Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race by Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman (review)
slavery, and racial intolerance—all part of a legacy of Anglo-Saxon civilization that the story critiques. The Empire Abroad offers important insights into the diversity and abundance of African American responses to US expansion and demonstrates that questions of empire and race should be an integral part of studies of US black literature and culture. However, perhaps because of the ambitious scope of the book, some of the complexities of African Americans' relationship to and imagining of US imperial expansion are at times glossed over. For example, for those African American writers who saw or imagined links between blacks in the US and Cubans, Filipinos, and other colonized peoples, how did they negotiate the US's involvement in Cuba when the US became the supposedly anticolonial liberator and ally of another colonized group (Cubans), while Jim Crow was being enforced in the US? Gruesser also concludes that most of the ambivalent or celebratory depictions of US expansion stem from an attempt to portray black soldiers positively, and that critiques of domestic race relations, rather than empire, thus become the main focus of texts that include black soldiers. But what are the implications for a text in which black soldiers are depicted as agents of empire—both colonizer and colonized? Rather than skirting the issue of empire, these texts seem to be indeed engaging empire in very intricate ways that Gruesser does not clearly spell out. A clearer articulation of the ambivalences of such a portrayal, as well as a more nuanced analysis of the layers of both subjugation and empowerment in the texts, would both add depth to Gruesser's argument and acknowledge the richness of this literature. Overall, The Empire Abroad leaves room for future research, but it does so in part because it is one of the first books to open up a much-needed conversation on this topic.