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This article explores the relationship between security, identity and loyalty. Focusing on the formative texts and practices underpinning the rise of the national security state in America, while alluding to more recent developments, the article claims that security and identity are inextricably linked, not just in the obvious existential ways, but also in a far more political way: that the fabrication of national security goes hand in hand with the fabrication of national identity, and vice versa. Extending well beyond the question of patriotism as a security trope, this ‘identity’ permeates the worlds of sexuality and domesticity. To make this case the article pinpoints loyalty as a key political technology for simultaneously gauging identity and reaffirming security, thereby unearthing what might be called a security-identity-loyalty complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Million Man March in the wider context of black nationalism, a persistent, though inconsistent, factor in African American life, enjoying wider currency at some historical junctures than others. Those periods when black nationalism resonated strongly among African Americans are called black nationalist moments, four of which are identified here. The Million Man March, with its heavy inflection of patriarchy and black capitalism, is seen as the iconic event of the fourth moment. The subsequent Million Woman March is pivoted as a more radical and activist rejoinder to the Million Man March, a response continued by the even more recent Black Radical Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]