Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader

For more than three decades, Fred Ho has been a radical artist and activist. As a composer and baritone saxophonist, he is famed for creating a new music that fuses Asian and African traditions. The influence of the Black Power and Black Arts movements during his coming of age inspired him to become one of the leading radical Asian American activist–artists. Ho’s passions for art and justice have always been linked—his music seeks to express his politics, and his activism has injected revolution into his art. Wicked Theory, Naked Practice is a groundbreaking collection of Ho’s writings, speeches, and interviews of the past three decades on topics ranging from Mao to Coltrane, from Sun Ra to selling out, and from fighting oppression to battling cancer. His work insists on connections among creative and artistic processes, political theorization, and activist organizing. As Robin D. G. Kelley says in the Foreword, “Ho writes, speaks, and plays in order to persuade and inspire, to expose the crimes of the ruling class, and to challenge the status quo so that we imagine a different future.” Through Wicked Theory, Naked Practice, Ho’s contributions merge political and cultural theory, shedding new light on the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s and revealing the fascinating story behind a prolific and politically engaged artist across all genres.