Red, Expert, and Black: Vicki Garvin, English Language Teaching, and Afro-Chinese Solidarity

• In Event: Unity in Dissent: Afro-Asian Intimacies

Abstract

From September 1964 to July 1966 the African American radical woman Vicki Garvin worked as an English language instructor to graduate students and seniors at the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute, where she was to push her students to become “red and expert,” but at the same time she resignified her teaching spaces so as to rekindle her political activism and in particular, to strengthen Afro-Chinese unity. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including Garvin’s lesson plans, class notes and lecture scripts, her students’ papers, and recent interviews with her former students and teaching assistant, this paper unravels how Garvin pushed her students to become not only “red and expert,” but also “black”—revolutionary subjects who would realize the freedom dreams of Afro Asia.

First, Garvin established a course aiming to not just sharpen her students’ English language skills but also familiarize them with recent and current events in the Third World. She planned her subject matter to include materials on China, Vietnam, U.S. imperialism, the struggle for black freedom in the U.S., Africa and Latin America. In this way she articulated and preached a new black internationalist politics which points to the internality and centrality of the African American freedom struggle to the synchronous, China-led Third World liberation movement, and that stressed the formation of an Afro-Chinese alliance as crucial to the victory of that anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist world struggle.

Second, referring to Mao Zedong’s practice-theory-practice dialectic, Garvin pointed out the dependence of knowing upon doing and called for the practical application of theory. She applied these principles to her teaching to institute what Mao called “education of the proletariat,” and also highlighted the likeness and interrelatedness between Maoism and black radicalism (which includes her own ideas), thus strengthening Afro-Chinese solidarity. In class she not only pushed her students to practice both Mao’s and her ideas so as to verify them, but also effected a simultaneous coloring of Mao’s China and Sinification of the black freedom struggle.

And third, Garvin, as a comrade of Robert F. Williams, Grace Lee and James Boggs, gendered the Revolutionary Action Movement’s class-first Bandung humanism not by according primacy to gender issues alone, but by gesturing toward a reconceptualization of race, class, and gender as intertwined forms of oppression, and toward a humanizing reorganization of gender relations. For her, women’s true emancipation entails the creation of revolutionary subjects and thus of human relationships through a large-scale socio-economic restructuring as well as a smaller-scale self-transformation. Her aim here was to integrate women into production and public life, which resonates with the Maoist campaigns to increase women’s share in the urban workforce and their role in agriculture.

Overall, this paper argues that Garvin advocated a particular variant of Afro-Asianism, characterized by a synthesis of radical Maoism and her own black feminist internationalism, and that her solidarity work in China served important political and ideological purposes for the Chinese government.

Author

• Zifeng Liu, Cornell University