Afro-Orientalism.

AFRO-ORIENTALISM by Bill V. Mullen. (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)

THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT: LITERARY NATIONALISM IN THE 1960S AND 1970S by James Edward Smethurst. (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

In these two compelling books, Bill Mullen and James Smethurst

trace the expressions of internationalism that intensified among African Americans as they explicitly linked anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia to their own anti-racist activism in the United States. In delineating collaborations and identifications among a range of social and cultural movements, each author offers original arguments that significantly expand current understandings of the scope and evolution of both diasporic interchanges and the Black Arts movement.

Smethurst's careful unpacking of the evolution and range of Black Arts movement poetry, theatre, journals, art and music shows the movement's continued, if ambivalent, relationship to 1930s-1940s left-led Popular Front aesthetics, politics, and institutions. Mullen also mines the writing and social movements of key African American and Chinese intellectual activists in the twentieth century to show a continued commitment to Marxist-Leninism and Maoism among figures who articulated their identification with and commitment to struggles in Asia and Africa. The obstacles constructed by the Cold War worked to unite artists and activists coming of age in the 1950s, as so many emerged from networks populated by an earlier generation of radicals who opposed racialized capitalism and colonialism. For Black Arts movement members and individuals affiliated with different organizations on the anti-racist left, their sympathies with national liberation movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa inevitably drew them into the ideological and physical struggles of the Cold War. In showing the vitality of political movements among African American, Asian, and Latino writers, both authors locate areas where Cold War repression of people of color and leftists did not entirely curtail the imaginative links being forged by many radicals.

As he traces the evolution of writers, artists, and activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Williams, Richard Wright, Grace Lee and James Boggs, and Fred Ho, Mullen delineates clear ideological shifts among each, and carefully analyses the causes and expressions of such changes. The distinctive subjects in his study formed a singular "dialectical movement [...] to reimagine black and Asian people as handholding gravediggers of Western capitalist modernity" (xxv). While some, like Wright, imbibed the Western exoticism and objectification of "the Orient," others transcended their original preconceptions through contact, activism and commonalities of position throughout the diaspora. As Mullen demonstrates, the salience of Marxism and Maoism to African Americans and Asian Americans created broad grounds for convergences and alliances throughout the twentieth century that were closely tied to nationalist aspirations.

Mullen introduces his work with a rigorous and at times witty discussion of theorists like Said, Gilroy, and Prashad, giving teachers an accessible way to engage theories of racial identity, anti-capitalism, colonialism, and diasporas. He critiques Paul Gilroy's limited configuration of the Black Atlantic for its reproduction of a Western-dominated exchange between Europe, the United States and Africa, and posits instead a diasporic triangulation between Africa, Asia, and North America. Arguing that Gilroy offers "identity politics without the politics, positing diaspora consciousness as a new form of 'common memory' while mystifying the public sphere where identity will live" (xxxi), Mullen proposes the alternative of "strategic antiessentialism" that "delink[s] binaries of racial and political separation (African/Asian, First World and Third/ Orient and Occident) among individuals whose understandings of the relationship between race, politics and aesthetics evolved through 'transnational correspondences'" (78).

Mullen's chronologically-organized study covers figures from the First World War to today, beginning with Du Bois, an ideal example of the sort of identifications this book undertakes. As Mullen notes, Du Bois' writings about China and Japan are often cursorily overlooked by other Du Bois scholars, when in fact these writings mark the evolution of Du Bois' increasing dedication to Marxism and move beyond strictly racialist thinking. In reconciling Du Bois's early pro-Japan Orientalism, his absorption of a Marxist analysis, and his eventual close relationship with China and beginning in the 1950s until his 1963 death, Mullen effectively conveys the reflexivity and openness that allowed Du Bois to continually transcend and complicate his earlier positions. Between Du Bois' imagined union of Africa and "The Orient" in the aptly glossed Dark Princess (1928) to his 1959 salutary poem "I Sing to China," Du Bois ultimately comes to see in China and Ghana in the early 1960s "the fulfillment of an Afro-Asian dream deferred" (29-30). Mullen's nuanced readings of Du Bois' copious writings on Asia significantly advance Du Bois scholarship by demonstrating how his increasingly internationalist outlook is obscured by scholars who fail to grapple with the centrality of Asia in Du Bois's conception of the color line.

