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.