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W. E. B. Du Bois dedicated more writing to the subject of Asia than any African American public intellectual before or after him. He visited Asia twice, Wrst in 1936 and again in 1959. The book he described as his “favorite,” Dark Princess, featured an Indian protagonist, Princess Kautilya . His columns, newspaper articles, and essays on Japan, China, and India in the Crisis, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Aryan Path, and other periodicals number more than one hundred. In 1906, only three years after he published The Souls of Black Folk, events in Asia forced Du Bois to reWne his prescription for the twentieth century. About the recently completed war between Japan and Russia, Du Bois wrote, “For the Wrst time in a thousand years a great white nation has measured arms with a colored nation and has been found wanting. The C H A P T E R 1 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Afro-Asian Fantasia Last night I sat in Utopia and saw Egypt and India, Africa and the South Seas parade in the sleek sweet splendor of Parisian Wnery made and planned in High Harlem. It was a lovely sight—such a poem as only colored New York can do, and do it carelessly, laughingly, perfectly, bathed in light and music. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis, June 1922 At last India is rising again to that great and fateful moral leadership of the world which she exhibited so often in the past in the lives of Buddha, Mohammed, and Jesus Christ, and now again in the life of Gandhi. . . . This mighty experiment, together with the effort of Russia to organize work and distribute income according to some rule of reason, are the great events of the modern world. The black folk of America should look upon the present birth-pains of the Indian nation with reverence, hope and applause. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis, 1930 1 Russo-Japanese war has marked an epoch. The magic of the word ‘white’ is already broken, and the Color Line in civilization has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past. The awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can doubt.”1 In 1914, Du Bois again reconWgured his color line trope to predict “a great coming war of Races.” In “The World Problem of the Color Line,” he wrote, “If . . . men would look carefully around them . . . they would see that the Problem of the Color Line in America instead of being the closing chapter of past history is the opening page of a new era. All over the world the diversiWed races of the world are coming into close and closer contact as never before. We are nearer China today than we were to San Francisco yesterday.”2 That his famous color line conception always included Asia is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Du Bois’s most hallowed formulation. Recovering this aspect is signiWcant. Seeing the color line as both racial and hemispheric allows us to see all the things that Du Bois saw in his corpus of Asian writings: the history to antiquity of Afro-Asian exchange; global geographic border crossings; ongoing multiracial diasporas; emerging black Atlantics and PaciWcs; inWnite horizons of political possibility. Indeed, as the epigraphs to this chapter begin to make clear, across the span of his life, Du Bois tended to invest Asia and the Asiatic with his most far-Xung hopes and desires as they pertained to a range of issues that preoccupied him: the political and biological relationships between colored peoples and nations; the role of culture in the deWnition and preservation of racial attributes; the fate of national, anticolonial, and other revolutionary struggles; the temporal and geographic parameters of ideas. Yet the interpretive burden of these ambitions, suggested by the fantastical language with which he often expressed them, was also a recurring theme of much of Du Bois’s Asian writings. On February 20, 1937, after his initial visit to China in the midst of its civil war and battle with imperialist Japan, Du Bois sketched this dilemma in his Pittsburgh Courier column in ways central to an understanding not only of his own lifelong body of thought but of the larger discourse I am calling Afro-Orientalism: 2 – W. E. B. DU BOIS’S AFRO-ASIAN FANTASIA [18.222.163.31] Project...

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