Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (review)

As a student of second-wave feminism, I have been familiar with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's work for a while now, and I was looking forward to the publication of her book. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era provides a much-needed transnational perspective on peace activism during the Vietnam War, a well-studied chapter in American history, yet one whose history has been told strictly from an American point of view until now. Radicals on the Road examines the transnational dialogues created by American peace activists who traveled to Southeast Asia before and during the Vietnam War as well as organized conferences in Canada where they welcomed delegates from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. As a result of these dialogues, peace activists, radicals, and feminists developed, or, depending on the case, strengthened their critiques of the American policies in Vietnam and of American society in general. More specifically, these political dialogues, as part of the antiwar movement, fueled the political imagination of the black power and women's liberation movements. Wu's book is remarkable for its ability to tell the complex histories of these activists' travels while highlighting how their different experiences in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced their understanding and reactions to the events they were witnessing. This thoroughly researched book also makes significant contributions to cultural and feminist theory, by coining terms like "radical orientalism" and by unearthing the complex history of global sisterhood.

The book combines exhaustive archival research with oral history interviewing with many former participants in antiwar activism. While not a speaker of Vietnamese, the author traveled throughout Vietnam and interviewed, either in English or with the help of translators, Vietnamese diplomats, journalists, and members of the Vietnam Women's Union who had been involved in the political dialogue with American activists. One of the strengths of this book, which are many, consists in recuperating the perspectives of the Vietnamese women and men who entered this dialogue with the West and of their contributions to this dialogue.

The most interesting theoretical contribution of the book consists in the concept of radical orientalism, which Wu coins to explain the cultural attitudes of the radical and antiwar activists involved in these dialogues. The way American activists perceived their Southeast Asian counterparts followed the cultural logic of orientalism as defined by Edward Said, with an important twist: if orientalist scholars viewed the East as mysterious, incomprehensible, and backward, American peace activists glorified it as the site of a socialist and anti-imperialist revolution as well as of a revolution in gender roles. In Wu's words, unlike the orientalist discourses analyzed by Said but following a similar logic, American peace activists idealized the East and denigrated the West.

Radicals on the Road begins with three chapters dedicated to Bob Browne, an African American graduate of the University of Chicago's prestigious MBA program who worked as an American aid adviser in Cambodia and South Vietnam between 1955 and 1961. Animated by an idealist vision of what U.S. economic aid could offer Southeast Asian countries (reconstructing agriculture after the war, stimulating industry, rebuilding infrastructure), Browne soon became disillusioned with American policies. After his return to the United States, Browne became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and an important figure in the antiwar and black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Browne had strong personal ties with Vietnam: while in Cambodia, he met and eventually married a woman of Vietnamese and Chinese descent. Back in the United States, Browne became an early collaborator and supporter of Thich Nhat Hanh. These connections lent him credibility in the peace movement; after a disappointing run for political office, Browne focused his energies on the black liberation struggle, which he viewed as similar to the struggle for liberation in third world countries...