Plummer, Brenda Gayle. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Summary
Plummer’s In Search of Power examines how states, elites, and dissidents--from presidents in oval offices to nationalists on Harlem streets--faced the challenges of the late twentieth century. “Those wishing to preserve the postwar liberal order with the United States as the center of the solar system,” she argues, “shared a focus with those who looked to the revolutions in Asia and Africa for the key to global emancipation. All embraced the nation-state as the measure of progress and search for power within its frameworks of possibility” (p. 19). The period in which she examines cannot be understood “simply as a matter of insurgents against the state who managed to have parts of their agenda incorporated,” but, instead, political actors from a range of nations, classes, and ethnicities that joined to “in the search to define, extend, defend, and legitimate their respective claims to power and author.” (8) (*Think Tzu-Chun) “Power resides in the state, but not exclusively, and the state itself is as much an arena of struggle over power as a stakeholder itself.” In other words, the state does employ power, but so too does local governments, teachers, workers, celebrities, revolutionaries, etc. Thus, this book attempts to move away from the nation-state periodization and reframes the civil rights/black power period as the “era of decolonization.” While policy makers upheld the goal of independence for the global south, the broader critiques of Western powers, led by the Left that attempted to link the worldwide radical movements, were disallowed or deemed subversive of world order.