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

China–United States relations is a large historical subject. Robeson Taj Frazier’s The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination is an important contribution to this scholarship. The book examines how some African American radical thinkers represented their solidarity and interactions with communist China during their visits there between 1949 and 1976. These radicals saw a link between antiblack racism and the rise of the United States as a world power; they thought that racial injustices “at home” were not isolated from developments in the wider world caused by their country and its allies, including white supremacy, imperialism, free-trade capitalism, militarism, and corporate domination (5). According to Frazier, it is through this worldwide view of a white-dominated power structure that the minority activists saw the need to go beyond national politics to seek dialogues with the newly formed People’s Republic of China (PRC). Fascinated by its anti-West rhetoric and elimination of Western occupation, they saw China’s peasant radicalism as an alternative to capitalism (6). Knowing Chinese, Frazier captures not only the U.S. black radicals’ thoughts and actions but also the Chinese communists’ in their political exchanges. He finds that when building their image as the anti-imperialism leader, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deliberately connected their anti-West rhetoric with that of other oppressed peoples of color and declared their support for the black struggle in the United States (6).

For Frazier, imagination was the key component of all these widely publicized cross-cultural exchanges between the black and Chinese leaders; radical imagining was crucial in “engendering and nurturing practices of liberation and radical democracy in the face of global injustice and inequality” (6–7). Such imagination transforms “hearts, minds, and souls into beings, subjects, and collectivities” and speaks to people’s “expressive and inventive capacity to render abstract visions, intentions, and drives into material processes, lifelike renderings, and socially grounded outcomes” (7). It is in short an ideological “process of contesting the worlds we inhabit and making and shaping them anew” (7). Based on this definition, the author unpacks the constructs that underpinned the black radical and Chinese communist propaganda campaigns during the Cold War: “China,” “Chinese communism,” “black liberation,” “racial solidarity,” and “Third World internationalism” (7). Frazier argues that these constructions were problematic because they were imagined to be “inclusive” and “whole” when in fact they were not. One of the constructs that Frazier focuses on is the black radicals’ and the Chinese communists’ representation of China as the antithesis of the United States. This imaginary served political purposes. By attacking the American imperialists as its ultimate enemy, the Chinese government exerted control over its people and suppressed any groups who opposed its ideology and policies. On the other hand, by echoing the Chinese criticisms of America, black activists “helped conceal the Chinese government’s repressive domestic practices and policies and the PRC’s efforts to build nationalist support among Chinese citizens by any means” (11).

After the extensive introduction (briefly summarized above), The East Is Black develops chronologically into two main sections, each of which has two chapters. Each section begins with a brief historical introduction. The first section focuses on the 1950s, when the rise of the CCP as the ruling party of China had repercussions for U.S. domestic and foreign policy and African American leftists’ conceptions of revolution. The chapters in this section trace and analyze the China journeys and writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois as well as those of William Worthy, respectively. The second section is set in the 1960s, a period during which the rift between China and the Soviet Union influenced China’s approaches to “anticolonial and antiracist movements” in different regions of the world (20). Chapter 3 follows the Cuba and China visits and...