Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (review)

In Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu explores the international journeys of antiwar and anti-imperialist activists from the United States during the Vietnam War era (1959–1975). Wu argues that the experiences of these figures in Vietnam, China, Korea, Cambodia, and Canada inflected their political consciousness and propelled their antiwar activism. For Wu, these activists came to see themselves as “internationalists” and embodied a “radical orientalism” that romanticized the East as an exemplar of decolonization and the West as arbiter of violent imperialism. By examining the experiences of such activists, their often uneasy collaborations with one another, and their connections to varying representatives from socialist Asia, Wu explores how race, ethnicity, and gender complicates and inflects the political terrain through which these figures arrive at their political moorings and activism. What emerges is a geographically expansive and theoretically complex depiction of social activism and cross-ethnic/cross-racial collaboration during the long 1960s. In so doing, Wu provides key contributions to historical narratives of social activism during the 1950s to 1970s and to theoretical conceptualizations emerging in comparative race studies.

Organized with a short introduction, three parts containing three chapters each, and a conclusion, Wu’s lucid and comprehensive history moves from an encompassing narrative of the geopolitical and national dynamics that forged the travelers’ journeys to the minute interpersonal dynamics between the activists and their “political partnerships.” Part I (chapters 1–3), “Journeys for Peace,” delineates the private life, international travels, and political activism of Robert Browne, an economic aid advisor in Cambodia and Vietnam and subsequent leader in the antiwar and third world liberation struggles during his return to the United States. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss Browne’s upbringing and identity as an African American man from the still segregated Chicago area, which instigated his travels abroad and mediated his own perceptions of and perceptions of him in Southeast Asia. In these chapters, Wu provides strong insights into the geopolitical dynamics that gave rise to both Browne’s “Black Internationalism” and “Afro-Orientalism,” key terms that express Browne’s relationality to the international community and affinities to Cambodia and Vietnam. Chapter 3 discusses how these affinities (congealed in his marriage to Huoi, a Chinese Vietnamese woman from Cambodia) incited his critique of U.S. foreign policy and involvement in antiwar activism. His family life and experiences in Southeast Asia helped to forge his “political partnerships” with major antiwar figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh. Wu compellingly examines how Browne’s reputation as a father figure in his multiracial family was symbolically valuable to antiwar activists who worked to establish themselves as paternalistic protectors of Southeast Asia.

Part II (chapters 4–6), “Journeys for Liberation,” focuses on the travels of the U.S. People’s Anti-imperialist Delegation, which began during the fall of 1969. Represented by eleven people from varying organizations in the United States, this delegation was spearheaded by Black Panther Party member Eldridge Cleaver and included notable participants such as journalist Robert Scheer, the BPP’s Elaine Browne, antiwar and women’s liberation activist Pat Sumi, and Red Guard Party member Alex Hing. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the delegates’ experiences and perceptions during their visits to North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and North Vietnam. While the delegates often recognized that they were receiving a “packaged” version of these countries, they nonetheless perceived Asia through a “radical orientalist” lens that emerged, for Wu, in their glorification of Asian women as revolutionary warriors who can use their bodies as sexual weapons. Wu explores how these perceptions iterated orientalist perceptions of Asian women as the sexually permissive dragon lady. Interestingly, the delegates’ orientalist perceptions were not only limited to views of Asia. They also emerged in Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine...