Introduction: Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations

In her article for this special issue of Scholar & Feminist, Apryl Berney explores the musical collaborations of Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto, who grew up together in San Francisco’s Fillmore district. ¹ In one of the duo’s most famous songs, “In the Basement,” James and DeSanto celebrate the power and possibility of the private domestic spaces in which they played and created together. We take this song – and James and DeSanto’s insistence that the basement is “where it’s at” – as a metaphor for the epistemological project we embark upon in this issue. We suggest that it is only by moving beyond the public, institutionalized space of the archive and toward more unknown registers that we might see and hear the fullest expressions of Afro-Asian affiliations and alliance: formations that become knowable only through an explicitly feminist and queer framework.

By using this metaphor of the basement as supplement – that is, in the Derridean sense of an addition that is also constitutive – we do not conceive of “feminist and queer Afro-Asian formations” as a recuperative project. Rather, we foreground elusive, discounted, or even illegible, practices, social relations, and spaces within and beyond the historical record, so as to illuminate the role that intimacy, affect, and aesthetics play in comparative racialization. Cultural historians and literary critics such as Ann Laura Stoler, Nayan Shah, and Lisa Lowe have recently turned to the analytic of intimacy to examine public archives in new ways, searching for those “proximities of power” through which the production of racialized difference is constructed and contested (e.g., in the close encounters of plantation economies, in prison barracks, and in the boarding school). ² For cultural studies scholars, intimacy not only names state management of racial difference and affiliation, but also provides new ways to read cultural forms in relation to the archive. Intimacy can allow us to access, however contingently and ephemerally, forms of relationality that remain “inaccessible and unseen” within historical registers of colonial and postcolonial state governance. ³ Intimacy, in this sense, gives expression to tacit, minor, or ephemeral affective relations that remain difficult to locate within state or official archives and that may surface more readily within the domains of the aesthetic and the representational.

Drawing on David Scott’s definition of the archive as “not merely a collection” but a “generative system … that governs the production and appearance of statements” (qtd. in Thomas), ⁴ Caribbean scholar Deborah A. Thomas names the archive – or what she calls the counterarchive – as a site that best creates “possibilities for seeing connections previously unexamined and for reordering our ontological taken-for-granteds.” ⁵ Thomas turns to literature, film, and ethnography, specifically, as constituting counterarchives. These forms of representation move us away from the “nationalist myopia” ⁶ that plagues narratives of anti-colonial resistance, and toward thinking about racial subordination as “an effect of class formation over time and space that is not only imminently racialized and gendered but also transnational in scope.” ⁷ Thomas’s redefinition of the archive as produced out of the intersectional and transnational processes that shape culture speaks to the focus of our interventions into Afro-Asian studies.

This special issue – the first edited collection on queer and feminist approaches to Afro-Asian studies – extends the work that has been done in feminist and queer cultural history to attend to what is “knowable” beyond the epistemological object of the archive. Drawing upon cultural history, literary analysis, performance studies, and visual art discourses, the formations that contributors to this issue analyze cohere around two key interventions in conventional comparative methods of analysis. First, when doing historical recuperative work, they engage the past against the grain of historicism. Second, several push beyond the archive to highlight the importance of cultural production as “the material site of struggle” through which “critical subjects and collectivities can be reproduced in new configurations, with new coherences.” ⁸ Like Thomas, we aver that nonheteronormative subjects and collectivities most often appear in spaces and forms that lie beyond empirical analysis, and within more aesthetic and representational modes like those of music, visual art, literature, and dance. Together, the contributors to this issue capture a sense of queer and feminist Afro-Asian studies as a varied and diverse emerging field with three overlapping aims: to illuminate the cross-racial political and creative labor of women and queer subjects, to critique the heteropatriarchy of Afro-Asian solidarity history, and to critically reimagine new shapes and possibilities for interracial affiliations.

Reviewing Afro-Asian Studies

The body of scholarship now known as Afro-Asian studies has rapidly expanded over the past two decades. Heralded by the recent turn toward comparative racialization, Afro-Asian critiques recuperate legacies of anti-imperial and postcolonial solidarity to promote an oppositional historical consciousness and to provide models for present and future cross-racial alliances. The field has emerged, largely, out of Asian American studies, both as a corrective to the model minority myth of Asian American racial formation and as “a nostalgic response to the rise of Asian capitalism on a world scale” under neoliberal global economic reforms. ⁹ The privileged relationship of elite Asian diasporic subjects to global capital within and beyond the United States has underscored a narrative that revises America’s history of systemic racial injustice. By positioning Asian Americans over their African American counterparts as upwardly mobile subjects driven by a strong work ethic, post-Civil Rights discourse in the United States depicts white assimilation and antiblack racism as the path of minority progress for Asian Americans.

