Congo Love Song

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).

Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Ideology · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · White (mutation) · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society