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Long out of print and ignored by all but a handful of scholars, David Graham Du Bois’s 1975 novel ...And Bid Him Sing compels its readers to conceptualize black liberation outside discursive—temporal and spatial—frameworks that have traditionally defined our understanding of the era. Specifically, the text challenges the dominant history of the 1960s that defines Civil Rights, as Jeanne Theoharis phrases it, as “a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s but then was derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it sought to move North after 1965” (2). Instead, ...And Bid Him Sing demands that the reader connects the period at the heart of the novel, namely the 1960s, to the moment of the novel’s publication, the post-Civil Rights 1970s. In addition, however, the novel’s spatial focus on Egypt and its emergence within the context of Black Power struggles in the Bay Area during the mid-1970s also poses a challenge to the reduction of black freedom struggles to the Jim Crow South—supplementing instead the Jim Crow West and the specter of a global Jim Crow. As such, the novel is centered on the lives of a broad range of black (and mostly male) African American expats in 1960s Cairo, who, to varying degrees, connect freedom struggles at home to decolonizing movements in Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, however, and this aspect of the novel has been ignored even by the select group of scholars who have studied the novel, ...And Bid Him Sing carries an important message for the black liberation struggle of the 1970s, especially within the context of the reorganization of the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party, for which David Graham Du Bois worked as spokesperson and editor from 1973 to 1977. Reissued, following its initial publication as a book, in serial form within the party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, David Graham Du Bois’s narrative, which is ostensibly about 1964 Cairo, confronts rank-and-file party members with a stark choice between cross-cultural community building and guerilla-style warfare.
A central scene at the heart of the novel, at a jazz and poetry event at Cairo’s Beaux Arts Club, illustrates the revolutionary potential of the pan-African, Afro-Arab,...