Afro Orientalism

As early as 1914, in his pivotal essay "The World Problem of the Color Line," W.E.B. Du Bois was charting a search for Afro-Asian solidarity and for an international anticolonialism. In "Afro-Orientalism, Bill Mullen traces the tradition of revolutionary thought and writing developed by African American and Asian American artists and intellectuals in response to Du Bois's challenge. Afro-Orientalism unfolds here as a distinctive strand of cultural and political work that contests the longstanding, dominant discourse about race and nation first fully named in Edward Said's "Orientalism. Mullen tracks Afro-Asian engagement with U.S. imperialism--including writings by Richard Wright, Grace and James Boggs, Robert F. Williams and Fred Ho--and companion struggles against racism and capitalism around the globe. To this end, he offers Afro-Orientalism as an antidote to essentialist, rase-based, or narrow conceptions of ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, calling on scholars in these fields to reimagine their critical enterprises as mutually constituting and politically interdependent.