The Other Side of Terror

Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers University. She is author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012), which received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and co-editor of Keywords for African American Literature (2018).

"Brilliantly maps the transformations in black women's expressive culture in response to COINTELPRO, the war on drugs, and the long war on terror. A necessary, timely history of state power and black feminist radicalism, The Other Side of Terror is, at once, a critique of empire and its myriad violence, a refusal of servitude, and a poetics of dissent. As Edwards demonstrates persuasively and eloquently: radical black feminist thought is indispensable to our collective effort to survive." (Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals) "In this highly informed and deeply researched interrogation of the global security state after 9/11, Erica Edwards asks us to read black women and black women's expressive culture as both resistant to and complicit in American global power. To expose and critique the American security regime and the cultures of imperialism, Edwards turns to a tradition of black feminist radicalism and the insurgent texts of black feminists such as Alice Randall, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, and Nikki Finney. This is a brave and unsettling book, one that makes us think about black women not as fringe actors or minority figures, but as major players in the global arena." (Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s) "Erica R. Edwards presents a powerful analysis connecting politics and literature...This is a brilliant book that is likely to produce endless new insights." (Ethnic and Racial Studies) "The book is an outstanding example of Black feminist historiography rooted in an interdisciplinary approach. Edwards, a literary historian, is in conversation with a variety of scholars and draws from a wide range of archives...[Her] deep and impressive knowledge of both large-scale and personal histories and use of this variety of sources shows the reader how to be a cultural historian." (Journal of African American History)