I can’t wait for my colleague’s new book, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary, to be published this February. In this important work, Professor Alex Lubin, the director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut, explores the historical connections between African American activists and political groups in the Middle East–within the context of how these groups “imagined” liberation for themselves and one another.
In this absorbing transnational history, Alex Lubin reveals the vital connections between African American political thought and the people and nations of the Middle East. Spanning the 1850s through the present, and set against a backdrop of major political and cultural shifts around the world, the book demonstrates how international geopolitics, including the ascendance of liberal internationalism, established the conditions within which blacks imagined their freedom and, conversely, the ways in which various Middle Eastern groups have understood and used the African American freedom struggle to shape their own political movements.
