By Corinna Lotz

Outside the door opening up to the Soul of a Nation exhibition at Tate Modern screens offer vintage news footage of Black leaders Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

These men and women - two of whom were assassinated - shaped the political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. The echo of their voices lends resonance to Nina Simone's call for artists to reflect their times.

In the wake of white supremacist brutality in Ferguson and Charlottesville, revisiting the Black power movement in America has gained a new urgency.

Soul of a Nation shows how artists were swept up in the struggle against the oppression of the institutionally racist US state. Through determined resistance, self-organisation, self-education and study of revolutionary theory, the movement and its artists asserted the possibility of a non-racist and revolutionary culture.

Support for Black power arose out of frustration with the pacifist orientation of the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. Leaders like Malcolm X called for justice "by any means necessary".

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in October 1966 to defend victims of police violence. The party championed Black self-determination. At the same time, its 10-point programme was distinctly anti-capitalist and socialist. It appealed to all oppressed and working class people to unite against the ruling classes and the state.

But the US state struck back. Under its chief, J Edgar Hoover, the FBI's counter intelligence programme (COINTELPRO) targeted Black Panther leaders. Police backed by FBI agents murdered Black Panther leaders around the country. Amongst the first to be killed in this way was the BPP's 21-year-old deputy chair, the talented and popular organiser, Fred Hampton. After being drugged by an FBI agent, Hampton was shot whilst asleep in his bed. It was an act of extreme brutality commemorated by artist Dana C Chandler in his reconstruction Fred Hampton's Door.

David Hammons' multi-media Injustice Case (1970) leaps out of the wall: shadowy body marks move around like ghostly x-rays on a white background, framed by the Stars and Stripes. Hammons used imprints of his own body on paper in this cry of anger against the treatment of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. Seale was bound and gagged by the trial judge when he was accused of conspiracy after anti-war demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Emory Douglas became the Panthers' Minister of Culture designing a remarkable series of propaganda posters and back covers for The Black Panther newspaper. Large-scale outdoor murals gave artists a chance to reach out to large numbers of people. The famous Wall of Respect, which 14 artists painted on a derelict building in Chicago's South Side in 1967, commemorated Black heroes and heroines including Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin and Martin Luther King. It was part of a nation-wide mural movement.

Black and Asian photographers made a special contribution. They celebrated the streets and inhabitants of Harlem as well as engaging in more abstract and lyrical subjects - musicians and singers in performance, still lives and nudes. Just waiting to be re-discovered is a 1955 photo book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life. It is a miniature gem of a story by Langston Hughes accompanied by Roy DeCarava's photographs.

Controversies arose about whether Black art had to be figurative or openly propagandist or whether the artist could work in an abstract idiom. Some like Jack Whitten used abstraction to pay homage to Malcolm X and African American history. British-Guyanese painter, Frank Bowling, took part in these debates. His magisterial Middle Passage features in the second to last space. A superb display of his work is currently at Munich's Haus der Kunst .

The last space at Tate Modern takes on a new spirit of joy in the inventiveness of Lorraine Grady who involved hundreds of people on a parade celebrating Harlem's African American Day Parade.

This is a knock-out show. Go and see it.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power will be on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas at the beginning of 2018 and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York from September 18, 2018.

This article was originally published at the Real Democracy Movement

By Deepa Kumar

In a recent CNN interview, religion scholar Reza Aslan was asked by journalist Alisyn Camerota if Islam is violent given the "primitive treatment in Muslim countries of women and other minorities." Aslan responded by stating that the conditions for women in Muslim majority countries vary. While women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere in various Muslim majority countries, women have been elected heads of states 7 times. But, before he could finish his sentence pointing out that the US is yet to elect a woman as president, he was interrupted by co-host Don Lemon who declared: "Be honest though, Reza, for the most part it is not a free and open society for women in those states."

How is it that people like Camerota and Lemon, who very likely have never travelled to "free and open" Turkey, Lebanon or Bangladesh, or read the scholarship on women's rights struggles in Morocco, Iran and Egypt, seem to know with complete certainty that women are treated "primitively" in "Muslim countries"? On what basis does Lemon believe that he has the authority to call Aslan out for supposed dishonesty? How is it that with little or no empirical evidence on women's rights in Muslim majority countries (which vary widely based on country, regions within a country, social class, the history and nature of national liberation movements, the part played by Islam in political movements etc.) Western commentators routinely make such proclamations about women and Islam?

