Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State

Congo Love Song is the product of wide-ranging remarkable scholarship and original interpretation that address the international engagements of African Americans in new and thought-provoking ways.--Brenda Gayle Plummer, The Black Scholar

The book's primary concern is to trace multiple routes of political engagement by African Americans . . . as being central to the making of modern black political culture. It meets this aim admirably.--Choice

One of the most thoughtfully researched and deeply thoughtful analyses of African American interaction with the Congo.--The International Review of African American Art

An enormously important book . . . . An important contribution to a body of work that is already changing the way we do history.--American Historical Review

Ira Dworkin's meticulously researched Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State thoroughly and insightfully addresses the often decontextualized links between the Congo and US history generally and African American political, religious, literary, and visual cultures specifically from the 1880s through the 1960s.--MELUS

A lively read, paced by clear writing and peppered with nearly forty photographs, illustrations, and plates of artwork. Lay readers who enjoyed popular works like Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost or Neal Ascherson's The King Incorporated, will find this a much more academic approach to the Congo, but one just as digestible. . . . A valuable contribution to the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture from UNC Press.--Journal of African American History