Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities by Rychetta Watkins (review)

In Rychetta Watkins’s account of the cultural productions by African Americans and Asian Americans from 1966 to 1981, Black Power and Yellow Power constructed parallel and related aesthetics calling for self-determination and self-representation, rather than engendering separatism, solipsism, and conflict. Although she stops short of arguing that these aesthetics provided the grounds for a unified social movement, Watkins contends that examining “‘Power’ as a hermeneutic born of the web of social, historical, and cultural interactions, influences, and cooperations that characterize black and Asian interactions in America … complicate[s] binaristic notions of race beyond black and white and provide[s] the basis for an indigenous American comparative ethnic cultural studies” (3-4). She traces the literary trope of the guerilla—a solitary, ideologically radical, counterhegemonic figure committed to fighting inequality—in black and Asian American theoretical writings, movement newspapers, literary anthologies, and novels, arguing throughout that these cultural productions convey a shared revolutionary stance opposed to structures of colonial and racial domination.

Watkins seeks to recuperate the Power era from too-easy dismissals that relegate its ideologies, cultural productions, and social and political practices to the dustbin of history. This is an important project, and her comparative methodology is the ideal way to combat charges that narrow cultural nationalism dealt a death-blow to the multiracial beloved community of the civil rights movement. Watkins examines how Black Power advocates, including Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael, along with Asian American writers adapted Frantz Fanon’s insights on the psychological impact of colonialism on subjugated peoples, and call for militant resistance in the service of national liberation in the context of the United States. Having established that black and Asian American radicals shared an anticolonialist framework, Watkins analyzes the figure of the guerilla fighter in The Black Panther newspaper and Gidra, the most important Asian American movement periodical, arguing that the Vietnamese liberation fighter occupied a central place in the imaginaries of black and Asian American activists. Watkins goes on to argue that the compilation of literary anthologies including Black Fire (1968), Black Arts (1969), and AIIIEEEEE! (1974) negotiated new black and Asian American subjectivities through strategies of representation and policing the definition of authentic literature; in this portion of the book, she shifts away from the revolutionary nationalism of the Black Panthers and the Gidra collective and toward the cultural nationalism of Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Frank Chin and Chin’s AIIIEEEEE! cohorts. Finally, Watkins takes up the figure of the guerilla in three novels: Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957, but reissued in 1976). In each, she argues that the protagonist represents a “guerilla subjectivity” that “privileges self-determination, self-definition, and the commitment to radical social change through individual action” (142).

Comparative work like Black Power, Yellow Power promises to illuminate patterns that transcend racial categories and reveal both commonalities and particularities in the cultural productions and experiences of racial groups. But comparative scholars will inevitably confront challenges from specialists who charge that they do not attend to the intricacies of the fields they incorporate into their analyses. In this case, it is clear that Watkins is more deeply rooted in African American studies than in Asian American studies: she misinterprets “Nisei” as first-generation rather than second in the introduction (but gets it right later), misspells the first or last names of a couple of scholars and activists, and misplaces the locus of Gidra in the Bay Area rather than Los Angeles. More consequentially, in her discussion of anthologies, she neglects Counterpoint (1976), a highly influential reader that incorporated selections on Asian American history and contemporary communities issues, but also included a full section of literature. These inconsistencies, however, in no way detract from the significance of this book nor obviate its critical argument.

Black Power, Yellow Power is an ambitious work filled with powerful...