"The monograph adds a European perspective to American Black Studies and sheds light on how women engage with nationalist ideologies by embracing, adapting or disputing them. It analyses narratives and artifacts in which female artists manipulate/revise images of women, ethnic and national heritage, and historical myths to re-construct collective identities of their ethnic groups and/or nations in a way that privileges feminist viewpoints. The monograph expands the Black Atlantic research by introducing a new methodological framework from nation-and-gender studies, which highlights the role of women in the maintenance or reconstruction of national identity in nations and diasporas. This project is also the first to offer a comparative perspective on BWR and BAM feminist discourses on gender and nation in the 1980s. The research results have proven that the African American and Black British feminist writing and art in the 1980s realized different politico-cultural agendas. While the BWR agenda, shaped by the black cultural nationalism of the previous decades, was often ethnocentric and separatist, the BAM agenda was more concerned with the place of black people within the British nation, and it understood blackness and femaleness in a much more inclusive sense.
The monograph also argues that the nationalist surge in the 1980s' black feminist fiction in the United States reflected another much larger transition in American politics of the conservative era, a “shift from redistribution to recognition” (Nancy Frazer, ""Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation” 2005). According to Frazer, at the end of the 20th century, feminism in the United States, in general, was no longer interested in the problems of class distribution, and, instead, became preoccupied with culture. In effect “whereas the previous generation [of feminists] pursued an expanded ideal of social equality, this one [in the 1980s and 90s] invested the bulk of its energies in cultural change” (Frazer ). The new emphasis on the politics of recognition, whose aim was to acknowledge and appreciate previously devalued cultures, which was so prominent in the writings of BWR, coincided with the rolling back of the frontiers of the welfare state under the pressure from global neoliberalism. Therefore, the monograph contends that BWR fin-de-siècle culturalism was a “regressive” politics that played into the hands of the neo-liberal establishment in the United States. This “strategic essentialism,” to use Paul Gilroy's expression, had the positive effect of building black self-esteem, consolidating imagined communities and mobilizing black people to resist the fallacy of post-racial and colour-blind America. On the other hand, however, it inadvertently helped, in the words of Nacy Frazer, to “subordinate social struggles to cultural struggles, [and] the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition.” The most important societal implication of the project is that the future of feminism lies in combining the goals of redistribution and recognition and forging trans-national and cross-cultural alliances that challenge the racially, nationally and ethnically segregated terrain of neo-liberal societies. The project has shown that this agenda has been partially realized by Black British artists and feminists."
