By offering an engaging account of American leftists' complex identifications with anticolonial movements, Soul Power challenges standard historical narratives about 1960s-era protest. Cynthia A. Young presents wide-ranging case studies that “analyze the ideas, art forms, and cultural rituals of a group of African Americans, Latino/as, and Anglos who, inspired by events in the decolonizing world, saw their own plight in global terms” (2). Her chapters explore the attraction of the Cuban Revolution for African American intellectuals; the political and cultural activities of the militant and multiracial New York health care workers' union, Local 1199; the cinematic innovations of the Newsreel filmmaking group and its successor, Third World Newsreel; the early career of African American Marxist Angela Davis; and the work of African and African American filmmakers of the LA Rebellion. Young pays particular attention to the cultural work inspired by identifications with Third World struggles, capturing a left internationalist “cultural front” of the 1960s era in many ways similar to the Old Left movement described by Michael Denning.

The “U.S. Third World Leftists” in Young's book drew a parallel between struggles against racial and class oppression in the US and movements abroad against colonialism and imperialism. This identification with Third World struggles had significant benefits for US leftists, expanding their horizons for political action and cultural production. Yet Young acknowledges the limitations inherent in such identifications, which had a tendency to reduce “the Third World in some instances to a set of icons, a set of projections and imaginaries” (12). There is an additional limitation that Young does not explore: in many ways, the identification of radical democratic movements in the US with authoritarian communist regimes in the Third World replicated the misguided and destructive romanticization of the Soviet Union by an earlier generation of leftists.

Readers may find it difficult to agree with Young that there was such a coherently identifiable group as a “U.S. Third World Left” which was “every bit as significant as the New Left or the civil rights movement” (12). Even so, the great virtue of Soul Power is to complicate our understandings of 1960s-era social movements. Soul Power successfully challenges New Left narratives that place the activities of white middle-class youths at their center, and civil rights narratives that concentrate on the struggle against racial oppression while ignoring that against class oppression. By focusing on a series of important, fascinating, and neglected historical actors, Young offers us a much richer understanding of the 1960s-era left.