Rethinking Emergences of Afro-Asian Coalitions

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Afro-Asian relations have become an increasingly important object of inquiry in wide-ranging, overlapping fields, such as American studies, comparative literature, and global history. Whereas early scholarship centered on the relationship between African America and East Asia, recent studies have diversified their scopes, encompassing the Caribbean, Africa, Asian America, and South and Southeast Asia. The materials of inquiry have also expanded from political discourse to cultural productions, including literature, art, and music. Although Afro-Asian studies have developed in such a number of directions, more analyses are necessary to further clarify complicated natures and diverse aspects of the encounters of peoples of Asian and African descent. Some of the critical questions to be fully examined are: How have global circuits of notions of race influence cultures and politics of Afro-Asian social movements and identities? How have multi-lingual and translational practices shaped Afro-Asian relations? How can the growing body of research on adoption and mixed-race identity contribute to Afro-Asian studies? How can we situate the experiences of migration in Afro-Asian relations?

In order to address these questions and illuminate the specific moments in which Afro-Asian coalitions have emerged, this interdisciplinary panel examines under-studied dimensions of Afro-Asian relations, including Afro-Korean relations, mixed-race studies, and left-wing coalition movements. First, Hiroaki Matsusaka examines political essays and fictions in the 1920s and the 1930s written by African American and Japanese socialists like Harry Haywood and Sen Katayama. He examines how these radicals articulated analyses of white supremacy, global capitalism, and imperialism through cross-cultural Afro-Asian discourse. Second, Joo Young Lee discusses photographs of black Korean orphans and adoptees in African American magazines Ebony and Jet in the mid-1950s, by showing how these magazines visually narrate stories of the Korean War, mixed race, and transnational adoption. Third, Jang Wook Huh explores the affiliation between Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party and Kim Il Sung of North Korea in the early 1970s. Drawing on archival documents and newspapers, he situates this coalition within the leftist circuits that black and Asian radicals constituted from the 1920s to the 1970s as a means of testing the liabilities of idealization as a political aesthetic and a cultural heuristic. Fourth, Robeson Taj Frazier builds on the arguments put forth in his book The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination by expanding his historical examination of the life and travels of radical internationalist Vicki Garvin to include Garvin's experiences and arguments about China during the 1970s and 1980s. It was during these two decades -- a period directly after her 1960s' experience living and teaching in communist China -- that Garvin was compelled to begin making sense of China's detente with the U.S. globalism and its gradual shift away from anticapitalist and antiracist solidarity with black diasporic world. After the four presentations, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu facilitates further discussions while putting the presenters and the audience in conversation. As such, our panel considers the possibilities and limitations of Afro-Asian coalitions, materialized or imagined, from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, University of California-Irvine

Individual Presentations

• Labor, Empire, and Afro-Asian Revolutionaries: Black and Japanese Radicals in the Interwar Period - Hiro Matsusaka, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Saving Black Lives: Representations of Black Koreans in Black Magazines - Joo Young Lee, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• The Politics of Idealization in the Alliance between Eldridge Cleaver and Kim Il Sung - Jang Wook Huh, University of Washington-Seattle Campus

• Afro-Asia as Philosophy of Praxis: Vickie Garvin's Critical Conceptions of Post-Socialist China - Robeson Taj Frazier, University of Southern California