▪ Abstract Apocalypticism and millennialism are the dark and light sides of a historical sensibility transfixed by the possibility of imminent catastrophe, cosmic redemption, spiritual transformation, and a new world order. This essay briefly surveys work by anthropologists and like-minded scholars that focuses directly on endtime movements. It then reviews at more length a varied literature focusing on American apocalypticisms and millennialisms. Turning to contemporary America, we survey the ways in which an apocalyptic/millennial sensibility—as a mode of attention, mode of knowing, and voice—has come to inhabit and structure modern American life across a wide range of registers.

Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis

This dissertation examines African-American Islamic culture from 1920 through 1959, a period I label the “African-American Islami c Renaissance” (AAIR). The AAIR is characterized by a significant increase in interest in Islam, extreme diversity in views about Islam, and the absence of a single organizati on dominating African-American Islamic culture for a significant amount of time. P revious works dealing with AfricanAmerican Islam in this period have failed to fully recognize these features, particularly the last of these. As a result, explanations for th e rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI) have not satisfactorily explained why it was only the NO I—and not other Islamic groups that were more popular than the NOI up until the mid-195 0s—that became a “mass movement,” gaining the allegiance of tens of thousa nd of African Americans. There has been some tendency, for instance, to assume that th e NOI was the most popular AfricanAmerican Islamic group by the early 1950s, a notion hat is probably an inference drawn from two other popular but inaccurate assumptions: that the NOI’s rise was due primarily to its radical racialized doctrines and its charism atic leaders, particularly Malcolm X, who became a popular minister for the group in the earl y 1950s. I argue, however, that the NOI was in fact not the most popular African-Americ an Islamic group until at least 1955, and even as late as 1959 its official membership nu mbers were not particularly large by AAIR standards. Also, its doctrines were not especi ally unique in the AAIR, nor was its having extremely charismatic leaders. I contend tha t the success of the NOI in the mid-toiii late 1950s was the result of three levels of change s at the time: internal, external in the AAIR community, and external in the broader U.S, cu lture.

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The African-American Islamic Renaissance and the Rise of the Nation of Islam

This article explores the political ideas and activism of Pearl Sherrod, an African American woman who became a leader of The Development of Our Own, a Detroit-based antiracist political movement that sought to unite African Americans with people of color in Asia during the Great Depression. This article demonstrates how Sherrod articulated “black internationalist feminism” by maintaining a commitment to building transnational and transracial political alliances while advancing a feminist agenda. By excavating Sherrod’s life, this article highlights the key role a nonstate female actor played in shaping black internationalist movements during a global economic crisis and within a climate of government repression and censorship.

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“[F]or the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World”: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s

Since whiteness is a mark of degeneracy in many animals near the pole, the negro has as much right to term his savage robbers albinos and white devils, degenerated through the weakness of nature, as we have to deem him the emblem of evil, and a descendant of Ham, branded by his father's curse. I, might he say, I, the black, am the original man. I have taken the deepest draughts from the source of life, the Sun: on me, and on everything around me, it has acted with the greatest energy and vivacity . Johann Gottfried Herder, 1784

Hatim A. Sahib

Papers

The Nation of Islam