact on the twentieth-century world,” he argues, “it is worth remembering that throughout American history, the world has had a profound impact on America.”²⁵

Importantly for African Americans, questions concerning the bounds of blackness have extended beyond the shores of the Atlantic, percolating east of Africa and the Arab world into the Indian subcontinent. In the late nineteenth century, social reformers began to make analogies between injustices there and in Jim Crow America. Many historical actors compared struggles against American racism with movements against Indian caste oppression, effectively pairing US racism with British imperialism and all Indians with African Americans.²⁶ Horne has written primarily on the North American side of this equation in the period leading up to India’s 1947 independence. Writing that “Negroes had been compelled to seek succor and allied globally,” Horne echoes historian Nico Slate in contending that common opposition to racism and colonialism tended to bind Indians and Black Americans.²⁷ Yet this bond was not without its contradictions and limits. Slate notes that connections involved selective appropriation and at times utter misunderstanding and that many historical actors oversimplified or ignored the differences that distinguished the challenges facing South Asians and Black Americans. Furthermore, with increased African American enfranchisement, Horne states that Black Americans felt the need to distance themselves from an independent India that helped launch a Non-Aligned Movement that Washington perceived to be too cozy with the Soviets.²⁸ “Today,” Horne writes, “the once bountiful bilateral tie has withered significantly.”²⁹

Further complicating this narrative of a prospective Indian–African American bond around the nexus of a shared fight against state-sponsored oppression is the manner in which they have related to one another. On this point Vijay Prashad, in his Karma of Brown Folk, offers a sobering critique. While acknowledging that the facts that desis (those claiming South Asian ancestry) are seen as nonwhite and don a spiritual veneer that is sometimes respected and other times undesirable, Prashad argues that when they come to America en masse “they sign a social contract with a racist polity by making a pledge to work hard but to retain a social life at some remove from U.S. society.” Furthermore, he writes, the claim to a higher civilization and spirituality “allows the desis to be positioned in such a way that they are seen as superior to blacks, a social location not unattractive to a migrant in search of some accommodation in a racist polity. The tragedy of this social compact is that it perpetuates and reproduces antiblack racism.”³⁰ Taken together, the relationship between Black Americans and Indians has been beautiful and imperfect, timely and ephemeral, mutually beneficial and, at its worst, counterproductive.

These dynamics not only provide a lens into the complex nature of subaltern solidarities but also serve as a fitting reference point to address the complexities of how the bounds of blackness factored into two other phenomena: Pan-Africanism and Afro-Arab solidarity. Black America’s engagements with Sudan reveal much about African American conceptions of race, the sociohistorical nature of blackness, and the evolving nature of Black consciousness, activism, and politics. Collectively speaking, African American approaches to Sudan comprised a crucible and stage for the production and presentation of transnational blackness. Sudan has been a constituent part of Black America’s global purview, and African Americans have also participated in shaping and implementing the US diplomatic relationship with Sudan and South Sudan. Sudan’s significance in the history of African American racial consciousness extends beyond the redemptive glory of ancient Nubia, stretching to the present day in hitherto unexplored ways. Notwithstanding ancient Sudan’s importance in debunking racist stereotypes, the history covered here shows that Sudan fits into twentieth- and twenty-first-century Pan-Africanism in compelling ways. African American decisions to liken themselves to Sudanese or distinguish themselves from them is critical to understanding how they make sense of what makes people Black.

While Bounds of Blackness is primarily about how Black racial definition, meaning, and politics manifested in one diasporic relationship, the book’s greatest intervention is to show the foundational role that Arabs played in this narrative. The Black-white dynamics of transatlantic slavery and European colonialism has resulted in Black diasporic solidarities that are birthed in narratives with Black oppressed and white oppressors. African American engagements with modern Sudan highlight the capacity for Black intellectuals to find, construct, and articulate racial solidarity in an oppressor-oppressed paradigm drawn along Arab-Black lines. Thus, this book is not only a microstudy of Black America’s broader relationship with colonial and postcolonial Africa; it is also quite fundamentally about its connection with the Arab world. Taking those together, this book shows that it is impossible to understand the full spectrum of Black consciousness and politics in the African diaspora without an intimate engagement with the African world’s affable, ambivalent, and antagonistic approaches to Arabs.

