Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans
Author: Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen
Publisher: Duke
Year: 2008
Format: Paper
Condition: New
ISBN: 9780822342816
Description
With contributions from activists, artists, and scholars, Afro Asia is a groundbreaking collection of writing on the historical alliances, cultural connections, and shared political strategies linking African Americans and Asian Americans. Bringing together autobiography, poetry, scholarly criticism, and other genres, this volume represents an activist vanguard in the cultural struggle against oppression.
Afro Asia opens with analyses of historical connections between people of African and of Asian descent. An account of nineteenth-century Chinese laborers who fought against slavery and colonialism in Cuba appears alongside an exploration of African Americans' reactions to and experiences of the Korean "conflict." Contributors examine the fertile period of Afro-Asian exchange that began around the time of the 1955 Bandung Conference, the first meeting of leaders from Asian and African nations in the postcolonial era. One assesses the relationship of two important 1960s Asian American activists to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Mao Ze Dong's 1963 and 1968 statements in support of black liberation are juxtaposed with an overview of the influence of Maoism on African American leftists.
Turning to the arts, Ishmael Reed provides a brief account of how he met and helped several Asian American writers. A Vietnamese American spoken-word artist describes the impact of black hip-hop culture on working-class urban Asian American youth. Fred Ho interviews Bill Cole, an African American jazz musician who plays Asian double-reed instruments. This pioneering collection closes with an array of creative writing, including poetry, memoir, and a dialogue about identity and friendship that two writers, one Japanese American and the other African American, have performed around the United States.
Contributors Betsy Esch, Diane C. Fujino, royal hartigan, Kim Hewitt, Cheryl Higashida, Fred Ho,
Everett Hoagland, Robin D. G. Kelley, Bill V. Mullen, David Mura, Ishle Park, Alexs Pate, Thien-bao Thuc Phi, Ishmael Reed, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Maya Almachar Santos, JoYin C. Shih, Ron Wheeler, Daniel Widener, Lisa Yun
About the Author
Fred Ho is a Chinese American social activist. A renowned baritone saxophonist, composer, and bandleader, he founded the Afro Asian Music Ensemble in 1982.
Bill V. Mullen is Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Purdue University. He is the author of Afro-Orientalism.
Reviews
"Afro Asia preserves and promotes critical thinking and activism in a global culture. Here, with incisive writings from diverse intellectuals, artists, and activists, Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen make a vital contribution towards liberation praxis that challenges the perceived permanence of manufactured distrust and division."--Joy James, author of Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics
"Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen have assembled a first-rate dossier of Afro-Asian work. It is equal parts lyrical and analytical. Flies like a butterfly; stings like a bee."--Vijay Prashad, author of Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity
"Afro-Asia is a long overdue tribute to the long history of cross-ethnic intellectual connections, as well as a celebration of artistic collaborations, between African Americans and Asian Americans. . . . Fred Ho and Bill Mullen have produced a book that is groundbreaking in its intellectual rigor, as well as aesthetically pleasing. . . . Afro-Asia is highly recommended to anyone interested in how radical ideas and concepts travel through and across cultural boundaries and eventually bloom with new brilliance."--Carol Huang "Journal of African American History "
"At a moment when the national media are abuzz with predictions of a new era of post-racial politics, Fred Ho and Bill Mullen's anthology on the intersections of African and Asian Americans remind us of the complex ways that race has shaped and continues to shape our lives in this country. Afro Asia compiles a diverse set of essays that illuminate a repressed tradition, spanning the early 19th century onwards, of 'creative political and cultural resistance grounded in Afro-Asian collaboration and connectivity.'"--Manan Desai "Against the Current "
"Afro Asia" opens with analyses of historical connections between people of African and of Asian descent. An account of nineteenth-century Chinese laborers who fought against slavery and colonialism in Cuba appears alongside an exploration of African Americans' reactions to and experiences of the Korean "conflict." Contributors examine the fertile period of Afro-Asian exchange that began around the time of the 1955 Bandung Conference, the first meeting of leaders from Asian and African nations in the postcolonial era. One assesses the relationship of two important 1960s Asian American activists to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Mao Ze Dong's 1963 and 1968 statements in support of black liberation are juxtaposed with an overview of the influence of Maoism on African American leftists.
Turning to the arts, Ishmael Reed provides a brief account of how he met and helped several Asian American writers. A Vietnamese American spoken-word artist describes the impact of black hip-hop culture on working-class urban Asian American youth. Fred Ho interviews Bill Cole, an African American jazz musician who plays Asian double-reed instruments. This pioneering collection closes with an array of creative writing, including poetry, memoir, and a dialogue about identity and friendship that two writers, one Japanese American and the other African American, have performed around the United States.
"Contributors" Betsy Esch, Diane C. Fujino, royal hartigan, Kim Hewitt, Cheryl Higashida, Fred Ho,
Everett Hoagland, Robin D. G. Kelley, Bill V. Mullen, David Mura, Ishle Park, Alexs Pate, Thien-bao Thuc Phi, Ishmael Reed, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Maya Almachar Santos, JoYin C. Shih, Ron Wheeler, Daniel Widener, Lisa Yun