The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination by Robeson Taj Frazier (review)

It has been seventeen years since Robin D.G. Kelley and Elizabeth Esch made the case in the journal Souls that “China offered black radicals a ‘colored,’ or Third World, Marxist model that enabled them to challenge a white and Western vision of class struggle” (Souls 1.4 [1999]: 6–41). Since the publication of their ground-breaking article, a variety of monographs, edited collections, and articles have explored aspects of the meeting ground between Chinese communism and the Black radical tradition. But now, thanks to Robeson Taj Frazier’s excellent study, we finally have a book-length consideration of the imaginative and intellectual space that Kelley and Esch opened a window onto in 1999.

The East Is Black ranges from the Chinese Revolution of 1949 until the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976, and is structured around the interactions between the People’s Republic of China (prc) and six Black internationalists who inhabited the overlapping categories of intellectual, journalist, activist, and educator: W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, William Worthy, Robert and Mabel Williams, and Victoria “Vicky” Garvin. In addition, Frazier provides two brief sections that effectively encapsulate the main contours of Chinese history during the periods under consideration, as well as a coda on the meanings of Sino-US rapprochement and a powerful, personal postscript that takes up the author’s own relationship to this topic and the prospects for freedom and unfreedom in the two societies today. There are a lot of moving parts to the complex story of Black radicalism and the PRC, but Frazier’s astute organization in itself brings an enhanced clarity to his analysis.

An interdisciplinary work that operates in the fields of media, cold war, intersectionality, social movement, and cultural studies, not to mention African American and Chinese history, The East Is Black advances an array of academic and political debates. To point to one example from each of these areas, Frazier’s account deepens the connection between political consciousness and media production and consumption, demonstrates Cold War continuities with longer histories of Western colonialism, explains how heteropatriarchal sensibilities shaped and were at times contested by pro-PRC Black internationalists, revises the still-dominant notion that states rather than social movements are the proper subject of international relations, documents how cultural production created an imagined bridge between Communist Chinese and African American contexts, buttresses the “long civil rights movement” paradigm, and offers a developed analysis of a relatively unexplored dimension of PRC public diplomacy during the Mao years. The East Is Black’s great strength in being able to make so many claims and take part in so many conversations is also what some readers might find off-putting. In the chapter on the Du Boises, for example, literary scholars will undoubtedly enjoy Frazier’s eight-page reading of W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel Worlds of Color (New York, 1961), while for some historians this might seem a too-lengthy diversion from the matter of the Du Boises travels throughout China. On balance, though, Frazier’s interdisciplinary reach certainly helps rather than hinders his most important arguments and narrative arc.

Even more than these broad claims and contributions, perhaps the most significant aspect of this book is its detailed attention to the encounters between its main characters and the PRC. In each of the four main chapters, there is something new to be learned about both the function of China in the Black radical imaginary and the individual or individuals under discussion. In terms of the Du Boises, we see how the PRC aided W.E.B.’s reformulations of Western Marxism and Shirley Graham’s evolving feminism, and how Mao’s government successfully steered the couple away from a critical analysis of either Great Leap Forward-induced starvation or Chinese repression in Tibet. Regarding William Worthy...