Reconstruction 5.2 (Spring 2005)

Return to Contents »

Bill V. Mullen. Afro-Orientalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 256 pp. Softcover. $18.95. ISBN: 0816637490

<1> For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’.  Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated as outsiders? What of aspirant allies of the east?

<2> Bill Mullen attempts to enrich Said’s legacy and perhaps counteract a one-sided aspect of it. He does so by sketching an intellectual strategy that attempts to cross the West-East divide. Throughout the twentieth century, not all observers of the Orient were ‘turning something into something else’ (Said, cited Mullen p.45) by constructing hegemonic discourses of the East. Others saw opportunities to forge new, internationalist alliances designed to break the chains of imperialism. Hence the ‘Afro’ half of the titular couplet, when US radicals from ‘racial’ minorities envisage forging associations of liberation with their Asian counterparts. This indicates the scope of Mullen’s ambition, setting out to portray a ‘red thread’ of Afro-Orientalism, from First World War to the present day.

<3> As Mullen sees it, this tradition in cultural politics began with W.E.B. Du Bois. While today Du Bois is most closely associated with African-American radicalism, his life-long body of writing on Asia is key to Mullen’s argument.  The opening chapter is given over to showing how through journalism – such as editorials in The Crisis – Du Bois returned time and again to the theme of Afro-Asian solidarity, writing in 1914 of ‘the World Problem of the Color Line’.  This formulation clearly includes Asia, an inclusion which appears to have been forgotten over time. Breaking the chains of racism at home required an internationalist orientation and, in Mullen’s argument, this ambitious project created a huge interpretive burden. It forced Du Bois to resort to fantastical language and a broad rhetorical sweep to add force to his argument. Part of the task of rendering these possibilities clearly fell to his novel Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), with an Indian protagonist whose fictional activities serve as a metaphor for a pan-Asian project of global liberation. Du Bois saw rationalist Enlightenment universalism as compromised by its association with the West, so he searched out other forms of expression for his project. Colliding imagined solutions with the tangible issue of the color line helped to generate an ‘Afro-Asian fantasia’, initiating a revolutionary sublime.  Thus Mullen presents Du Bois as constructing appropriate cultural forms with which to align a major liberation strategy.  The thematic evolution from the Dark Princess to a final poem in the 1950s, ‘I Sing to China’ – reprinted in full – marks a maturity in Du Bois’ thinking, seeking to create ‘a Chinaman’s chance of a different world’.

<4> Subsequent chapters deal with Du Bois’ successors. Not all participants in this informal tendency have his magnitude as a leader and inspiration. Thus Richard Wright, something of a self-styled ‘exile’ outside the US at the time, was developing travel writing of his own.  Whereas Du Bois sought alliances of color, Wright’s assumptions meant that, in effect, he was adopting a personal orientalist trajectory.  In Mullen’s words, 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 race and historical materialism’ (xlii-xliii). Thus Wright’s participation in and contribution to this body of thought is a problematic one.  He seemed mainly concerned with maintaining his status as an outsider. Envisioning an ‘iron curtain’ between Europe and Africa since medieval times, Wright ‘offered an image of Asia (and Africa) as separated, partitioned or “lost” in the Cold War lexicon of the Dulles-led West, to both the “irrational” nature of racialist politics and the madness of Communist appeal’ (65).  Perhaps the only common ground for Du Bois and Wright (and perhaps for Mullen too) is their shared, instinctive suspicions of the Enlightenment humanist intellectual tradition, which subsequently rule out its application of reason the problem of race and ‘race relations’.

<5> Reading between the lines, it is apparent that Mullen has another objective in mind.  He is keen to undermine the familiar picture of Wright as the ‘star’ of African-American proletarian fiction and his subsequent reinvention as an existentialist writer.  For every author willing to treat Wright as the embodiment of these trends, Mullen is on hand to show why that Native Son in fact broke with his community. This follows on from the 1999 volume Popular Fronts, which opens by debunking the idea of Wright at the center of black Chicago’s literary renaissance: the most significant developments occurred after Wright’s departure from the scene i.e. ‘Chicago’s “renaissance” so-named was created, led, and sustained by people other than Wright who broke neither with Chicago, nor American radicalism, when Wright did’ (1999: 26). Thus does Mullen’s critique – debunking the ‘long black shadow of Richard Wright’ – continue to manifest itself with a non-linear, modular structure, guerilla skirmishes across a range of publications: we should look forward to the day they are collected in a single volume.

