The Other Side of Terror - by Erica R Edwards (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The Other Side of Terror reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of U.S. global power through counterterrorist discourses, practices, and policies since 1968. It also carefully analyzes the Black feminist literature tracked the monumental political and cultural shifts that culminated in the crises we now face"--

Book Synopsis

WINNER, 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association

HONORABLE MENTION, 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association

Reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power

The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the "imperial grammars of blackness."

This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late-Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it.

The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on "the other side of terror", which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.

Review Quotes

"Brilliantly maps the transformations in black women's expressive culture in response to COINTELPRO, the war on drugs, and the long war on terror. A necessary, timely history of state power and black feminist radicalism, The Other Side of Terror is, at once, a critique of empire and its myriad violence, a refusal of servitude, and a poetics of dissent. As Edwards demonstrates persuasively and eloquently: radical black feminist thought is indispensable to our collective effort to survive."-- "Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals"

"Erica R. Edwards presents a powerful analysis connecting politics and literature...This is a brilliant book that is likely to produce endless new insights."-- "Ethnic and Racial Studies"

"In this highly informed and deeply researched interrogation of the global security state after 9/11, Erica Edwards asks us to read black women and black women's expressive culture as both resistant to and complicit in American global power. To expose and critique the American security regime and the cultures of imperialism, Edwards turns to a tradition of black feminist radicalism and the insurgent texts of black feminists such as Alice Randall, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, and Nikki Finney. This is a brave and unsettling book, one that makes us think about black women not as fringe actors or minority figures, but as major players in the global arena."-- "Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s"

About the Author

Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers University. She is author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012), which received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and co-editor of Keywords for African American Literature (2018).