Afro Orientalism

5. Making Monkey Signify: Fred Ho’s Revolutionary Vision Quest

Afro-Orientalism’s familial relationship to other discourses of liberation is revealed by its fondness for the revolutionary imagination. W. E. B. Du Bois’s midsummer night’s dream of a colored world’s revolution nods affectionately to Communism’s wedding to happy endings. Grace and James Boggs’s dialectical humanism enacts the human potential movement integral to Marxism’s vision of a workers’ paradise. Richard Wright’s ambiguous utopias described in The Color Curtain and Black Power bear the scars of Western modernity’s brute force and the healing hopes of its demise. Robert Williams’s rhetorical transformation of China into a world without police and without race signiWes how far he physically and mentally traveled from dystopic America. For the Revolutionary Action Movement or the Nation of Islam the American city was the black man’s land, the mountaintop come to (Elijah) Muhammad. Afro-Orientalism’s utopian and speculative thrust is central to the work of Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer, and cultural worker Fred Ho. A longtime participant in Asian PaciWc American and African American political movements, Ho’s performances and recordings C H A P T E R 5 Making Monkey Signify: Fred Ho’s Revolutionary Vision Quest The culture and Arts of the oppressed owes nothing, needs not be thankful to, the culture and art of the oppressor. What oppressor cultural aspects there are have been refashioned and transformed, and dare we say, violated and miscegenated. This has been the way of the oppressed masses: the Weld slave, the coolie, the savage, the bandit, the heathen, the guerilla. —Fred Ho Music is our bomb! —Ron Sakolsky and Fred Ho 163 Promotional photograph of Fred Ho and the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble, with Esther Iverem and Alma Villegas. Photograph by Juan Sanchez; courtesy of Fred Ho. 164 – MAKING MONKEY SIGNIFY for disc and theater provide a staging ground, literally and Wguratively, for key moments in the history of Afro-Asian liberation struggle. Ho is founder and director of Big Red Media, Inc. He has released more than a dozen albums and is the founder and leader of both the Monkey Orchestra and the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble. He has coedited two books, Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution and Legacy to Liberation : Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian PaciWc America. His operas and staged theatrical productions have debuted at signiWcant American venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They include the recordings Monkey: Part One and Part Two, an adaptation of the epic Chinese fable Journey to the West; The Black Panther Ballet Suite, a multimedia narrative history of the Black Panther Party; and Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors (A New American Opera), a prolonged dramatic musical essay on African and Asian sheroes. In these works and others, Ho synthesizes African and Asian archetypes, myths, fantasies, and real-world acts of heroism with a revolutionary optimism born from a longtime engagement with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Third World liberation theory, and radical feminism. Ho’s name for this strategy, his own creative archetype, is “revolutionary vision quest.” It is a dramatic metaphor for what he perceives as the urgent necessity of discovering and reclaiming “indigenous” Afro-Asian cultural expressive forms suitable as vehicles for revolutionary politics. “Afro-Asian New American Multicultural Music” is Ho’s provisional title for this cultural work. The “Afro-Asian” designation echoes the self-description of anticolonial organizers at the Bandung Conference of 1955, a major touchstone for Ho’s theory and practice of cultural critique. Ho’s music correspondingly incorporates both folk and traditional African American and Asian American formic structures, instrumentation, and themes to produce “a musical analogy for the Chinese American identity or, even further, something Afro Asian in sensibility.”1 The “something” Ho’s work seeks to articulate in dramatic and musical terms is solidarities of politics and culture between people of color in the face of white supremacy, capitalist domination, patriarchy, and old and new forms of colonial imperialism. At the same time, his strategy of Wnding “analogy” in music for the historical experiences of blacks and Asians bespeaks a strategic antiessentialism and dialectical approach to culture and identity. Ho founded the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble, for example, “to musically express a vision of unity between the culturalsocio -political struggles of African Americans (the originator and innovators of ‘jazz’) and Asian...