Afro Orientalism

Introduction: Afro-Orientalism and Other Tales of Diaspora

In his 1941 collaborative photodocumentary 12 Million Black Voices, a study of African American migration to Chicago, Richard Wright casts himself as a participant observer in this memorial description of a southern black peasantry he had not so very long ago left behind. Recalling Jim Crow life in rural Mississippi as a persisting nightmare—“as though the Lords of the Land had waved a magic wand and cast a spell upon us, a spell from which we cannot awaken”—Wright recounts moments of abjection and reverie expressed in secular songs sung by black families behind closed doors. Some tunes, he remembers, protest the indifference of poor whites to black suffering. Still other times, he writes, songs emerge “when we feel self-disgust at our bare lot, when we contemplate our lack of courage in the face of daily force.” In these moments, “we are seized with a desire to escape our shameful identiWcation; and, overwhelmed emotionally, we seek to become protectively merged with the least-known and farthest removed race of men we know; yes, when we weigh ourselves and Wnd ourselves wanting, we say with a snicker of self-depreciation”: White folks is evil And niggers is too So glad I’m a Chinaman I don’t know what to do . . .1 I N T R O D U C T I O N Afro-Orientalism and Other Tales of Diaspora The problem of the twenty-Wrst century is to re-invent political practices that account for new social problems without forgetting those that we have inherited from the past. —Arif Dirlik, Amerasia Journal XI Wright moves swiftly past this knowing and ironic memory, but we should not. In addition to disclosing a poignant example of resistance culture, this peasant spiritual’s playful positing of an imaginary Asianness as a Xeeting antidote for African American suffering should resonate in multiple ways for readers familiar with twentieth-century geopolitics and writings on race. From the moment of his 1900 declaration that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the world color line, W. E. B. Du Bois hoped for just such radically imaginative (if more healthily assertive) linkages between and among people of color in response to white Western domination. Indeed, it was the Japanese victory over Russia in 1904, the century’s Wrst major victory over a white nation by a colored one, that moved Du Bois to declare Asia the fraternal twin of Africa in the struggle to decolonize the modern world, and contributed to his lifelong interest in Asian politics and culture. Second, Wright’s signifying snippet resonates with and anticipates contemporary academic deliberations on racial identity. Choked by Jim Crow segregation , black sharecroppers attacked racial binarism with a creative double consciousness. Implicit in their critique of brutalizing Jim Crow norms is a satirical and strategic antiessentialism that sees race, and racism, as being devalued once the possibility of an ulterior miscegenation—colored mixing—is thinkable, if not allowable. Thinking dialectically, as this vernacular syllogism invites us to do, China and the Chinaman represent an imaginary “third way” out of the crushing oppositional hierarchies of the American South’s peculiarly brutal history. Asia’s distance in this parable is its utopian attraction, far removed, literally and Wguratively, from the sphere of Western power. Its surprising appearance in a Mississippi folk song is a prime example of what Robin D. G. Kelley has called, in a different context, the “freedom dreams” of the black radical imagination.2 Yet the temptation to make a fetish of this local anecdote, to inXate it to world-historical or world-biographical signiWcance, might also be tempered by another critical problem it evokes, namely, the tendency of Western speakers to conjure Asia primarily for the purposes of delineating Occidental problems and desires. In his still-dominative study of XII – INTRODUCTION the subject, Edward Said writes: “To the Westerner . . . the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West; to some of the German Romantics , for example, Indian religion was essentially an Oriental version of Germano-Christian pantheism. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental.”3 Said’s invitation to understand Orientalism as both an oppressive discursive trend in Western thought and a...