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Not all narratives follow Du Bois' path to a progressively radical politics. For example, Mullen yields new insights about a much-covered figure as he charts Richard Wright's adoption of an Orientalism that condescended to Asian and Africans, and, in its move away from Marxism and activism, became ambivalently imbricated in Western humanist ideals. Like Du Bois, Wright's work offers a "distinctly African American point of view of the place and role of Asia as an index to black world fortunes" (47). However, Wright's "negative loyalty and metaphysical abjection" (71) resulted from his sense of outsiderhood, from both the communist ideology and organizational work that he once embraced and his difficulty identifying with Asian and African anticolonialist movements. Indeed, through charged, critical readings of Wright's White Man Listen/and The Color Curtain, Mullen finds that Wright frequently used "primitivism, primalism and psychic excess" to describe Asians (64), and, unlike Du Bois, never overcame a debilitating alienation in his short life. As in his earlier work in Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46 (1999), Mullen complicates too-easy venerations of Wright, and in so doing, invokes and revises Said's notions of Orientalism by implicating this canonical figure.

In his chapter on James and Grace Lee Boggs, Mullen navigates the various paths taken by these Detroit icons whose marriage itself was representative of the union of Asia, Africa and the United States that Mullen explores. Mullen presents a cohesive trajectory of the Boggs' thinking and work over five decades of activism, from a Trotskyist, Jamesian interest in labor issues and civil rights in the pages of Correspondence and Facing Reality to an increasing alignment with anticolonialism that currently translates into anti-globalization work. Mullen soundly puts this development into the context of the Boggs' evolution as it emerged from their work in Detroit, and in this complicates easy categorizations of their political vision. Mullen rightly points out that James and Grace Lee Boggs' break with C.L.R. James did not represent a renunciation of Marxist politics, but instead their move toward a "Bandung or Third World" understanding of capitalism, racism, and colonialism. Throughout the 1960s, "Mao's insistence on placing politics before economics, the personal as a means to political transformation, and on the central contradictions of manual and mental labor, town and country" became cornerstones of the Boggs' political approaches to local change in Detroit (118). As he examines the occasionally vague, even contradictory tenets of Boggsian philosophy, their faith in "dialectical humanism" emerges as the most consistent, if elusive, feature.

Mullen follows his discussion of the Boggses with a consideration of one of their inspirations, Robert Williams. Calling Williams' actions in Monroe and Cuban exile "the signal event that revived and described a more prescient internationalism for black radicals in the Bandung era" (79), Mullen traces Williams' dynamic career as activist and theorist. From his experiences in Monroe, North Carolina to his stays in Cuba and China, Williams maintained an active presence within the United States, particularly in Detroit and on the West Coast, where his call for militant self-defense resonated. Through his "Radio Free Dixie" program, broadcast from Cuba where he was exiled, to his newspaper Crusader, Williams helped shape the contours of an imagined triangulation of influence, between the Americas, Africa and Asia. In his discussion of the Black Arts movement, Mullen finds Williams (along with Maoism) an influential force, particularly in Detroit among artists like Woodie King and Dudley Randall. Publishing collectives like Correspondence and the Broadside Press and artistic and political forums around Black Arts, Black Power and diasporic identity venerated Williams as the embodiment of Latin American, Asian and African nationalist aspirations and internationalist solidarity.

