In Race and America's Long War, Nikhil Pal Singh explores the mutually enforcing relationship between what he articulates as the United States’ “inner and outer wars”: that is, the history of the US domestic and foreign policing, confinement, and extermination of racialized peoples. In a series of essays, Singh deftly interrogates the evolution of these dynamics, beginning with the slavery, dispossession, and colonial genocide that formed the conditions for the emergence of the US nation-state, and ending with a chilling assessment of “the present crisis” in the era of the Trump administration. The thread that connects these wide-ranging, yet intertwined, histories of violence is the ever-evolving logic of racial differentiation that enables US liberal democracy to cloak its sovereign power over life and death – in the form of settler colonial elimination, slavery, incarceration, or the waging of war – within a ruse of rights and rationality.

For example, in the first essay, “Race, War, Police,” Singh argues that the racialized institution of policing has always been integral to the governance of the boundary between lives worth cultivating and those that are vulnerable to legitimate state violence. In a brilliant analysis that draws upon and speaks to scholars of Indigenous studies, African American studies, the carceral state, and US overseas empire, Singh connects the criminalizing, dehumanizing racial logics behind the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterinsurgent “slave patrol” and “frontier police” to those that bolstered the emergence of a US Cold War empire that envisioned itself as a “global police,” extending its reach beyond US borders (44–58). This critique continues in another essay, “From War Capitalism to Race War,” in which Singh invokes the histories of slavery, conquest, racialized incarceration, and global militarization in his argument that race and colonialism have always been inherent to, not separate from, the dynamics of capitalist exploitation and surplus value. In conversation with scholars of racial capitalism, Singh argues that a reckoning with “the indebtedness of freedom to slavery” (88), and consequently the enduring role of race as a material relation of capitalism, opens up space for nuanced Marxist critiques of racialized surveillance, confinement, exploitation, and violence. In “The Aftermath of Fascism,” Singh again focusses on the contradictions of US liberalism – this time within the discourse of antifascism. Since the twentieth century, politicians and scholars have often positioned fascism as the foil to American democracy. Yet Singh posits that fascism is in actuality democracy's “doppelganger,” which continually reemerges in the form of US domestic and global institutions that work to enslave, confine, occupy, and kill racialized others with impunity – such as the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the military base, or the overseas colony (109).

The final essays focus on how these racial logics have mutated within the contemporary period of neoliberalism, globalization, and the war on terror. In “Racial Formation and Permanent War,” Singh argues that the post-Cold War consolidation of the “militarized, carceral, war-on-terror state” (149) has introduced complexities that urgently require anti-racist politics to think outside nation-based, civil-inclusionist frameworks, and toward transnational critiques of colonialism, militarism, and racial differentiation. The last essay, “The Present Crisis,” constructs a bristling critique of progressive neoliberalism during the presidencies of Clinton, Bush, and Obama, which Singh argues allowed a public discourse of racial and gender equality to coexist with the widespread dismantling of state support for education, health, and labor rights. Thus the left's misplaced belief in neoliberalism as an agent of equality created a vacuum for a Trumpism to emerge that flouted the taboos of “political correctness” and “diversity talk,” while “welding a populism that invoked an abandoned generation of virtuous heartland producers to a foreign policy that emphasized hitting hard and unilaterally, but only against clearly marked enemies” (156–68). This essay, along with the others in this volume, illustrates how Trump's election is not an exception in a history of “post-civil rights progress,” but rather is a perverse new episode in the long history of a racist, militarist, carceral state at war (164–65).

Singh's Race and America's Long War makes vital contributions to American studies; US history; Indigenous and settler colonial studies; African American studies; and studies of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and counterinsurgency –and, most importantly, places these fields into closer conversation with one another. Among the many strengths of this book is that its interdisciplinary analysis of US history is decidedly not linear: each essay makes a discrete and unique argument, yet together these pieces form a compelling transnational critique of racial differentiation, US liberal democracy, and war that is greater than the sum of its parts. Finally, Singh's cogent and illuminating prose makes these essays ideal for inclusion on syllabi for courses that focus on colonialism, empire, war, policing, racial capitalism, or critical ethnic studies – courses which, in our current political moment, are more important than ever.