During Sudan’s colonial era (1899–1956), African American newspapers framed Sudan as a Black land colonized by white (British) and Arab (Egyptian) overlords. With such framings came expressions of a racial solidarity based on shared experiences of slavery and dominance at the hands of racial Others. However, following independence and the new government’s violent attempts to Arabize and Islamize the country, some African Americans articulated a north Sudanese Arab versus Black southern Sudanese binary. In this paradigm, the former solidarity expressed for the entire Sudan was now increasingly aimed at southern Sudan. Thus, Sudan provides one case in which African American solidarity with Africans came at the expense of amity with Arabs.

Yet there was an interesting twist to this equation. Some, like the Nation of Islam, supported the Arab-dominated Sudanese government by viewing it as a target of Israeli aggression. In this paradigm, some African Americans expressed support for Sudan through a racial and religious solidarity with Arabs in the larger context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Immediately following World War II, most African American opinion leaders supported the Zionist movement and portrayed it as a model for African American self-help, African diasporic revitalization, and African independence. Over time, however, some African Americans who had supported Israel’s creation began to link Zionism with colonial discourse. When the Arab-Israeli conflict reached a fever pitch in 1967, some Black radicals condemned Israel as a racist, imperialist Western proxy. Following the 1967 conflict, African American commentary displayed a pattern wherein some civil rights organizations defended Israel while groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee condemned its position.³¹

Michael R. Fischbach’s recent study on Black Power and Palestine explores the conflict’s role in African American activism and its influence on the push for racial equity. Other works have investigated the civil rights movement’s responses to the Israeli state, the Black Panthers in Algiers, and the Middle East’s role in African American liberation politics from the Eisenhower to Nixon administrations.³² The African American studies scholar Alex Lubin takes a longer historical approach in Geographies of Liberation, where he explores links between African American political thought and the Middle East in a study that goes back to the 1850s. Showing connections between the imaginings of African Americans, Arabs, and Israeli Jews, Lubin aims to extend the framework of the Black freedom struggle beyond the Atlantic world.³³ Thus, research on African American engagements with the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular allows for a more comprehensive understanding of African American politics, ideology, and global history.

While African Americans looked overseas, Arabs and other peoples in the Middle East looked outside of their region and worked to establish themselves as anti-colonialists and people of color with connections to Black liberation in America and Africa. For instance, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement—which called for the creation of a Palestinian state and a guerrilla war to free Palestine—expressed identification with Black American experiences and embraced Black power. However, Pan-African festivals held during the 1960–1980s brought the terms of Black-Arab solidarity to the fore in divergent ways. The First World Festival of Negro Arts (held in Dakar in 1966) celebrated Senegalese leader Leopold Senghor’s idea of the unity of African and Black diasporic art and literature. However, this celebration of Black cultural achievement was paired with Arab exclusion: Senghor had established firm criteria for North African material: namely, a small number of works representing the art of North Africa’s Black communities but not Berber or Arab art. The 1966 festival’s exclusion of North Africa became a recurrent cause for critique.³⁴ Conversely, at the 1969 Pan-African Festival held in the North African city of Algiers, Algerian participants and officials recollected to Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik that, though Algerians may have been prejudiced against Black Africans before the festival, “they opened up and discovered their Africanness” at the event.³⁵ But the historian Andrew Apter notes that when Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, a divisive debate occurred over the meanings of Black cultural citizenship. Nigeria’s great oil wealth motivated its inclusive vision of blackness, and Lt. General Olusegun Obasanjo maintained that North Africans should fully participate; conversely, Leopold Senghor maintained his position. “North Africa became the focus of these competing definitions of blackness,” writes Apter, “[and] the struggle over North Africa in FESTAC 77 shows that the political stakes of black cultural citizenship were neither trivial or ephemeral.”³⁶ In all these ways, non-Americans of color were reshaping the bounds of blackness as African Americans created solidarities with other people. However, the reality remains that Sudan—which joined the Arab League in 1956—has been largely absent in the field as it relates to Afro-Arab relations.

