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What are the moral economies of the African-American consumption behaviors? What are the moral economies of the narratives of freedom that center on the imperial impulses of domination rather than on the struggles of the enslaved and free blacks for their own liberation? What are the moral economies of the Black Atlantic identities and cultural expressions? What are the moral economies of the dominance of the U.S. race politics in the Western Hemisphere? In this wide-ranging book, Paul Gilroy addresses these questions in twists and turns to primarily illustrate how deeply embedded Black Atlantic Culture is in the morass of U.S. consumerism and Western imperialism while at the same time the Black subjectivities are increasingly becoming politically ineffective in the Western nation-state project. This book is, however, not about (re)theorizing the moral economies of the Black Atlantic culture, as one might expect from the notable cultural theorist author. The title, conjoined from Curtis Mayfield's great hit "We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue" and from an Anglo-American cultural history tradition—moral economy is surely a savvy marketing label that gives a modicum of coherence to three disparate chapters, each of which grew out of the Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures that Dr. Gilroy delivered about ten years before publication.

Chapter one is a critique of the African American consumer culture. Here, Gilroy observes that the consumption patterns of the African [End Page 409] Americans appear to have been part of the materialization strategy for claiming citizenship at the different turns of their historical experience, from the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction to the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. He offers illuminating insights to show that corporations branded and courted African Americans as bankable "consumers long before they acquired citizenship rights." And he implies that the appeal of the Negro market to the profitability of political integration was at the root of the support of the business class for the Civil Rights Movement. He zeroes in on what can be called the African-American fetishizing of railroad cars and private cars to underscore the janus-faced consumerism patterns in the African-American culture. These automobiles have been crucial to the African-American flight to freedom from the clutches of slavery and the Jim Crow South to the industrial north, as well as from the institutionally dysfunctional inner city to the suburbs. He argues, "the automobile supplies the best tool for all attempts to understand both their (African-Americans) behavior as consumers and their diminishing distance from citizenship." On this singular category of products, African Americans spend $39 billion, account for thirty percent of the automobile buying public, although they account for twelve percent of the U.S. population. The conflation of good citizenship with hyper-consumerism in the U.S.'s over-developed capitalism is what worries Gilroy. His cultural analysis of car consumption by the racialized citizens is revealing and sometimes brilliant. His psycho-historical speculation that the African Americans' love for automobiles resulted from what the later symbolically represent as instruments for fleeing their oppressive spaces is, however, wildly imaginative and conceptually playful, and it raises more sociological questions than Gilroy's postcolonial analysis can answer.

In chapter two, the author questions the accuracy of the normative imperial narrative of human rights, democracy, and freedom. He implies that this narrative is morally bankrupt because it displaces the Black Atlantic's fundamental contributions to the subject of racial equality, a topic that the Western imperial impulses and intellectual designs continue to either deny or cosmetically address. Whereas the hegemonic discourse of human rights places the origins of this consciousness in the 1948 UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of the Second World War, he argues that it is to the anti-colonial agents, anti-racists, and anti-segregationists that the genealogy of human rights must be traced. Fair enough. But Gilroy omits the seventeenth...