<6> If Wright is (again) the exception, who steps into the ‘Afro-Orientalist’ void left by Du Bois? Mullen finds four plausible candidates who take us from the 1950s to the present day. Taking up the baton in ways that Wright deliberately eschewed is Robert F. Williams. Head of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, he was exiled to Cuba after the FBI charged him with kidnapping in 1961.  As Williams’ letter writing and visits to China won the attention of Mao, black radicals in Detroit paid attention too. Williams’ internationalism – built upon his reputation for black self-defense and as the victim of a frame-up – made him an inspiring figure. His contacts with the Chinese and Vietnamese authorities, and a wider sympathy for guerilla warfare on the radical left, ensured he was caught up in the radical 1960s regardless of the geographical distances involved.  As Mullen shows, this particular ‘moment’ was actually the maturation of a tradition of political-cultural ‘call and response’, which the author calls ‘transnational correspondence’. It begins with the meeting of decolonizing nations in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 and continues into the 1970s. It consists of wave after wave of manifestos and other declarations, often influenced by Mao, which seek to analogize disparate events, from the Watts riots to the war for Algerian independence. Typical of this process is the way the word ‘black’ becomes briefly synonymous with the political category of being oppressed, regardless of one’s ‘non-white’ ethnicity.  Hence the distress of Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan in the 1970 introduction to Beyond the Melting Pot, when they note that the word ‘Negro’ – mere member of an ethnic group, as they saw it – has been replaced with a term expressing a political identity.  It was an identity pioneered by Williams, who addressed black America through a continuous stream of pamphlets, newspapers (the Crusader) and Radio Free Dixie broadcasts from Cuba, urging African-Americans to take a position on the Sino-Soviet split and the US blockade of Cuba.

<7> Mullen doesn’t explicitly state this, but it’s obvious that widespread participation in the militancy under discussion subsides over time. Whereas Williams’ early ‘correspondents’ were activists in groups like the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and other embryonic social movements in US cities, the political evolution of these organizations was not accompanied by long-term growth. Unkindly, one might see instead a cycle of similar-sounding international conferences making a diminishing impact between 1955 and 1972.  As the author argues, ‘the presumption that military strategies and scenarios could be retrofitted merely by analogizing place was at odds with fundamental tenets of warfare, not least of which being the willingness to fight, for whom, and for how long’ (110). That 1990s bumper sticker saying ‘from LA to Somalia to Detroit, pigs is pigs’ represents the last gasp of such rhetoric (and invites countless parking tickets). Yet the story is not simply one of deterioration; among those feeling Williams’ influence at the height of his powers were James Boggs and his partner Grace Lee Boggs, Detroit-based veterans of the Trotskyist movement, who carried the legacy forward.

<8> The examples of James and especially Grace Boggs show in various ways how they continued the improvisational aspect of Du Bois and Williams’ internationalism.  Working closely with C.L.R. James in the 1940s, breaking with Trotskyism and wanting to ‘proletarianize philosophy’ and turn to rank and file trade unionists, their thought matured into the organization Correspondence and its final manifesto Facing Reality (1958). In the 1960s their writing aimed to supplement the burgeoning Black Power movement and advocate a black/Third World axis for the coming revolution. Whereas Grace Lee Boggs’ community activism remains exemplary – a trip to the Detroit MGM shows her skepticism about the regenerative properties of casinos was largely justified – the advantages of ‘Boggsian’ philosophy are less than clear.  Indeed, Mullen depicts a continual process of rebranding, where the ideas of Boggs acquire new, seemingly more precise labels over time. Anti-bureaucratic and on the side of the oppressed, the finer calibrations of the philosophy are, however, indicated by changing terminology revealing little of the content: “a more human human being”, “new self-governing America”, and so forth. Mullen’s coda, that ‘the numerous contradictions in Boggsism – from its at times inchoate liberalism, to its redundant faith in humanism, to its at times contradictory means of assessing American capitalism – also merit enormous areas of study and review for young radicals’ (162), barely scratches the surface. In sum, her ‘radicalism embodies an intellectual diaspora to which few contemporary ethnic studies movements have yet caught up’ (162).

