Christopher Tounsel. Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan and the Politics of Solidarity. Cornell University Press, 2024. 238 pp. $45.95. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781501775628.

Scholarship on Black internationalism that emphasizes Black American engagements with Africa has traditionally centered on Ghana, Liberia, South Africa, and Tanzania but has rarely engaged Sudan.Yet, Sudan looms large in the historical imagination of African Americans, especially through Afrocentric views that trace Black origins to Nile Valley civilizations.Although Sudan gained independence on January 1, 1956, Ghana's independence more than a year later, on March 6, 1957, is erroneously cited as the first in sub-Saharan Africa; and has since become the focal point of African American diaspora.Tounsel therefore investigates why African Americans may have been drawn to one African nation in a way that did not extend to another (3).To answer this question, Tounsel examines African American engagements with Sudan from the early twentieth century through the twenty-first century, using African American newspapers, personal diaries, memoirs, and official government and diplomatic records.Bounds of Blackness argues that Black Americans engaged Sudan through literary, cultural, and diplomatic channels, thereby shaping narratives of independence in both Sudan and South Sudan.It examines how Sudan figured in African American conceptions of racial pride and diasporic belonging (5).African American opinion on Sudan was not uniform.Tounsel's longue dure approach allows him to trace the changes in racial solidarity over time.Three main forces shaped African American views of Sudan: British and Egyptian colonialism; Sudan's Arab heritage and claims of Arab dominance over indigenous Black populations; and, finally, US foreign policy.The book unfolds in six chapters.Chapter One examines how graduates from Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute contributed to British Sudan's agricultural (cotton) scheme in the early twentieth century.Their migration was framed as racial uplift, but also an opportunity for African Americans of a certain class to display their cultural and masculine superiority.Tounsel situates this migration alongside Tuskegee Institute's collaboration with European colonial enterprises in other parts of Africa.Chapter Two draws primarily on African American newspapers to examine discourses on Sudan from the early 1920s to independence in 1956.Here, Tounsel shows the dichotomy in racial politics: writers recognized Sudan's Blackness under British-Egyptian rule but cautioned against the Arab makeup of the north and how Arabs allegedly dominated indigenous Blacks of the south.While African Americans celebrated Egypt as evidence of ancient Black achievement, they were equally alarmed that Egyptian (Arab) control of Sudan threatened the freedoms of Black Southerners.Thus, Black American critique of colonialism in Africa