Reveals a century of political solidarity uniting Asians and African Americans

As early as 1914, in his pivotal essay “The World Problem of the Color Line,” W. E. B. Du Bois was charting a search for Afro-Asian solidarity and for an international anticolonialism. In Afro-Orientalism, Bill Mullen traces the tradition of revolutionary thought and writing developed by African American and Asian American artists and intellectuals in response to Du Bois’s challenge.

Afro-Orientalism unfolds here as a distinctive strand of cultural and political work that contests the longstanding, dominant discourse about race and nation first fully named in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Mullen tracks Afro-Asian engagement with U.S. imperialism—including writings by Richard Wright, Grace and James Boggs, Robert F. Williams, and Fred Ho—and companion struggles against racism and capitalism around the globe. To this end, he offers Afro-Orientalism as an antidote to essentialist, race-based, or narrow conceptions of ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, calling on scholars in these fields to re-imagine their critical enterprises as mutually constituting and politically interdependent.

Bill V. Mullen is professor of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio, as well as the author of Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946, coeditor of Radical Revisions: Reading 1930s Culture, and the editor of Revolutionary Tales: African American Women’s Short Stories from the First Story to the Present.

"Mullen discusses both famous figures and the unjustly neglected. In doing so he offers rare insight into anti-Orientalism. Highly recommended."—Choice

"Afro-Orientalism offers a penetrating look at the history and mutuality of struggle against Western imperialism by peoples of African and Asian descent. A complex and invigorating study."—American Literature

"Mullen provides a solid foundation for ethnic scholars to re-imagine research on monocultures by embracing hybrid theorizing and polyculturalism."—MultiCultural Review

"Afro-Orientalism comes at an important moment. Beyond academic debates, recent developments in China’s diplomatic and trade relations with Africa suggest that Afro-Orientalism will be a topic of discussion for some time to come. Mullen’s book reminds us of just how long Black Americans have been interested in this topic."—Reclaiming Black History