Session Submission Summary

Unity in Dissent: Afro-Asian Intimacies

Fri, November 10, 4:00 to 5:45pm, Hyatt Regency Chicago, San Francisco, Ballroom Level West Tower

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

At the height of the Cold War, the ideal of Afro-Asianism energized a global struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and racism, and fueled Third World efforts to restructure the bipolar global order. Central to the tenets of Afro-Asianism was an oppositional culture of “Afro-Asian modernity”—the result of the formation of Afro-Asian political solidarities—that defied development models from the First and Second Worlds. Afro Asia, thus as a pedagogical project, opened up a space for the generation of liberatory knowledge through classroom teacher-student interaction, technical and tactical cross-fertilization, international travel, and dramatic representation, and thereby allowed for the production of revolutionary subjects.

In this panel, we will address Afro-Asian connections across several cultural, historical, and political contexts, and examine in particular the oppositional pedagogies utilized to forge Afro-Asian solidarity as facilitated by the bi-directional, if not multi-directional, transnational, transracial, and trans-ethnic circulations of ideas, theories, and individuals. The panel seeks to investigate especially the interplay between pedagogies of dissent on an international and domestic level. In light of the importation of the spirit of Bandung into social movements within the U.S., we will first carefully examine the transnational networks that African American internationalists and their allies built to link nationally bound disparate struggles into a unified, global movement for liberation, and of the re-articulation and reconfiguration of such concepts of race, nation, gender and culture within the context of Black internationalism. We will also focus on the trans-ethnic and trans-racial connections forged in the United States, and explore the revolutionary potentiality of cross-racial identification to subvert oppressive, Eurocentric discourses.

More importantly, we caution against the uneven power relations and essentialized, racialized, Orientalist tendencies that structured and problematized Afro-Asian alliances.Through an examination of female agency and global sisterhood, which were crucial to the gendering of Afro Asia, we privilege an intersectional analytic of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. We will look at African American women activist-intellectuals’ analysis of interlocking forms of oppression facing both Black and Asian women, and the incorporation of Asian revolutionary ideas into their feminist politics. Moreover, we will explore the convergence and divergence of Asian and Black femininity, and their causal relationship to whiteness, racial purity, and Afro-Asian unity.

Overall, this panel hopes to contribute to the discussions on cross-racial solidarity building, Third World Studies, the relationship between race and class, and Black internationalism. It argues that the knowledge of Afro Asia during the Cold War era was produced and disseminated through multiple means—in the actual classroom, in the practical and strategic exchange, and in the cinema, and that these liberatory—albeit occasionally problematic—Afro-Asian alliances were forged in the process of constructing transnational, cross-racial networks that shared essential technical, political, cultural, and gender knowledge.

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