Historian Christopher Tounsel’s Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the politics of solidarity is a timely and very welcome contribution to our understanding of over a century of various African American views on and episodes of involvement with Sudan, a large, diverse African country with a tragic history of instability and a multilayered identity – African and Arab, terms that can carry multiple meanings to different people, informing different forms of engagement. Tounsel documents several African Americans’ travels to and writings about Sudan since the foundation of the modern Sudanese state in the late nineteenth century under Anglo-Egyptian condominium rule. His research cites primary sources from archives, including historically Black colleges and universities such as Howard University, the Sudan Archive at Durham University, the Comboni Mission Archives in Rome and the South Sudan National Archives in Juba, along with other institutions and multiple secondary sources.

The book, in six chapters, mainly covers African American engagements with Sudan in two eras: colonial Sudan under joint British and Egyptian rule from 1899 to 1956; and independent Sudan starting in 1956, including South Sudan following the 2011 referendum that saw its birth. It also makes reference to views on Sudan’s ancient past – that of ancient Nubia as a source of early inspiration for many African American intellectuals – and the nineteenth-century religiously inspired uprising against foreign rule led by the Mahdi. How have African Americans interacted with Sudan? In the book’s introduction, Tounsel puts forward a guiding statement: ‘African American discursive framings of Sudanese as Black or Arab (or both) have changed in different moments of distinctive reasons with divergent results. In brief, the bounds of blackness have shifted over time and are continuing to shift.’

Tounsel begins by shedding light on the first recorded interactions of African Americans with Sudan: Black agriculture experts from the Tuskegee Institute were recommended by educator Booker T. Washington to join a cotton scheme in northern Sudan founded by American businessman Leigh Hunt. Early twentieth-century Black newspapers, such as Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, whose interest in African affairs was sparked by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, recognized Sudan early on as ‘Black’ in relation to its colonial rulers, particularly ‘Arab Egypt’. Tounsel also highlights the work of some of the early African American diplomats in Khartoum, who, as representatives of the American state, helped shape economic, educational and cultural programmes such as the Central Bank and the visits of historian William Leo Hansberry and poet Langston Hughes.

‘In the Sudan … both the Arabs and non-Arabs would at once be called Negro in America,’ wrote J. A. Rogers in 1947 for the Pittsburgh Courier. So how did such views begin to ‘diverge’? During Sudan’s first civil war, as the government based in the north fought against rebels in the south over government-sponsored Arabization programmes in the 1960s, ‘portrayals of northern Sudanese as Arab and southern Sudanese as Black swelled’. These views would further intensify during Sudan’s second civil war a decade later and with the government’s introduction of Islamic law, sharia, in the country, as well as allegations of the revival of slavery in southern Sudan, then later genocide in Darfur in the following years. Different African American circles, however, engaged with Sudan differently. Some African American Muslim groups, such as the Nation of Islam, conscious of a history that connected with Sudan (Malcolm X visited Sudan in 1959, for example) rejected explanations of Sudan’s woes in terms of ‘Black’ or ‘African’ against ‘Arab’, pointing to the complexities of these terms in Sudan and alleging ‘Zionist conspiracies’ against a Muslim state. Sudan, however, would later become a top priority for key African American representatives of the US government, such as President Barak Obama, UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Ambassador Susan Page.

What explains these different approaches to Sudan? ‘It would be foolish to think that Black newspaper editors and contributors, diplomats and other figures who wrote about Sudan and/or journeyed through the countryside did so through lenses completely untouched by their class, racial, gender, and other perspectives and biases,’ Tounsel acknowledges. But he also concludes with conviction that ‘strident, conscious attention to the realities facing contemporary Africa’ is important and that, in this case, the internal inconsistencies and tragedies produced by Sudan’s conflicts, including slavery and genocide, should be addressed.

Surprisingly missing is any reference to the connections of some high-profile African American figures to Sudan, such as Malcolm X’s close relationship with some Sudanese individuals or boxer Muhammad Ali’s humanitarian visit to the country. The author, who admits that he has focused on the ‘African American side’ of this equation, would certainly have further enriched this study with access to writings, documents and debates from the Sudanese during the same period across political, ethnic and religious lines on identity and politics, including sources in Arabic, perhaps through access to the Archives House in Khartoum. The emerging input of Sudan’s diaspora in America and the global reactions to Sudan’s 2019 revolution, including by African American celebrities, are also worthy of attention. Overall, Bounds of Blackness is a reminder of the always evolving notions of identity and how they inform the politics of solidarity.