The Politics of Idealization in the Alliance between Eldridge Cleaver and Kim Il Sung

• In Event: Rethinking Emergences of Afro-Asian Coalitions

Abstract

In 1969, Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, visited North Korea to attend the International Conference of Anti-Imperialist Journalists. What he saw during his month-long stay there was neither abject poverty nor unending suffering but political inspiration, economic progress, and cultural modernity. Cleaver eulogized Kim Il Sung and his ideas of Juche [self-reliance and independence]. Similarly, Kim heroized Cleaver and critiqued the U.S. oppression of the Black Panther Party while envisioning solidarity in their common struggle against U.S. imperialism. Drawing on essays, archival documents, and newspapers, both American and North Korean, my paper examines the affinity between Cleaver and Kim in order to test the limits and liabilities of idealization as a political aesthetic. Although shared notions of dispossession and marginalization enabled black and Asian leaders to instigate non-white agitations, in their recruitment of parallel images of subjugation and resistance, they often ignored their material, cultural, and historical conditions and differences. In particular, Cleaver’s celebratory accounts of North Korea turn blind to the vagaries and suppressions of the North Korean people. By the same token, Kim rationalizes the extremist schemes and anarchic acts of the Black Panther Party. Their romanticizing views of each other are, to borrow Edward Said’s words, “governed not by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.” By situating Cleaver’s coalition with Kim within the leftist circuits that black and Asian radicals constituted from the 1920s to the 1970s, this paper demonstrates how the trope of idealization not only provides an analogical and associative framework for a futurity of global liberation but also problematically engenders black Orientalism and Asian Occidentalism in spite of the trope’s political import and critical purchase.

Author

• Jang Wook Huh, University of Washington-Seattle Campus