Mullen's most contemporary figure, Fred Ho, has constructed a successful career as a musician, poet, activist, and public speaker. Ho's prolific work "synthesizes African and Asian archetypes, myths, fantasies, and real-world acts of heroism with a revolutionary optimism born from a longtime engagement with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Third World liberation theory and radical feminism" (165). Accordingly, Ho exemplifies Mullen's conceptions of "anti-essentialism," wrought out of Ho's innovative linking of his work in numerous groups. As Mullen explores the wide range of influence and transformative events in Ho's life that links him to his political experience as a college student in the 1980s amidst efforts in California universities to institute black and Asian studies courses, he shows the enduring impact of the Bandung Era as he grapples with questions of culture's role in self-determination struggles. Mullen argues that Ho's view of "Afro-Asian collaboration as a deconstructive tool for destroying racial, cultural and geographic boundaries undergirding Orientalism and the Western metaphysic that is its foundation and platform," Ho seemingly points to the future of Afro-Orientalism (167-8).

Mullen's book would generate productive discussions in any class dedicated to the study of race, colonialism, Marxism and Maoism, and more generally, cultural, and political movements of the twentieth and with Ho, twenty-first, century. Not only is it written in an immensely engaging way, but Mullen is able to traverse difficult grounds because this book takes on a comparative, transhistorical project to investigate ongoing political issues. Each figure is put in dialogue with others, which facilitates a conversation across generations and alliances that raises many important issues, particularly regarding the formative effect of Marxist dialectics on the thinking of the activists and writers he studies. His dexterous handling of a variety of materials, from manifestoes, newspapers, fiction, poetry, music, archives and interviews gives compelling support to his arguments that will surely inform future discussions of diaspora, culture, and class.

James Edward Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s addresses similar issues, focusing on the tension between internationalism and nationalism in a politicized culture through an examination of local forms of Black Arts across the United States. As with Mullen, Bandung figures prominently, as does Detroit and efforts to conceive a more inclusive but cohesive sense of racial identity, including Asians, and for Smethurst, Latinos as well. This book's spectacular range, abundance of evidence and argumentative intricacy foregrounds the dialectics between these forces and in meticulous details eloquently and insightfully registers ideological confluences and conflicts. After analyzing over sixty organizations, hundreds of individuals, events and publications, Smethurst is well-positioned to become a definitive source for information about the Black Arts movement, the black left in the 1950s through the 1970s, and the black power movement. As Smethurst notes, there has been a surge of new scholarship on the Black Arts movement, yet this work is singular in its ambitious investigations into how each region of the United States, particularly urban centers, produced its own unique forms and definitions of the Black Arts movement.

Smethurst's geographic organization brings attention to often overlooked sites of black arts movement activism, and he underscores the relationship between regional specificities and nationalist, or internationalist, visions. Key figures dominate, like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Askia Toure, Maulana Karenga, Bob Kaufman, Haki Madhubuti, Larry Neal, and Lorenzo Thomas while lesser known figures such as Russell Atldns, Kalamu ya Salaam and Barbara Ann Teer, among many others, are also discussed. He similarly highlights the numerous journals and broadsides that have received little attention, carefully describing conflicts among editors and the intricate debates among the artists involved. Indeed, the pages of often forgotten publications are the grounds on which Smethurst navigates the exchanges that occurred amongst their producers.

Smethurst argues that the Black Arts movement's resourceful use of public funding, wide-spread community support, intergenerational contacts and aesthetic innovation made it "arguably the most influential cultural movement the United States has ever seen" (373). Such a claim is bolstered by Smethurst's continual linking of the Black Arts movement with other cultural movements and by the book's end one is overwhelmed by the many arenas Black Arts participants operated within and strongly influenced. The Popular Front, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, New American poetry, and the jazz avant-garde all inform the many forms taken by Black Arts movement activists who alternately rejected or adapted central aspects of these forms.

