AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (review)

In AfroAsian Encounters, Hernandez and Steen set out to "examine AfroAsian interconnections across a variety of cultural, political, and historical contexts in order to examine how the two groups have interacted, and have construed one another, as well as how they have been set in opposition to each other by white systems of racial domination" (1). Although this is a lot to tackle, the two editors generally pull it off. Joining Bill Mullen's Afro-Orientalism and Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh's special issue of positions entitled The Afro Asian Century, this wide-ranging, ambitious project spans both centuries and continents, covering everything from Indo Caribbean art to African Canadian identity, Asian American hip hop to the swing Mikados of the late 1930s.

This breadth is the volume's major strength and chief weakness. On the one hand, the essays engage with several disciplines: anthropology, ethnic studies, American studies, pop culture studies, sociology and history, and multiple mediums: literature, film, painting, music, martial arts. On the other hand, that eclecticism threatens the volume's coherence, giving it a somewhat amorphous feel. I suspect this is due in part to the fact that these essays broadly share a common topic, but they do not share a methodological, intellectual or ideological approach that helps frame them.

AfroAsian Encounters is divided into four sections: "Positioning AfroAsian Racial Identities"; "Confronting the Color Hierarchy"; "Performing AfroAsian Identities" and "Celebrating Unity." If each section's contents at times feel arbitrary—many essays could go in multiple sections—that is because these topics inevitably bleed into one another.

Since his Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting is a clear influence, it is fitting that Vijay Prashad's Foreword opens the collection. "Bandung is Done" situates the essays in the context of the 1955 Asian-African Conference where 29 countries met to declare Third World independence and anticolonial solidarity. In the wake of deadly cultural nationalisms—including the U.S.' "War on Terror"—and structural adjustment, the Bandung dream might seem both naïve and hopelessly outdated. And yet, Prashad argues, if we wish to combat global inequality and "corporate multiculturalism," we need work like AfroAsian Encounters to unearth the "epistemological and historical archive of solidarity" (xxi) needed to forge new anti-imperial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist visions.

Though every essay does not live up to Prashad's ambitions, several begin to fill in that archive. In Part I, Sanda Mayzaw Lwin's essay on the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision explores how Justice Harlan's dissenting opinion appealed to nativist sentiment by decrying the fact that the "absolutely excluded" "Chinaman" (21) could legally cross the color line while black citizens could not. In "Crossings in Prose: Jade Snow Wong and the Demand for a New Kind of Expert," Cynthia Tolentino shows how early sociology, known for pathologizing its black objects of study, simultaneously defined a "process by which Asian Americans could become knowledge producers of exotic information" (39). Intervening in race(ist) discourse, Wong positioned Chinese Americans as "transnational subjects," moving them from object to subject status.

Central to AfroAsian Encounter's historical archive is the theme of racial passing and performance, with two essays handling the topic particularly well. Steen's "Racing American Modernity: Black Atlantic Negotiations of Asia and the 'Swing' Mikados" is a rich and fascinating look at how black performers impersonating feudal Japanese represented Asia as a "site through which the United States would create a modern status distinct from that of Europe" (169). Blackness then became "the vehicle through which Asia could be Americanized" (169). In the more contemporary example of the Jackie Chan–Chris Tucker Rush Hour films, Mita Banerjee argues that Chan's "straining of the confines of the minstrel form is enabled by [Tucker's] adhesion to and his entrapment in minstrelsy" (205). Their AfroAsian partnership functions to both flatten multicultural L.A. and expand the cultural space afforded to Asians and Asian Americans on screen. In each case, racial minstrelsy...