Afro Orientalism

Bill V. Mullen

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781452935355
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Reveals a century of political solidarity uniting Asians and African Americans

As early as 1914, in his pivotal essay “The World Problem of the Color Line,” W. E. B. Du Bois was charting a search for Afro-Asian solidarity and for an international anticolonialism. In Afro-Orientalism, Bill Mullen traces the tradition of revolutionary thought and writing developed by African American and Asian American artists and intellectuals in response to Du Bois’s challenge.

Afro-Orientalism unfolds here as a distinctive strand of cultural and political work that contests the longstanding, dominant discourse about race and nation first fully named in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Mullen tracks Afro-Asian engagement with U.S. imperialism—including writings by Richard Wright, Grace and James Boggs, Robert F. Williams, and Fred Ho—and companion struggles against racism and capitalism around the globe. To this end, he offers Afro-Orientalism as an antidote to essentialist, race-based, or narrow conceptions of ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, calling on scholars in these fields to re-imagine their critical enterprises as mutually constituting and politically interdependent.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Afro-Orientalism and Other Tales of Diaspora
• 1. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Afro-Asian Fantasia
• 2. The Limits of Being Outside: Richard Wright’s Anticolonial Turn
• 3. Transnational Correspondence: Robert F. Williams, Detroit, and the Bandung Era
• 4. “Philosophy Must Be Proletarian”: The Dialectical Humanism of Grace Lee and James Boggs
• 5. Making Monkey Signify: Fred Ho’s Revolutionary Vision Quest
• Appendix: Fred Ho Discography
• Notes
• Index