Smethurst shows the considerable influence of black artists on Marxist cultural practices among these movements, thus emphasizing the reciprocity that informed the Black Arts Movement's aesthetic and political agenda. As the rich, eclectic history of the Black Arts movement unfolds, its continual enactment of the dialectical relationship between the Black Arts and other cultural movements, as well as between Black Arts and Black Power, become a central feature. Smethurst evokes a dynamic relationship between the Old Left and the Black Arts movement, which included "critical support" from older African American poets and writers like Margaret Burroughs and Gwendolyn Brooks, as they questioned cultural nationalism. For example, when Smethurst discusses New York, often seen as a focal point of Black Arts activism, he uncovers the interactions between the Old Left, New Left, and Black Arts on the Lower East Side that have, as he points out, often been obscured in response to the chilling, enduring effects of anticommunism in the early Cold War. Smethurst finds that the "Communist Left ... did much to underwrite the maintenance of [the Umbra Poets Workshop] and to advance the careers of its members" (141).

Such impressive recovery of the relationships between cultural institutions like the Harlem Writers Guild, Umbra, American Dialog, Freedomways, and movements like the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), the Progressive Labor Movement, the Socialist Workers Party and Mobilization for Youth shows the degree of interchange that occurred due to the interpersonal ties of widely connected individuals and the affinities between the political and cultural projects. Thus in his painstaking excavation of how "nuts and bolts political activism (not simply some sort of symbolic politics) cleared a space for, energized and created a support network for black artists production" (181) Smethurst shows how the presence of the Nation of Islam, a long tradition of anti-racist activism, vibrant radical presses, and a history of CPUSA Popular Front activism and Trotskyist influences informed the Midwestern Black Arts Movement.

Smethurst's discussion of the Black Arts Movements interregional differences in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis shows that despite a broader coherency in the Midwest, dynamic interchange occurred that reflected trends from discord and lack of financial support to debates over political culture. Frequently, smaller Black Arts communities became stopping off points on the way to New York City, and even cities like Chicago and Detroit saw some artists migrate to New York. Such movements suggest that, to some degree, the tendency to focus on New York is somewhat warranted, but by describing the unique Black Arts movement formations across the United States, Smethurst ultimately enhances our appreciation of the movement's dynamism. His frequent comparisons between, for example, Chicago and San Francisco, historicize the roots of Black Arts in each area, and demonstrates how the intense interchange of different lineages led to collective efforts, recreation of the vigorous debates between nationalist, separatist, culturalist and internationalist goals, avant-garde influences, and Marxist/Maoist strains in the 1960s that responded to the civil rights activism, riots, war, and anti-colonial revolution. Smethurst looks closely at the contributions of Black Theatre, Negro Digest/Black World, Nkombo, and Soulbook to the political and cultural debates around these issues, their attempts at unity as well as their rifts.

In California, Smethurst locates within the Black Power and Black Arts movement a "cultural memory" shaped by the comparatively visible presence of the Communist Left on the West Coast in the 1960s, citing the CPUSA'S Che-Lumumba Club as one example of the Left's organizational strength in cultural and union activities (252). As in other parts of the country, an intergenerational, often interracial exchange between Black Power advocates and the Old Left yielded a bohemian culture that fostered key figures in Smethurst's book, like Bob Kaufman. In a location influenced by Beat poets and bohemia, the Black Arts forged connections not only with these groups but with the Black Panther Party and Karenga's Us, among others. If the Bandung era was constrained by the Cold War contest between Communism and capitalism, it also galvanized writers to identify with Third World movements and debate the path to self-determination. Accordingly, Black Arts movement activists fashioned Pan-Africanist and nationalist forms, and agitated around matters of academic curriculum and racism (particularly in California).

