Publishers Weekly
★ 11/22/2021
Legal scholar Allan frames this incisive discussion of “the ongoing and often bloody battle to fully incorporate black Americans into the citizenry of the United States” around the history the 1807 Insurrection Act. Noting that there is “no record of any congressional debate on Congress’s intent in introducing and passing the law,” Allan recounts cases when it has been invoked, or nearly invoked, by president to deploy federal troops to suppress civil unrest, including Franklin Pierce’s 1856 response to violent clashes between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas, John F. Kennedy’s 1963 deployment of the National Guard to enforce the court-ordered desegregation of Alabama’s public schools, and George W. Bush’s political decision not to invoke the act in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In every case, Allan finds that the “insurrections” the government sought to quell had their roots in the struggle for racial equality. Allan weaves the perspectives of W.E.B. Du Bois, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other key thinkers on racial justice issues with her own experiences, such as learning from her parents that some of their white neighbors on Long Island had conspired to expel Black families from the community. Eloquently mixing history, autobiography, and philosophy, this powerful account sheds new light on the Black experience in America. (Jan.)
Patricia J. Williams author of Giving a Damn
"‘All of history is happening right now,’ observes Hawa Allan in this beautifully written history of the complex, paradoxical role of the Insurrection Act in American life. Allan’s profoundly moving book exposes the emotional underbelly of slavery’s traumatic legacy on both enslavers and enslaved, and on all the generations since. The affective echo of that moral crisis remains entangled in today’s most urgent conflagrations. In a moment as deeply divided as ours, Allan’s book offers principled and reflective pause."
Adrian Piper
"Hawa Allan speaks with the cool, clear, analytical rigor of the highly trained legal scholar, the detached bemusement of the social anthropologist who declines to go native, the eloquence of the poet, and the sublimated autobiographical anger of the unwilling recipient of this country’s doggedly persistent attempts to deny the rights of full and equal citizenship to Americans of acknowledged African descent. Her prose is mesmerizing; her voice is fresh, original, and completely unique. Insurrection is a profound historical meditation on the American pathology, the brilliant debut of a major thinker on the American intellectual scene."
author of?Escape to Berlin Adrian?Piper
"Hawa?Allan speaks with the cool, clear, analytical rigor of the highly trained legal scholar, the detached bemusement of the social anthropologist who declines to go native, the eloquence of the poet, and the sublimated autobiographical anger of the unwilling recipient of this country’s doggedly persistent attempts to deny the rights of full and equal citizenship to Americans of acknowledged African descent. Her prose is mesmerizing; her voice is fresh, original and completely unique.?Insurrection?is a profound historical meditation on the American pathology, the brilliant debut of a major thinker on the American intellectual scene."
Library Journal
12/01/2021
In her first book, lawyer and cultural critic Allan (lecturer, the New School; editor of The Offing magazine) offers a meditative history of the U.S. Insurrection Act of 1807, which she argues was born out of white fears of enslaved people rising up to massacre their captors. The Insurrection Act places federal troops at the disposal of state governments to quell civil disturbances and reestablish order. According to Allan, what was often called an "insurrection" represented a continuous and often bloody battle to fully incorporate Black Americans into the citizenry of the United States. The paradox in the title is that presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act in ways that help and hurt Black people. Dwight Eisenhower forcibly desegregated Southern schools and universities while Lyndon B. Johnson and others used the ct to end civil disturbances in the wake of police violence and after natural disasters which overwhelmingly affected Black people. Throughout, Allan's personal reflections and experiences add a depth and immediacy to the narrative that highlights the continued struggles of Black Americans to obtain and enjoy the rights of full citizenship many take for granted. VERDICT Allan's prose seamlessly draws the personal and historical together in a book that general readers of U.S. history will find interesting and thought-provoking.—Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH
Kirkus Reviews
2021-10-20
How presidential invocations of the Insurrection Act of 1807 have reflected the contested status of African American civil rights.
As cultural critic and attorney Allan explains, the act authorizes the deployment of military and federal forces against its own citizens but leaves it up to the executive to determine what counts as an insurrection. This openness means that invocations of the act become touchstones for the fears and priorities not just of particular presidents, but of the culture’s various competing factions during specific historical moments. A pattern of alternating, antithetical motivations, Allan makes clear, can be discerned in a long-term view of the roughly two dozen instances in which the act has been invoked: either a desire to restrict African American civil rights by stifling protests against slavery or other racial injustices or to enforce those rights against the indifference or resistance of local authorities. What we ultimately witness in studying the act, she provocatively but convincingly argues, is an “ongoing and often bloody battle to fully incorporate Black Americans into the citizenry of the United States—a struggle which…appears more like an open-ended civil war than a history of ‘progress.’ ” Though Allan sometimes strains to provide broad philosophical commentary on the existential topics she discusses and in framing historical events with personal responses to contemporary flashpoints, her explication of the act’s use and sociohistorical significance is consistently incisive and illuminating. Particularly effective are the author’s explorations of John F. Kennedy’s two invocations of the act in his attempts to desegregate schools as well as the striking genealogy set forth in tracing legal and social expressions of White supremacy from the antebellum era to the Trump era. Though he “did not invoke the Act,” writes Allan, “his administration did devise a means of federal intervention in the protests against police brutality in Portland, Oregon.”
An insightful, cogent consideration of the history and persistence of conflicts over racial equality in America.
