Afro-orientalism

Rating:
Summary: critical theory to American ethnic groups
Review: Afro-Orientalism by Bill V. Mullen (University of Minnesota Press) Chapter 1 of Afro-Orientalism retells the evolution of the political and cultural thought of W. E. B. Du Bois through examination of his life-long body of work on Asia. Du Bois viewed the relationship between the modern and ancient worlds of Asia and Africa as a dialectical site of struggle for the future of the races of men. It was also the testing ground for most of his internal struggles with concepts of culture, nationalism, racial authenticity, and, toward the end of his life, Marxism. The evolution of Du Bois's ideas regarding Africa and its role in the Western world is also incomprehensible, this chapter argues, without careful attention to his analysis of Asia as its fraternal twin in global struggle. Particularly in his 1928 novel Dark Princess, long out of print but now rightfully restored to prominence by the University Press of Mississippi, Du Bois provided a map of Afro-Asian relations predictive of much of the twentieth century that followed.
Chapter 2 examines in tandem Richard Wright's exiled writings on Asia and Africa. The chapter argues that Wright's fraught and shifting analyses of race, and Marxism, reflect his conception of himself as "Outsider," a figure transcending the entirety of his career but most clearly understandable in his writings on colonialism. This same figure can be described as a figure for the Orientalist. Wright's unresolved relation-ship to Western modernity and a Western epistemology superseded his early commitment to historical materialism. As he moved further from the citadel of Western empire, he was ironically drawn back to its telos and epistemology as a way to assess the non-Western world. This led Wright into essentialist judgments and hostile conceptions of both raceand historical materialism. It also eliminated the possibility of a dialectical resolution of themes in his writing. The chapter contends that Wright's exiled writings of the 1950s thus constitute a key chapter not only in his career but in the career of Afro-Asian thought and exchange, particularly on the question of colonialism.
Chapter 3 documents forms of political and cultural correspondence practiced among Afro-Asian radicals during the so-called Bandung era from 1955 to 1973. Black American radicals and cultural workers in Detroit constructed imaginative forms of solidarity with Third World struggles in Asian countries by forging internationalist links through intertextual strategies of exchange. A crucial conduit for this process was the fugitive NAACP organizer Robert F. Williams. During his exile to Cuba and China from 1961 to 1969, Williams became a literal and figurative correspondent for sympathetic internationalists in Asia and black America. Much of the cultural work produced under the Black Arts movement rubric in Detroit also found direct inspiration in Mao's famous Yenan Forum address on the arts, and more generally in the example of China's Cultural Revolution. This chapter will explore the strategy of transnational correspondence as a means of building a dialectical Afro-Asian exchange across continents, and redefining notions of East and West by rethinking the political geography of cities like Detroit.
Chapter 4 makes a careful examination of the evolution in political thought of the most significant Afro-Asian collaboration in U.S. radical history, the marriage of James and Grace Lee Boggs. Architects of and participants in some of the most vital grassroots political organizing of the twentieth century, the Boggses' work stands at the crossroads of important Marxist and anticolonial writings attempting to synthesize in particular the struggles of Afro-Asians as "people of color" and representatives of the world proletariat. Beginning with their work with the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, up through their serious study and use of Maoist theory during the Black Power movement, the Boggses consistently used a dialectical comprehension of race and class-and, to-ward the latter stages of their careers, gender-to fashion a fundamentally Marxian theory of liberation. Even in moments of contention and disavowal, their durable theory of "dialectical humanism" has remained faithful to the premises of Marx and Engels's assessment of colonialism and racism as the brute forces underpinning the exploitation of the majority of the world's citizens. This chapter will delineate the growth - and movement with Boggsism to bridge seminal moments of transformation in the century that comprises the story of Afro-Orientalism. It will also identify the independent trajectory of Grace's own body of thought after the death of her partner and comrade in 1993.
Chapter 5 will take up the work of the important Asian American jazz musician and composer Fred Ho. The creator and leader of the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble, and a veteran of both early Black Arts and Asian Pacific American movements, Ho has devised an Afro-Asian cultural politics based in what he describes as "new Afro-Asian multicultural music." Borrowing liberally from Marxist, anticolonialist, and feminist theory, Ho's work puts the props back in agitprop. His performances, operas, recordings, and martial arts ballets are dialectical revisions of signal moments in the intertwined history of African and Asian descendants. Each is revised to accord with a parallel or continuous stream of cultural and political struggle emerging from its twin tradition. Ho describes his own radical hybridity as guerrilla theater, or what I call trickster jazz. It summons up linguistic, musical, and political touchstones of subversion and liberation from Afro-Asian culture and deploys them in the service of a revolutionary vanguardism beyond the boundaries of mainstream taste and consumer culture. Ho is indeed liberal multiculturalism's worst nightmare: a serious class antagonist who refuses to re-lease the dream of a Third World internationalist aesthetic. As such he looks backward at the Afro-Asian century and forward into a future where Afro-Orientalism may yet do the work of changing the world.