<9> From the accounts in each chapter it becomes apparent, although never stated, that the cultural/political outlook based on elective affinities between African-Americans and a broadly defined East Asia, stretching from Indian to China, has had a rather tenuous existence.  Taken together, this series of character studies could be even read as a spiral of decline. We move from the influential Du Bois, via an adversarial Wright, to the fugitive Williams to the Boggses, increasingly isolated former Trotskyists in Detroit. Indeed, Mullen’s emphasis on this select band of individuals almost suggests that Afro-Orientalism as a political tradition is one vulnerable to harsh winters and traffic accidents. Stripped of its activism, the book’s titular search for Afro-Asian solidarity could be read as an increasingly monastic pursuit, as the dream of a global alliance against imperialism is passed from one individual to the next. Such a reading would be unkind, but in part this reflects the real interaction between Afro-Orientalists and like-minded social movements (a theme surfacing episodically throughout this account).  The author notes that ‘valiant African American efforts to maintain strategic alliances with socialist, Communist, or decolonizing movements in Africa and Asia during the 1950s were generally limited in their success by domestic Cold War restraints and recriminations’ (79); however, with the notable exception of Williams, it is far from clear what the relationship of the Afro-Orientalists to broader anti-colonial movements was.  Penny Von Eschen’s Race Against Empire (1997), which Mullen cites, provides an overview of this movement and the role of such figureheads as Du Bois and Paul Robeson; at times it appears that the social movements and the cultural practitioners had overlapping aspirations while inhabiting parallel universes.

<10> Likewise there is little attempt to show how Afro-Orientalism was mirrored in the thinking of US and European elites, whose discourses of race and empire expressed continuous fears of being overwhelmed by a non-white alliance (see Furedi, esp. pp. 113-131). Race consciousness worked dialectically, as an expression of white elite insecurity and as the solidarity of oppressed peoples; Afro-Orientalism is weighted toward the latter. Yet these criticisms of Mullen are unfair, as he maintains a consistent emphasis on the autonomy of cultural work. While they are politically engaged – flirtations with Maoism and People’s Republic of China abound – thankfully the creative practitioners under discussion are under no obligation to follow a party line in their literary or musical output. Even the central chapters concerned with Williams and James and Grace Lee Boggs, who are viewed in a more activist context, apply scrutiny to their imaginative dealings with key issues of first world/third world relations. In short, if this book is a study of social movements it would demonstrate their failure, but as an account of the utopian thought necessary to develop such movements it dramatically establishes the vitality of such dreaming.

<11> Since Afro-Orientalism involves the construction of an imaginative and discursive liberation strategy, it has the potential to survive the vicissitudes of international change. Even though the perceived meaning of nationalist movements has gone from prestigious liberation forces to fratricidal struggles in Eastern Europe, Afro-Orientalism can persist or prosper, provided there are still personnel who share the dream.  A case in point is Fred Ho, whose place in the final chapter – plans for a post-9/11 postscript were shelved (x) – does not suggest the terminus of this cultural movement, merely its current mature phase. In Mullen’s account, Ho seems to be the hardest-working man in show business and internationalism.  A Chinese American composer, baritone saxophonist and political activist, Ho has a long history of synthesizing ‘African and Asian archetypes, myths, fantasies, and real-world acts of heroism with a revolutionary optimism’, in order to create a ‘revolutionary vision quest’ of his own (164-165).  In addition, this unique audio-visualization is enhanced by the manipulation of vernacular and commercial forms, from martial arts movies to Soviet social realism.  In an extravagant move, but one consistent with Afro-Orientalism as a whole, Ho composed the first modern Chinese American opera, incorporating traditional instruments and political insights in equal measure. A Chinaman’s Chance previewed in 1989, and was followed by a feminist-influenced adaptation of the ‘Monkey’ serial Journey to the West. Increased prominence in the US Asian Arts movement ensued. This emphasis on genre experimentation and recombinant works populated by genderbending revolutionary figures shows Ho as having brought the fantastical elements of Afro-Orientalism to the fore, in the manner of Du Bois’ Dark Princess over seven decades before. Through a careful analysis of Ho, Bill Mullen shows how the utopian project he calls Afro-Orientalism lives on, even in times when its manifestos risk seeming archaic.

Graham Barnfield

Works cited

Furedi, Frank. The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race.   London: Pluto Press, 1998.

Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1970.

Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46.University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-57. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1997.

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.