This book is an important addition to the publisher's Comparative Feminist Studies Series. The six sections provide a devastatingly critical analysis of unwitting U.S. black and white male nationalists who have coalesced around a sort of phallic nationalism. Strategically, the book employs an eclectic analytical and methodological frame that combines thick narrative analysis with assorted interdisciplinary critical standpoints, including political science, women's studies, critical legal studies, cultural studies, and policy studies. Consistent with this multidimensional approach is a determination on the part of the author to further the implications of intersectional analytic frames in preference to a “postempiricist,” “postpositive orientation.” The forces shaping black women's experiences in U.S. society require a cultural studies frame that accounts for the “mutually constitutive” (p. 8) dimensions of black women's lives.

Nikol Alexander-Floyd theorizes the intersecting and shared spaces of the rights and rites of male privilege in the gender-innocent tropes of “community,” “family,” “responsible fatherhood,” and disdain for pathological ghetto-dwelling black women (welfare queens) and their offspring (e.g., the endangered black male) that forge a virtual nationalist “Gentlemen's Agreement” concerning the black cultural pathology paradigm (BCPP). The BCPP centers black women as causes célèbres and black feminists and women generally as race traitors. The charge that warring black and white male nationalists forge a “wounded masculinity” alliance around single black female sourcing of underclass cultural and moral depravities is one of the boldest made in the book. Relying on Wahneema Lubiano's “brutally reduced” treatment betraying black nationalism's “statelike cultural ‘work’,” the book emphasizes the mimetic performance of black nationalist discourse in relationship to white nationalism. It passes, however, on identical intrafeminist critiques of U.S. black feminists concerning the metonymic ways in which “black” in feminist discourse resounds with a provincial “American” accent, marginalizing diasporic black feminist or womanist voices that led Naomi Pabst to note that “all the blacks are American” (“Mama, I Am Walking to Canada,” in Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds., Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, 2006, 120–21). Moreover, debates within feminist discourse concerning matters of gender and sexuality have invoked many of the claims that feminists have aimed at black nationalism, including heterosexist feminism as a form of gendered nationalism vis-à-vis “queer” discourses.

Alexander-Floyd acknowledges that her study sets aside historical analysis by choosing not to engage in “an exhaustive examination of the subject,” (pp. 3, 159) because of the tendency toward “trans-historical” accounts (p. 55). This vital decision makes much of the book's discursive argumentation possible. Nevertheless, the author insists that “as a hegemonic, metanarrative the BCPP [of black nationalism], much like a living, breathing organism, adapts and reshapes itself to fit the exigencies of particular time periods, contexts, and constituencies” (p. 163). Atomistic readings of black nationalism, through reluctance to concede any contiguity in the orientation (except where its principal constitutive property is its aping of white nationalism or heterosexist chauvinism), dominate contemporary treatments of black nationalism. They make plausible the book's microanalysis linking the nationalisms of subaltern men symbiotically with the nationalisms of oppressive states.

A main premise of the book concerning wounded interracial nationalist convergence is put in abeyance in the analysis of the ineffective Faith Based Initiative (FBI) and Father Initiative (FI) projects of George W. Bush. These are viewed as sharing gendered ideological symbiosis with black nationalism. The book, in turn, discusses Christian black nationalist minister Eugene Rivers, III, a fierce critic of the 1995 Million Man March/Day of Absence (MMM/DOA), and several prominent African-American Christian ministers, who stood in line for the Faith Based Initiative and Father Initiative but opposed the MMM/DOA on theological and ideological grounds. This opposition problematized the claim that MMM/DOA precipitated “a men's movement in Black churches” (p. 99) that bridged the FI and “compassionate conservatism,” because ideology and religion divide more than a facially masculinist consensus unites. Where Alexander-Floyd skillfully links an array of offenders embracing the BCPP (rap artists, integrationists in the NAACP, white political and cultural conservatives, and black churches), it is mostly black nationalism that is held to account. The book necessarily downplays how African-American men are subject to many of the same bugbear constructions in mass media as African-American women, in which they are depicted as menacing, criminal, rapacious, drug addicted, oversexed, violent, and morally weak. To incorporate these caricatures in the analysis of the BCPP would trouble the book's criticisms concerning nationalist campaigns in the interest of reified endangered black males.

The author fully accepts that the polemical intellectual terrain her book has entered is a vigorously contested one, and has led to occasional vitriolic public confrontations and sometimes violence that have done nothing to mobilize an operational post–Civil Rights black politics beyond that which Todd Boyd calls a kind of centripetal academic “esoterica” (Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the Hood and Beyond, 1997, 7). In intellectual and academic discourses, tensions have seldom been more highly charged than in reactions to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (1965) and Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), to which Alexander-Floyd applies her legal skills to respectively indict and to resuscitate. She courageously invokes Wallace's book as prescient in highlighting the phallic nationalism conjoining white nationalisms and black nationalisms. Failure to heed Wallace's analysis, she maintains, prevented oppositional forces from recognizing, “the Black cultural pathology narrative as the shared ideological ground for a conservative backlash against equality and a Black nationalist resurgence in popular culture” (p. 71).

Some otherwise devastating feminist critics of black nationalist excesses have been disinclined to note the manner in which the narratives of “community feminists” (women black nationalists) militate against one-dimensional characterizations of black nationalism as solely or a priori a masculinist project. According to Joy James (Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, 1997, 117, 120), “radical women embraced and shaped the political ideologies espoused by black male intellectuals such as Malcolm X” and Paul Robeson. Additionally, to sustain a feminist critique of phallic black nationalism, some analysts have necessarily engaged in tamping down the legacies of pro–“proto-womanist” black nationalist men and black women nationalists. Evelyn Simeon (Black Feminist Voices in Politics, 2006) has also insisted that African-American men have yielded higher levels of support for some measures of black feminism than have black women. In any case, according to Ula Yvette Taylor, “community feminists” like Jacques Garvey, Maria Stewart, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s opted to reconcile their intersectionalized and multilayered commitments as women, workers, poor, mothers, wives (for those who were married), and racially oppressed. For her, these women are those “who may or may not live in a coverture relationship; either way, their activism is focused on assisting both the men and women in their lives … along with initiating and participating in activities to ‘uplift’ their communities” (The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, 2002, 64). They are, in fact, “undeniably feminists in that their activism discerns the configuration of oppressive power relations, shatters masculinist claims of women as intellectually inferior, and seeks to empower women by expanding their roles and options.” As much as the eradication of sexism and patriarchy cannot mitigate the impact of race in their lives, the eradication of racism would leave them in the throes of sexism and patriarchy. If it is true that “all the women are whites, all the Blacks are men,” then despite the excesses of whole generations of African-American male nationalists, all the womanists are not feminists, and all the black nationalists are not men.

In the end, Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics takes readers on a journey mined with unreconstructed gendered ideologies that have demobilized large segments of the African-American collective. While many readers are likely to be convinced of the sharp comparisons drawn between white and black male nationalists in American culture and politics, others without strong ideological commitments might long for an articulation of some affirmative liberatory policy prescriptions that push forward all black people and their allies.