Anna Hartnell's central premise in this excellent and challenging book is that the biblical story of Exodus, of the Jewish slaves in Egypt being freed and then led into the Promised Land, is a valuable analytical device by which to understand African American history and rhetoric. In this manner Hartnell not only interjects a compelling intellectual framework to twentieth-century debates on civil rights but also reaffirms the compelling religious narrative that is often lost, except at a superficial level, in many accounts. While the scope of the book is from W. E. B. Du Bois to Barack Obama, it takes into account literature, politics, Hurricane Katrina, and international relations alongside American exceptionalist tendencies.

Hartnell focusses on familiar and recognizable aspects of twentieth-century black history and culture: from Du Bois's double consciousness to Martin Luther King's Promised Land, Malcolm X's African/Egypt paradigm, and Toni Morrison's Paradise, as well as making pertinent analysis of Obama's problems being the first black US President. One of the overarching themes that link these chapters is that the African American experience is explained as being at the centre of the American story, “in a way that fuses African American exceptionalism with the exceptionalist narrative that has long played a leading role in US national life” (18). Indeed the strength of the book is that it looks beyond the reductivist models of black American thought as being “separatism versus assimilation, militancy versus accommodation … that tend to pit blackness and Americanness against one another” (50). Hartnell extrapolates the black American experience as a redemptive power “for the rest of the world, adapted from Judaism as well as more directly from American messianic traditions” (63). African Americans, therefore, replace the Jewish experience as a specific group that reflects and highlights the problems of a world power whilst also retaining the potential of redemption that can absolve the US (and therefore the world) from its sinful past.

Hartnell suggests that black intellectuals used twentieth-century developments in Zionism to understand their own Americanness and their blackness (classic Du Boisian duality) as they sought out new ways in which to arrive at a promised land which has, at various times, been designated within and outside the USA. African American views on Zionism underwent a transition from the belief that the state of Israel was a fulfilment of scripture (with Martin Luther King supporting Israel during the 1967 war) to the outright rejection of Zionism by Black Power groups. Ironically, King supported Israel as a “critique of colonial relations” whilst Black Power advocates used the same reasoning to support the Palestinian situation (123). This was, Hartnell suggests, a late 1960s shift by black groups towards seeing Israel as an occupying force in the Middle East supported by white American imperial interests. A little more on relations between Jewish and black groups within the US would have been interesting here. On the one hand, many African American civil rights organizations were supported by Jewish groups, who saw parallels with their own historical predicament; on the other, some groups blamed Jewish landlords and businesses for their urban slum conditions (what Henry Louis Gates has called a “clientelistic hostility”).

Hartnell uses this intellectual and religious history to appreciate the problems Obama has had as a “post-exceptionalist” leader, especially in foreign policy (59), whilst navigating a “whites only model of citizenship” (67) that had previously led Malcolm X to claim that America and “Christianity might just be irretrievably contaminated by white racism” (142). Hartnell persuasively argues that the problems of President Obama relate to the fact that black and white Americans have a radically different view of their own and each other's histories and there is a difficulty of reconciling both. Obama has suffered as President due to the issue of state memory – that as President he has had to manage white institutional structures whilst simultaneously he has tried to articulate the “black counter-narrative” (219). This book reexamines and expands our understanding of major black figures in the civil rights movement and beyond, shows that there is still much to interpret in civil rights history, and paints Obama's role as struggling to balance white and black experiences in America.