Though the South has received less attention than West and East Coast Black Arts movements, its regional singularity made it "the most successful in reaching a broad grassroots regional constituency while ideologically imparting a sense of the movement as a genuine expression of the entire black nation"(247). Smethurst details how ties between civil rights organizations and key Black Arts movement institutions like the Free Southern Theatre were able to root themselves in communities that shared a "regional solidarity" and thus remained longer than most Black Arts communities. In his discussion of the diverse intermixture of influences in New Orleans, Smethurst exhibits his aptitude with music (a consistent strength throughout the book), describing a popular avant-garde infused with jazz, rhythm, bebop, and blues. Smethurst also underscores Mullen's point that Robert Williams was a pivotal force who cemented ties between nationalist and internationalist militants throughout the United States, particularly Detroit.

Smethurst argues that despite the Black Arts and Black Powers' "dramatic staging of gestures of rupture and disaffiliation with earlier modes of radical politics," such movements were, particularly in the beginning, "enabled by a commitment to institution building by more strictly nationalist groups and individuals inspired by and complementing similar left projects" (56). Such ties to older movements, particularly the CPUSA, are unearthed with remarkable detail. Because Smethurst historicizes his analysis so thoroughly, the many theoretical positions, interpersonal dynamics and regional variation of artistic forms that later cause friction within Black Arts and Black Power has been firmly grounded, make Smethurst's complex arguments and web of connections more accessible.

As with most recent scholars of the Black Arts movement, Smethurst addresses the questions of gender, homophobia and sexuality in the Black Arts movement. In contrasting the homophobic strains of Black Arts with other cultural movements, Smethurst situates this much critiqued feature of the Black Arts Movement within the context of a national pattern of homophobia. At the same time, Smethurst shows that amidst the pronounced masculinism of Black Arts, respect for African American, gay icons like James Baldwin existed. Similarly, and with more extensive evidence, Smethurst shows that male supremacy was part of "the mainstream of downtown bohemia in terms of gender roles rather than following some black nationalist imperative" (86). Indeed, given the large number of women who were highly respected and influential within Black Arts, through their leadership and active participation in Black Arts projects, Smethurst argues "the Black Arts and Black Power movement were among the few intellectual spaces in the United States in the 1960s where it was comparatively easy to raise issues of male supremacy" (86).

As artists participated in multiple organizations, "the boundaries between Marxism and cultural nationalism continued to be more porous" than one may expect (369). Like so many other radical formations at that time, internal divisions coupled with external pressures led to a fracturing of the delicate cohesion Smethurst weaves throughout his narrative. Smethurst shows that despite regional distinctions, throughout the nation a sense urgency and purpose due to world events, from sitdowns in the United States to anti-colonial struggles in Ghana, Cuba and dsewhere, compelled black artists, intellectuals, and activists to create new cultural spaces from the remains of older local institutions and Communist, Socialist, Pan-Africanist, and black nationalist organizations.

The ambitious range of Smethurst's work, in terms of its extensive genealogy and geography, art forms--including theatre, novels, poetry--cultural theories, graphic art, journalism, and its compelling, fresh, and richly documented arguments, makes it valuable in a range of academic disciplines. While the subject is ostensibly literary, Smethurst's research, archival evidence, careful structuring, and balance of both local and global histories offer an excellent example of historical methodology. This work would also be an instructive model of interdisciplinary work for Cultural and Ethnic Studies programs.

These two books are part of a growing conversation about the meanings and historical significance of the Black Power and Black Arts movements. With their focus on the transgenerational and transnational routes black radicalism took, and the ongoing negotiations among black, Latino, and Asian activists, Smethurst and Mullen dramatically broaden our understanding of black political activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Moreover, as Mullen shows, the blurring of boundaries between imperialist wars abroad and white supremacist policies at home, or, a Smethurst points out, between artists, activists, and educators, created a richer, more complex movement for black liberation than historians have tended to recognize.

These two books are excellent resources for scholars, teachers, and students, as well as more general readers interested in African American and anticolonial movements. Both are a pleasure to read, and together they deepen comprehension of a historical moment that has too often been seen as self-motivating and self-perpetuating. Mullen and Smethurst remind us that few cultural phenomena are not connected across borders to other movements, other ideas, other happenings.