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This chapter analyzes the poetry and prose of Assata: An Autobiography and contextualizes the memoir within the revolutionary aesthetics Black Power vernacular and the political realities of northern Blue Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It examines the feminized rhetorical strategies in Assata that help to circulate Black Power activism. Like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Shakur situates herself as a leader and as a martyr using nostalgia for Black Power leaders as inspiration for the activism ahead. She uses black history as a rhetorical resource for new political action and highlights the importance of cultural nationalism. In addition, she commits herself to self-defense and Third World solidarity through a gendered articulation of the Black Power vernacular. Shakur’s vernacular is mobile, flexible, and global as she uses the history of slavery in the U.S. and colonialism abroad to explain the BLA’s resistance to “law and order” culture. Finally, she explains the historical and contemporary exigencies that prompt continued action, including police brutality, the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, judicial corruption, and false accusations of cop killing. Still in print, Assata demands a place for Shakur’s narrative among the prison manifestos of the Black Power movement.

Chapter Five examines Cuba’s provision of formal political asylum to political dissidents from the United States. Focusing on black radical activists such as Robert F. Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, Assata Shakur, Nehanda Abiodun, William Lee Brent, Charlie Hill, and Huey Newton, and organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika, the chapter explores the role that political exile and asylum has played within the larger relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the African American freedom struggle, and the impact of this engagement upon U.S.-Cuba relations amid the Cold War and the War on Terror. While some U.S. black activists looked to the Cuban Revolution as a hemispheric beacon of hope, Cuba in turn looked to U.S. black activists as allies in its geopolitical struggle with Washington, viewing the African American freedom struggle as its best hope for a radical ally in its northern neighbor.

Defense attorney Paul Magnarella describes American law enforcement’s attempt to bribe Pete O’Neal to arrange for the arrest of fugitive Assata Shakur, who enjoyed refuge from U.S. authorities in Cuba. Magnarella informed O’Neal of the bribe offer, which included money and a possible reduction of O’Neal’s four-year sentence. O’Neal emphatically rejected the offer.

I engage the pan-Africanist drama of Lorraine Hansberry to talk about questions of scale, leadership, internationalism, and gender in her work. I pay attention to her play Les Blancs as it relates to the formulation of “the reluctant warrior” à la Assata Shakur as well as how Hansberry’s Haitian Revolution opera relates to world systems theory.