The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination by Robeson Taj Frazier

Abstract

The East Is Black: Cold War in the Black Radical Imagination, by Robeson Taj Frazier. Durham, Duke University Press, 2015. xiv, 314 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper). It has been seventeen years since Robin D.G. Kelley and Elizabeth Esch made the case in the journal Souls that China offered black radicals a 'colored,' or Third World, Marxist model that enabled them to challenge a white and Western vision of class struggle (Souls 1.4 [1999]: 6-41). Since the publication of their ground-breaking article, a variety of monographs, edited collections, and articles have explored aspects of the meeting ground between Chinese communism and the Black radical tradition. But now, thanks to Robeson Taj Frazier's excellent study, we finally have a book-length consideration of the imaginative and intellectual space that Kelley and Esch opened a window onto in 1999. The East Is Black ranges from the Chinese Revolution of 1949 until the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976, and is structured around the interactions between the People's Republic of (prc) and six Black internationalists who inhabited the overlapping categories of intellectual, journalist, activist, and educator: W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, William Worthy, Robert and Mabel Williams, and Victoria Vicky Garvin. In addition, Frazier provides two brief sections that effectively encapsulate the main contours of Chinese history during the periods under consideration, as well as a coda on the meanings of Sino-US rapprochement and a powerful, personal postscript that takes up the author's own relationship to this topic and the prospects for freedom and unfreedom in the two societies today. There are a lot of moving parts to the complex story of Black radicalism and the PRC, but Frazier's astute organization in itself brings an enhanced clarity to his analysis. An interdisciplinary work that operates in the fields of media, cold war, intersectionality, social movement, and cultural studies, not to mention African American and Chinese history, The East Is Black advances an array of academic and political debates. To point to one example from each of these areas, Frazier's account deepens the connection between political consciousness and media production and consumption, demonstrates Cold War continuities with longer histories of Western colonialism, explains how heteropatriarchal sensibilities shaped and were at times contested by pro-PRC Black internationalists, revises the still-dominant notion that states rather than social movements are the proper subject of international relations, documents how cultural production created an imagined bridge between Communist Chinese and African American contexts, buttresses the long civil rights movement paradigm, and offers a developed analysis of a relatively unexplored dimension of PRC public diplomacy during the Mao years. …