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"Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen have assembled a first-rate dossier of Afro-Asian work. It is equal parts lyrical and analytical. Flies like a butterfly; stings like a bee."--Vijay Prashad, author of "Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity"

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AFRO ASIA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................................................................................1PART I THE AFRICAN AND ASIAN DIASPORAS IN THE WEST: 1800-1950...................................................................................................................................................20Fred Ho Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: The Roots to the Black-Asian Conflict................................................................................................................................30Lisa Yun Chinese Freedom Fighters in Cuba: From Bondage to Liberation, 1847-1898.................................................................................................................................55PART II FROM BANDUNG TO THE BLACK PANTHERS: NATIONAL LIBERATION, THE THIRD WORLD, MAO, AND MALCOLM..............................................................................................................91Mao Zedong Statement Supporting the Afro-American in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, August 8, 1963.......................................................................94Mao Zedong Statement by Mao Tse-Tung, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression, April 16, 1968.....................97Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution.................................................................................................................................155Fred Ho The Inspiration of Mao and the Chinese Revolution on the Black Liberation Movement and the Asian Movement on the East Coast..............................................................................165Diane C. Fujino The Black Liberation Movement and Japanese American Activism: The Radical Activism of Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama.............................................................................198PART III AFRO/ASIAN ARTS: CATALYSTS, COLLABORATIONS, AND THE COLTRANE AESTHETIC.................................................................................................................................217Ishmael Reed The Yellow and the Black............................................................................................................................................................................220Cheryl Higashida Not Just a "Special Issue": Gender, Sexuality, and Post-1965 Afro Asian Coalition Building in the Yardbird Reader and This Bridge Called My Back................................................256Fred Ho Bill Cole: African American Musician of the Asian Double Reeds...........................................................................................................................................265Kim Hewitt Martial Arts Is Nothing if Not Cool: Speculations on the Intersection between Martial Arts and African American Expressive Culture....................................................................285royal hartigan with Fred Ho The American Drum Set: Black Musicians and Chinese Opera along the Mississippi River.................................................................................................291Ron Wheeler with David Kaufman Is Kung Fu Racist?................................................................................................................................................................295PART IV AFRO/ASIA EXPRESSIVE WRITING............................................................................................................................................................................321David Mura and Alexs Pate Secret Colors and the Possibilities of Coalition: An African American-Asian American Collaboration.....................................................................................354Kalamu ya Salaam We Don't Stand a Chinaman's Chance Unless We Create a Revolution................................................................................................................................359Lisa Yun El Chino................................................................................................................................................................................................363Ishle Park Samchun in the Grocery Store..........................................................................................................................................................................365Maya Almachar Santos Self-Rebolusyon, April 1998.................................................................................................................................................................369JoYin C Shih Chyna and Me........................................................................................................................................................................................376Everett Hoagland All That........................................................................................................................................................................................379Contributors......................................................................................................................................................................................................383

Chapter One

Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: The Roots to the Black-Asian Conflict

When my Afro Asian Music Ensemble's debut Soul-note recording was released in late 1985-early 1986, Martin Johnson, a young African American journalist, wrote a feature on me in the City Sun. After the feature was published, a reader named Yusef Salaam wrote a letter to the paper noting the political comments I had made about "jazz"; he took exception, however, to my use of the term "Afro" in the title of my band. To him, an "Afro" was a hairdo; he preferred that I use the phrase "African-Asian."

It was not until much later, in a 1990 feature on me by Esther Iverem, an African American arts writer for New York Newsday, that I publicly clarified my use of the term "Afro Asian" as inspired by and taken from the "Afro Asian Unity Conference" of Bandung of the mid-1950s. This was the initial summit meeting of leaders from the newly independent nation-states and anticolonial movements of Africa and Asia that included Julius Nyerere, Chou En-lai, Kwame Nkrumah, and Nehru, among others. The conference gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement or "Third World" (not "third" as in lesser than first or second, but as an alternative to the two major power blocs of the West/Europe-United States and the East/Soviet bloc).

I had begun my ensemble to express musically a vision of unity between the cultural-socio-political struggles of African Americans (the originators and innovators of "jazz") and Asian Americans. Since my teen-age years, the Black Power movement (particularly the leading ideas of Malcolm X) and the Black Arts movement (especially the poetry of Baraka, Sanchez, Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets, and the music of Mingus, Coltrane, Shepp, Parker, Ellington, and Cal Massey) greatly inspired my social consciousness and identity as a...