Page 27 - BCALA Summer 2018

Book Review: “Set the World on Fire” by Keisha Blain, PhD
By Nicholas Grant, reprinted in accordance with Creative Commons permissions
(Editor’s note: The original post is linked here: https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/ reviews/2368386/grant-blain-set-world-fire-Black-Nationalist -women-and-global)
BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 3 | 27
Set the World on Fire
Author: Keisha Blain, PhD Pages: 264
ISBN 13: 978-0812249880
In 1937, the Black Nationalist activist Celia Jane Allen packed her bags and headed from Chicago to Mississippi. Working for the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), she traveled against the tide of the Great Migration with the specific aim of promoting Black emigration to West Africa. Allen addressed Black audiences throughout Mississippi, disseminating letters
and articles from PME founder Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, establishing new local chapters, and even collaborating with prominent white supremacist senator Theodore Bilbo. Over six years, she risked her life to promote the Black Nationalist values of race pride, political self-determination, and economic independence in the Jim Crow South. Insisting that Black men and women had no future in the United States, she noted that during this chapter of her life, “I tried very hard to make my people see that our time is winding up in the Western World” (p. 91).
Allen is just one of several absorbing and multidimensional figures that Keisha N. Blain explores in her
new book “Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the
Global Struggle for Freedom”. In a remarkable act of historical recovery, Blain expertly traces the vital role women played in shaping Black Nationalist politics between the 1920s and 1960s. Challenging historical narratives that often emphasize
the decline of Black Nationalism following the deportation of Marcus Garvey from the United States, she demonstrates how a diverse group
of Black women—operating in the US, the Caribbean, and Europe— worked to keep this political vision alive. Always attuned to the gender dynamics that shaped their politics, Blain has produced a landmark study that challenges us to think more deeply about Black Nationalism
both as a political ideology and transnational activist program in the twentieth century.
“Set the World on Fire” is centered on a broad cast of historical actors, many of whom have been neglected by scholars and largely forgotten in popular memory. Expertly weaving together personal narratives with local, national, and global histories, Blain primarily focuses on Amy Ashwood Garvey, Amy Jacques