Sudan’s proximity to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Sudanese government’s aims to fashion the country along Arab and Islamic lines make African American mentions of Israel and Zionism in discussions of Sudan significant. Bounds of Blackness shows that during the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972), some African Americans used anti-Israeli sentiment to express their support for the Sudanese government while others referenced Israeli assistance to southern anti-government rebels in expressions of support for them. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—when Sudan found itself in the throes of another civil war to the south and genocide west in Darfur—Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam claimed that the Sudanese government was the target of an anti-Zionist plot. Thus, African American engagements with Sudan not only illustrate the tensions of Afro-Arab solidarity after decolonization but also point toward religion’s capacity to strengthen or undermine racial solidarity. Taken together, Black American approaches to Sudan show how blackness operated as an imagined identity linked to evolving realities of oppression, liberation, and sociopolitical status. African American discursive framings of Sudanese as Black or Arab (or both) have changed in different moments for distinctive reasons with divergent results. In brief, the bounds of blackness have shifted over time and are continuing to shift. When African Americans proclaim “Black Lives Matter!”, which lives are we invoking? Which lives are we ignoring?

Bounds of Blackness is divided into six chapters. In the early twentieth century, Booker T. Washington worked with businessman Leigh Hunt to send men with Tuskegee Institute ties to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Using contemporary newspapers, the Booker T. Washington papers, and British and American archival materials, chapter 1 examines the Sudan project. The Hunt-Washington scheme is significant in the broader narrative of African American engagements with Sudan for several reasons. To begin, it was the first recorded instance of African Americans within Sudan’s geographic boundaries, the first of what would be a train of several generations to do so over the next hundred years. The demographic composition of the men involved in the project—namely, their association with the historically Black Tuskegee Institute—augured the largely educated demographic of African Americans that visited the country in the decades to come. Conducted during the era of Jim Crow and its concomitant disenfranchisement, their work had an unmistakably elitist tenor. Two elements of this tendency can be found in the projects’ albeit loose association with the US government (which became more pronounced in African American work in Sudan during the 1950s and 1960s) and the spirit of aid that undergirded the cotton scheme and persisted into the early twenty-first century. In these ways, the Washington-Hunt project established several elements that marked Black engagements with Sudan in the twentieth century.

Chapter 2 explores African American discourse concerning Sudan from the early 1920s until the eve of Sudanese independence (1956). More specifically, it is concerned with the ways that Black writers during this period voiced respect for and solidarity with Sudan. From interest in Sudanese ancient history to acknowledgment of Sudanese physical features similar to African Americans’ own, Black Americans found the Sudanese foreign but unmistakably familial. Nowhere was this affinity more blatant than in the way that the Sudanese were described in relation to Egypt—that is, as Black people subject to potential mistreatment from a racial Other, Arabs. This expressed dichotomy delineating Arab rulers and Black subjects, Arab oppressor and Black oppressed, not only made the Sudanese more relatable in the eyes of African Americans subject themselves to state-supported racial hierarchies but also foreboded the language that African Americans would use about Sudan during that country’s postcolonial civil wars, when Black, marginalized southern Sudanese waged war against northern Sudanese Arab regimes. Thus, this period represents a discursive prologue to the rhetoric disseminated by Black writers in the latter twentieth century, language that portrayed Blacks and Arabs in an oppositional dichotomy, with blackness suffering under the weight of Arab oppression. Support for Black Sudanese went together with criticism of Egyptians specifically and/or Arabs more generally. Black racial solidarity, in this context, undermined affinity with one group of fellow nonwhites living under the auspices of white authority—namely, Egyptian Arabs under British rule.

