Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin (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 1880 s through the 1960s. Belgium's King Leopold II began to form a colony in Central Africa in the late 1870 s, and it received legitimacy at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, in part because a few months earlier the increasingly white-supremacist United States became the first nation to support Leopold's claim to the Congo. Summing up his project, Dworkin asserts that black American connections to Africa "have included, at their core, modern political engagement, … which was routinely routed through the Congo as a uniquely visible and troubling site of imperial crisis, [shaping] African American culture throughout the colonial era" (2).

The introduction parses the influences on and the ideological work done by James Weldon Johnson's immensely popular "Congo Love Song" (1903), contending that when the musical number is "[r]ead in the context of colonialism, Johnson emerges less as a foil for Malcom X's political engagement than as his intellectual fellow traveler" (3). Dworkin's title also refers to the deep commitments to the Congo and its people made by African Americans who lived or visited there, as well as to the sentiments of many who, while remaining in the Western Hemisphere, gained knowledge of that part of Africa through the accounts of US black missionaries and other means and media. Dworkin calls for the Congo to be recognized as "a charged political site and not a generic marker" for all of Africa (4), declares that "an appreciation for African American discourse about the continent must maintain a historical grounding in particular locales" such as the Congo (12), pays "careful attention to the internationalism at the heart of African American culture" (14), and strives "to excavate the 'productive political context' of the Congo as a visible site of American and African American engagement and counterengagement, that locates colonialism, in all its political minutiae, at the heart of American culture" (15).

Devoted to the pivotal late nineteenth-century connections between historically black US colleges and the Congo, part 1 comprises excellent and well-coordinated chapters on the historian George Washington Williams (who first exposed the depredations of the Congo Free State), the missionary William Henry Sheppard (whose eyewitness account of severed hands focused international attention on Leopold's regime), and the educator Booker T. Washington (who as a youth idealistically dreamed of being a missionary in Africa). Initially enthusiastic about Leopold's efforts in the Congo, Williams and Sheppard changed their minds based on their personal experiences in the colony and informed the world about the regime's atrocities (although they rarely received credit for exposing them). Once he had become a national race leader, Washington, who never visited Africa, pragmatically insisted that interactions between his Tuskegee Institute and the Congo reflect positively on the school.

More diffuse than part 1 but further establishing the strategic role of black colleges and significantly enhancing the diversity of the monograph, part 2 concerns early twentieth-century African American perceptions of and engagements with the Congo influenced by Sheppard's American Presbyterian Congo Mission. It features chapters devoted to the Fisk-educated missionary Althea Brown Edmiston (who produced a grammar of the Bukuba language), the author and pioneering Colored American Magazine editor Pauline Hopkins (who conflates classical Ethiopia, modern Ethiopia, and the Congo in her 1902-03 serial novel Of One Blood), and several US black visual artists (many of whom were inspired by Sheppard's collection of Congolese art, particularly textiles, at Hampton Institute).

The final section examines politically engaged responses to the Congo from the 1920s through the 1960s. It begins with a crackerjack reading of "The Negro Speaks of...