The answer lies in a ubiquitous, taken-for-granted ideological framework that has been developed over two centuries in the West. This framework, referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, is based on the appropriation of women's rights in the service of empire. Birthed in the nineteenth century in the context of European colonialism, it rests on the construction of a barbaric, misogynistic "Muslim world" that must be civilized by a liberal, enlightened West; a rhetoric also known as gendered Orientalism.

Colonial/imperialist feminism has taken new and old forms in the US. The immediate context for a resurgence of imperialist feminism in the US is the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Borrowing a trope from Britain in India and Egypt, and France in Algeria, the US argued that it was going to liberate Afghan women. Liberals and feminists in the US, going against the wishes of Afghan feminist organizations such as RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) who opposed US intervention, linked arms with the Bush administration and supported the Afghan war.

In the Obama era, liberalism became even more intertwined with empire. Despite mountains of evidence to show that the US/NATO occupation had done little for women's rights, Amnesty-USA conducted a campaign in support of the continued occupation of Afghanistan. In 2012, ads appeared in public places of Afghan women in burqas with the caption: "Nato: Keep the Progress Going!" Amnesty further organized a summit that rearticulated through the voices of powerful women, such as Madeline Albright, imperialist feminist justifications for war.

What explains this tendency among liberals to take positions that go against the interests of Muslim women and women of color? While there are numerous factors, two are worth noting-racism and empire.

As several Third World Feminists have argued, a historical weakness of liberal feminism in the West has been its racist, patronizing attitude towards women of color who have been seen less as allies/agents and more as victims in need of rescue. This attitude prevails both in relation to women of color within Western nation states, as well as women in the global South. This is what allows figures such as Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton to be viewed as feminist saviors even while both, in their roles as Secretary of State, have advanced US imperialism. It is liberalisms understanding of the state as a neutral body, rather than as a coercive apparatus used to advance capitalism and empire, which is at the root of such perspectives.

In the cultural sphere, TV shows such as Homeland reproduce imperialist feminism not only through its plot line and female lead character (Carrie Mathison), but also through its ad campaigns. In the lead up to Season 4, the publicity campaign featured Mathison "far from home" fighting the righteous war. Mathison's red hood, blue gown and white face stand in for the American nation against a sea of Eastern darkness. Her unique clothing and her active posture mark her as the embodiment of liberal individualism in contrast to the passive, indistinguishable Muslim women in black. The larger narrative is the construction of "us" as a society that values women and their agency, and of them as misogynistic in a classic reproduction of the "clash of civilizations" colonial argument.

Yet, imperialist feminism has not been the province only of white elites in the West; comprador intellectuals in the global South have always played a productive role. Today, in the "post-racial" era, it is not only white liberals and feminists that have bolstered imperialist feminism, middle and ruling class brown and black women in the West and the global South have actively contributed to the articulation of new forms and new agents of imperialist feminism.

One recent example of how imperialist feminism can occasionally incorporate Muslim female agency is the widespread media attention in the West focused on the UAE female pilot Maryam al-Mansouri. Widely praised by liberals and conservatives in the US (not withstanding the "boobs on the ground" comment), al-Mansouri became a means by which to paper over the gulf monarchies' atrocious human rights record. Even while the image of a Muslim female pilot served to disrupt the standard victim imagery, the larger narrative was one which cast the US as savior leading a coalition of "good Muslims" in a righteous war against ISIS. In place of T. E. Lawrence, we have Barack Obama.

Liberal feminism has routinely viewed women's participation in the military as positive. In 1991, after the first Gulf war, feminist Naomi Wolf praised US female soldiers for eliciting "respect and even fear" and for taking the struggle for women's rights forward. What she failed to discuss is the over 200,000 Iraqis, men, women and children, who were killed in that war. US women cannot achieve their liberation on the bodies of the victims of empire any more than Arab women can by raining bombs on Syrians. Empire does not liberate, it subjugates.

Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers University (New Jersey). She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike.

This article was originally published at Open Democracy