Chapter 3 examines the work and experiences of African American foreign service workers in Sudan during the early years of independence. For both the United States and Sudan, the 1950s and 1960s were years of sweeping change. The United States was fraught with fears of nuclear holocaust, growing military action in Vietnam, and a nonviolent civil rights movement confronted by all manners of violence. Sudan was embroiled in its own quagmire: the young nation experienced a series of coups, found itself entangled in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and was nearly rent apart when southern Sudanese long confined to the margins of state power waged a long and bloody civil war against successive Khartoum-based regimes. Amid it all, African Americans like Andrew Brimmer, Valerie McCaw, and Madison Broadnax provided economic, agricultural, and cultural resources to Sudan during its early independence. The early independence years represented the most significant era of African American labor in the country since the Tuskegee project (which, coincidentally, occurred during the early colonial period). Never in the decades bookended by those two moments was the African American presence in Sudan so large. While the African American labor during the mid-twentieth century mirrored the Tuskegee project in its heavy representation of historically Black college graduates, it was distinct in the diversity of work involved and, importantly, the presence of African American women in Sudan. Finally, the diplomatic work examined in this chapter foreshadowed the work of other African American individual and organizational work later performed in Sudan under the auspices of the US government. Before considering the work of Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Susan Page in northern and southern Sudan, one must first examine their diplomatic predecessors in the early independence period.

While chapter 3 explores the social, economic, and cultural work that African Americans performed in early independent Sudan, chapter 4 focuses on the ways African American coverage and opinion on Sudan shifted during the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972). Though Black newspapers had formerly framed Egypt as an Arab oppressor of Black people, writers now placed that moniker on northern Sudanese Arabs. While Black newspapers formerly voiced sympathy for colonized Sudan, amity was now increasingly directed toward southern Sudan. Thus, the early independence period witnessed the emergence of a discourse that placed Sudanese in a polarizing binary that not only classified Arabs and Blacks but also linked their oppressor-oppressed status along these racial lines. Yet this rhetoric was not adopted by all. Some writers critiqued Israel’s involvement in the Sudan and, by doing so, added another layer to the issue of racial solidarity. The convergence of these issues and split opinions on Sudan portended divisive Black approaches to Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War.

Chapter 5 concerns Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam’s impassioned, contrarian, and controversial support for the Sudanese government during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). The NOI defended the Sudanese government and condemned anti-Arabism in the US mass media. As such, the Nation of Islam’s approach to Sudan not only highlighted the continued salience of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Black engagements with Sudan. It also added a curious element to the role of race in this history. However, African American Christians during this time rallied behind southern Sudanese through shared Christian faith and experiences of slavery. Sudan became an ideological battlefield on which Black Muslim and Christian Americans marshaled competing racial and religious solidarities.

Chapter 6 explores how President Barack Obama’s Black diplomats dealt with Sudan and the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, founded in 2011. Obama was elected US senator in 2004 and then served two terms as president of the United States, and these years (2004–2017) corresponded with several major developments in Sudan: the genocide in Darfur, the end of the Second Sudanese Civil War, the achievement of South Sudanese independence, and civil war in the young nation. More than simply highlighting Obama’s work with the new nation, this chapter positions two Black women—Susan Rice and Susan Page—as critical figures that shaped America’s early relationship with independent South Sudan. As such, African Americans not only played an important role in establishing America’s diplomatic relationship with postcolonial Sudan, but they also directed early US–South Sudan relations at the highest diplomatic level.

The conclusion reexamines the book’s findings and arguments in the context of Black Lives Matter. What impact might historically Black colleges and universities have in African American relations with Africa moving forward? How might we consider the history, form, and implications of largely unexplored engagements that Black Americans have had with other African countries? How can the internet operate as an arena for Black Americans to engage the Sudanese (and others throughout the Africana world) in the spirit of Black consciousness and solidarity? The conclusion addresses these questions and offers some speculation on the future politics of transnational Black racial solidarity.