Afro Orientalism

Acknowledgments

I owe this book to my students in the People’s Republic of China. This project was conceived in 1985 as they and I decoded James Baldwin’s “Fifth Avenue Uptown: A Letter from Harlem” at a moment when even a policy of open doors couldn’t shed light on that corner of the United States. Particularly inspiring in that course at the Changsha Railway Institute was Xiao Xiao Yu, as were the friendship and support of colleagues Chen Xiao Chen, Ren, and their son Kenny. The project deepened with the assistance of a Fulbright award to Wuhan University in the PRC, where students in a graduate course began to theorize their own AfroOrientalism while reading Claude McKay’s revolutionary sonnets and Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Zhu Ying, a brilliant and gracious woman, wrote her MA thesis on Toni Morrison out of that course. My family also lives in every page of this book, particularly my grandfather John J. Mullen, who opened the Wrst door between the Harlem Irish and this project. Liz Petrasovic has been a strong, caring, and patient partner through the long march of authorship. Max Mullen is eleven now and already a polyrhythmist and polyculturalist. He plays backbeat behind this story. A number of institutions and libraries have been exceedingly generous in support of this book. Youngstown State University granted both a sabbatical leave in 1998 and a research professorship. The University of Texas–San Antonio provided a faculty summer grant and support for Acknowledgments VII two superb research assistants. The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan provided a Bentley travel grant for use of the Robert Franklin Williams Papers. Roger Buckley at the Asian American Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut made possible my research into the Fred Ho Papers at the Thomas J. Dodd Center. The faculty and students at UConn, especially Roger and program assistant Fe Delos-Santos, were especially generous to me during my visit to the institute—special thanks to them. Other support came from the Walter Reuther Library in Detroit and the Tamiment Library at New York University . My thanks to the staffs at each of these facilities for their generous assistance with collections. Still other timely help came from the CISA Crossroads in the Americas Lecture Series, which allowed me to present developing work from this project in lecture form at Hampshire College. Special thanks to Eric Schocket for his efforts to bring me there and to Michelle Stephens for thoughtful and provocative exchange about Robert Williams and the idea of Afro-Orientalism. Other people close to this project are owed heartfelt thanks for their generosity with materials and time with interviews, especially Grace Lee Boggs and members of the Grace and James Boggs Center in Detroit, including Scott Kurashige, Jim Embry, Rick Feldman, and Shea Howell . Fred Ho made available materials that were otherwise difWcult or impossible to discover. Herb Boyd and Kalamu ya Salaam gave generously of themselves in interviews conducted for this book. Their lived history is the history I seek to resurrect. I was lucky to spend time talking with Marty Glaberman about Facing Reality and facing reality before he passed. Marty connects people and ideas in this book in the same way he did as a writer and organizer. Doug Armato has been a fabulously supportive and patient editor for this book; Gretchen Asmussen at the University of Minnesota Press guided the manuscript Xawlessly. Other journals, presses, and editors have also given their much-appreciated critical attention to early versions of this work and deserve all thanks: Ron Strickland and Amitava Kumar at Mediations helped shape an early version of my chapter on Richard Wright; Mike Sell gave a careful reading to an early draft of the VIII – ACKNOWLEDGMENTS chapter on Robert Williams and Detroit and shepherded to publication an important journal issue on transnationalism and the 1960s. Andrew Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, along with two anonymous readers, gave expert response and encouragement to an early version of my work on W. E. B. Du Bois and Dark Princess. Their special issue of positions, “The Afro-Asian Century,” is an important moment of scholarship. I share their debt to writer and editor Joe Wood, who introduced me to the “yellow Negro” and was a beam of light and honesty during his tooshort time in this world. Finally, Greg Meyerson and David Siars offered excellent advice on a...