“What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political scientists. Michael Hanchard responds to this inattention by presenting a dazzling, learned tour of the contours of contemporary black political thought. Moving fluently from the local to the national to the hemispheric to the global and traversing disciplinary lines at the same time, Party/Politics has much to offer scholars in multiple fields, both within political science and beyond. At the risk of understating this larger contribution, this review will focus on the example it sets for the practice of political theory.

The central axis around which the book turns is the vexed question of the relationship between politics and culture. If the boundaries of the political are always in question, always connected to cultural practices in complex ways, this has been especially so for black political subjects, whose experiences have been marked by uneven patterns of cultural and political representation and power. Hanchard deftly carves out a middle ground between political science literatures that largely ignore questions of culture and cultural studies arguments that treat cultural practices as inherently political. Through a series of intellectual excursions, he mines pop culture, literature, individual acts of resistance, and a wide array of practices to assess their political character.

The argument proceeds in three sections. In the first, “Politics and Form,” Hanchard inquires how people of African descent have responded to the everyday experience of inequality and asks when and how those responses have translated into collective action. The second section, “Politics in Fact and Fiction,” situates recent controversies over the status of “black intellectuals” within a hemispheric American context and considers how fiction enables us to interpret the “not-quite-collective acts of black politics” (p. 180). The final section on “Hemispheric Perspectives/Black Internationalism” builds on Henry Highland Garnet's nineteenth-century observation that “the Western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race” (p. 183), both to dismantle assumptions about racial mixture lurking behind some arguments for multiculturalism and to examine the relationship between racial solidarity and political agency in the African diaspora in the twenty-first century.

Hanchard pays especially careful attention to the relationship between micro- and macro-politics. His aim, he explains, is to develop a “middle range” theory that inquires when and how black citizens' responses to injustice have political salience, even when they do not constitute a political movement. A chapter coauthored with Michael Dawson, for example, sheds light on the ways that political ideologies circulate in black communities in the United States. It exposes and explores “the upward diffusion of ideological forms,” as middle-class African Americans adopt ideas and behaviors from the working-class (p. 85). One of the most important theoretical contributions, furthermore, is Hanchard's account of an “ethics of aversion” as a strategic choice through which subordinated subjects aim to minimize their encounters with members of the dominant group. Demonstrating how black resistance to assimilation operates selectively, and undermining the assumption that it is “racism in reverse,” he enriches conventional political and moral vocabularies, which have proved inadequate for interpreting the actions of black subjects.

The book also addresses the temporal dimensions of black political life. Building on his earlier work on Afro-modernity, Hanchard offers a view of the modern “West” that foregrounds the slave trade, slavery, colonial conquest, and apartheid. Not only does this account bring a distinctive voice and constellation of concerns to the burgeoning conversation about comparative political theory, but it also presses against prevailing understandings of the predicament of the present. At a moment when European and Anglo-American democratic theorists decry the undemocratic character of late modern existence and mourn the loss of now-discredited emancipatory narratives, the author redirects our attention to another set of losses and utopian alternatives. Attending to the fragmentation of the transnational solidarity that undergirded the anticolonial and antiapartheid movements and the gap between emancipation and freedom in much of the black world, he offers an alternative diagnosis of the present and a font from which to draw insight about what more democratic forms of life would require.

It is not possible to introduce so rich an array of theoretical questions and concepts and to dwell on all of them in depth. My only quibble with the book, then, is that it contains the germ of several books, all of which might be profitably developed further. For example, the first three chapters, which lay out Hanchard's theory of “quotidian politics,” could easily constitute a substantial volume on their own. Such a book would allow Hanchard to flesh out in more detail how “coagulation” works in actual political practice and clarify the political stakes in differentiating his conception of everyday black political activity from the idea of infrapolitics in the work of James Scott and Robin D. G. Kelley. Similarly, Hanchard's capacity to range across so many spatial dimensions of black political thought sometimes comes at the cost of specifying how these dimensions are related to one another. The book opens with a fascinating meditation on the dual meaning of “party”—as festivity and discipline—in the context of Afro-Brazilian politics; and it could do more to trace the ways that that notion of political party, as well as other political ideas and cultural practices, circulates within the African diaspora. Finally, a follow-up volume would allow Hanchard to develop the conception of “political community” upon which much of the argument depends.

To say that Party/Politics leaves questions unanswered is not, however, to diminish its achievement. Perhaps the book's most significant contribution resides in the demand that political theorists—and, indeed, all students of politics—learn to ask more adequate questions about the character of black political experience, as well as in the guidance Hanchard provides in indicating what some of those questions should be. Attending to “the sources of political imagination” among people of African descent across the globe, the book lays out a necessary and ambitious research agenda. It offers an eloquent counter-argument against entrenched conceptual frames and habits of thought that push slavery, colonialism, and their legacies to the margins. And it testifies powerfully that theorists who are serious about the constitution of more democratic futures need to look to the horizons of black political thought and practice today.