“Asiatic Black Man”: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes in Soviet Asia--Part I—The Shifting “Double-consciousness” of Du Bois

Abstract

Abstract This essay seeks to revisit the curious case of the “Asiatic Black Man” by demonstrating how this identity, inherent in the collective unconsciousness and shared by Muhammad Ali, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, could be consolidated as an “imagined community” through the microhistory of African Americans experiencing Soviet Asia. The essay proposes Afro-American Eurasianism as a transcontinental approach to converge the transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific perspectives in the Eurasian landmass, wherein the consilience of the Soviet overarching ambition of becoming the only world power as well as various themes that connected the micro-narrative of African Americans with the big history1 of Asia rendered Eurasianism as a shared political ideology, to be exploited by each side as a grand strategy in ending global racial politics. By positioning the twin cases of Du Bois and Hughes, this paper aims to show how the Soviet Union’s divergent endeavors of the “world revolution”—with Hungary and China as their primary targets for exporting revolutions in order to control the Eurasian “heartland”—and “socialism in one country”—with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as the in-the-making products of the Soviet nation-building experiments so as to convey the raceless image of Potemkin villages through Central Asia’s window to the world—could draw them away from their initial embrace of Black nationalism and shape their radical thoughts toward the Soviet cause. Moreover, this study posits that Soviet Asia functioned as a psychogeographical and geopolitical conduit that facilitated the elaboration of the Afro-American “Asiatic Black Man” fantasy and imagination of the communistic utopia as an alternative international order, while it unexpectedly resulted in a new “double-consciousness,” compelling Du Bois and Hughes to oscillate between Moscow and Beijing/Tashkent. (YZ)