American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs by Grace Lee (review)

Director Grace Lee’s compelling documentary biography American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs follows the long life of Grace Lee Boggs (no relation to the director)—a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist who has spent the better part of the last century working in Black movements in Detroit. Boggs, now age 99, has in recent years become increasingly well-known outside of Detroit through the University of Minnesota Press’s 1998 publication of her autobiography Living for Change and a more recent (2011) collection of essays, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, coauthored by Boggs and historian and American studies scholar Scott Kurashige.

Boggs’s lifelong work revolves around the racial and labor politics of Detroit. In the 1940s she moved to the city to collaborate with C. L. R. James to develop the idea that the Black community should and would be at the center of class struggle in the United States. She has spent the majority of her life in Detroit—throughout the period of white flight, the 1967 rebellion, and the city’s massive deindustrialization. She organized, wrote, and theorized about revolution and rebellion, racial politics, and, most recently, the need to create new forms of work, collectivity, and self-transformation to respond to crises of capitalism. Lee’s film follows Boggs’s trajectory from a scholar of Hegel at Barnard during the 1930s, to her introduction to Black community organizing in a campaign to protest rat-infested housing in Chicago’s South Side in the early 1940s, to her life as a Marxist Black Power organizer and philosopher in Detroit.

The roots of this documentary lie in Lee’s 2005 film The Grace Lee Project in which she profiled Boggs as one of a number of women with her own name, Grace Lee, as part of an effort to examine Asian American female stereotypes and realities. In American Revolutionary, Lee returns to this theme to examine Boggs’s identity as a Chinese American woman who has committed her life to Black movements and a predominately Black city. Boggs notes that “I saw myself as a part of and apart from the Black community,” and Lee presents a picture of her complex trajectory: from growing up in a closely knit and relatively well-off Chinese family with very little contact with Black communities to being so deeply embedded in Detroit’s Black-activist community that the FBI wrongly identified her as Afro-Chinese. Boggs’s position is made even more complicated by the fact that increasingly, Asian American studies and movements have embraced her as an Asian American activist icon, but her life’s work and, arguably, her sense of self are much more strongly linked with Black communities and Black struggles. Lee offers all of these threads without attempting to tie them together into a tidy formulation for the viewer. Her point is that it is complicated.

Indeed, the film shows Lee and Boggs struggling to talk about identity with each other. In one scene, the director pushes her subject to talk about her identity as an Asian American woman, and Boggs exclaims: “You keep asking me this! I didn’t think of myself so much as Chinese American, I didn’t think of myself so much as a woman, because the Chinese American movement hadn’t emerged, and the women’s movement hadn’t emerged.” The scene cuts to the two women sitting together silently, Boggs smiling at the camera, Lee looking somewhat uneasily over her shoulder. Clearly, Boggs’s telling of her own identity does not fit neatly into the racial and gender narrative that Lee initially set out to tell.

American Revolutionary is especially effective at showing Boggs’s political and intellectual development: the current events that moved her, the relationships that pushed her. Both Lee’s film and Boggs herself challenge a new generation of activists and organizers to think about one’s own political life as a...