In response, ethnic studies scholars began to recover evidence of a class-based internationalism, spanning the anti-colonial movements of the modernist era to the third-world solidarities of the 1960s, in order to highlight white supremacy as a common legacy of oppression between Asia and Africa. This move aimed to remind readers of the anti-racist investments of Asian and Asian American leaders. At the same time, it sought to resituate United States-based movements for racial justice – such as Civil Rights and Black Power – within a history of black internationalism that was directly influenced by Asian anti-colonialisms. ¹⁰

More recently, the field has tracked the shifting terrain of racial management in the United States, produced first by a “third wave” of working-class South Asian American and Muslim Asian American immigration in the 1980s and 1990s ¹¹ and later by the entrenchment of the Islamophobic security state during the post-9/11 U.S.-led global War on Terror. This shifting terrain disrupts the easy association of Asian Americans with model minority subjectivity – a break that has led to heightened attention to the contradictions of Asian American racializations. Even as the figure of the Asian American model minority prevails, the xenophobic pathologizing of Muslim religious identity emerges, within this same context, as linked to the logics of state violence that criminalize U.S. blackness. These overlapping genealogies of Asian American racial formation, produced out of class factioning and geopolitical realignment, have deepened the sense of urgency for comparative racialization projects.

Drawing upon a resulting desire to promote histories of crossings between Asian and African diasporas, scholarship from Vijay Prashad’s path-breaking Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (2002) to Nico Slate’s more recent Colored Cosmopolitanism (2012) has mobilized cross-cultural and transnational approaches to theorizing Asian and African racial formations. ¹² Turning to public archives and the personal collections of political leaders, these studies reveal the deep history of political cross-fertilizations between African and Asian leaders across the twentieth century, including those among Chairman Mao, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh. They focus on friendships, such as that of W.E.B. Du Bois and Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian nationalist who Du Bois proclaimed a “martyr to British intolerance,” ¹³ and on political strategies of anti-imperialist struggle, such as King’s proclamation of Gandhi as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” ¹⁴ The influential 1955 Bandung Conference organized by state leaders of nearly 30 newly independent Asian and African countries has, in particular, functioned as a milestone of Afro- Asian internationalism and coalition. ¹⁵ Indeed, many of the contributors to this issue critically engage with Bandung ‘s lasting legacy and impact on the formation of Afro-Asian consciousness and scholarship.

In looking back at this body of work, however, we identify some epistemological limitations in its critical genealogy, several of which are conditioned by the field’s unexamined privileging of historical methodology. The first limitation is characterized by content: examining the more than dozen Afro-Asian anthologies and monographs currently in print reveals an almost-exclusive focus on men as political and historical actors in the construction of cross-racial solidarities. Because scholars rely so heavily on evidence gleaned from public records and institutional archives, the solidarities we find within Afro-Asian scholarship are overwhelmingly among male intellectuals, activists, and artists who benefited from the freedom of international mobility and whose ideas and actions have been esteemed as historically relevant.

In Colored Cosmopolitanism, for example, Slate details the strategic collaborations between “forward-thinking” South Asian socialists and politicians, such as Cedric Dover, to black leaders in the Jim Crow U.S. South; these collaborations initiated a “shared struggle for human rights that transcended national notions of freedom.” ¹⁶ Slate captures Dover’s deep connection to the African American community by including archival photos that feature Dover’s personal copy of Du Bois’s 1940 autobiographical essay Dusk of Dawn, and a personal snapshot of him with Langston Hughes. These striking images vivify the historical narrative Slate traces, but also represent a larger desire within Afro-Asian studies for the archive to produce tangible evidence of cross-racial solidarities – a desire that overlooks the unspoken heteronormativity that characterizes the cosmopolitan anti-imperialism that Slate unveils. The archive thus risks appearing as a transparent repository of a radical past in Afro-Asian historical analysis, rather than as the “regulating apparatus” that black feminist scholars like Saidiya Hartman caution us to read in more critical ways. ¹⁷

Even in work that adopts a more eclectic and selective approach to the archive, heteromasculinity is naturalized as a condition of possibility for oppositional politics. In his 2012 interdisciplinary study Black Star, Crescent Moon, Sohail Daulatzai presents a brilliant analysis of the radical politics of black Islam, and examines a swath of history that comprises what he calls “the Muslim International,” from the community leadership of Malcolm X to the contemporary cultural production of hip hop artist Mos Def. ¹⁸ But, like Slate’s gendered cosmopolitanism, Daulatzai’s wide-ranging historical study selects almost entirely for black Muslim men, revealing an unquestioned link between straight men and radicalism. This masculinized framing of the Muslim International leads him to foreground what Grace K. Hong, citing black feminist writer Audre Lorde, calls the “patrilineage” of cultural and state nationalisms. ¹⁹

Of course, most of these texts do attend to gender in some way, either by acknowledging singular examples of women in Afro-Asian history or by critiquing the masculinism of U.S. imperialism and capitalism. Yet, the affective rhetoric that comprises the “manifesto poetics” of Afro-Asian studies nevertheless privileges militant, heteromasculine revolutionary language and representational forms. ²⁰ In what is arguably the most influential and oft-cited study in the field, Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting presents the “street-fighting prowess” of kung fu star Bruce Lee as a symbol of the unflinching yet artful politics Prashad would like to engender. ²¹ Recalling Lee’s cult status as an anti-imperial hero among the oppressed in places from Prashad’s native Calcutta to the Bronx, Prashad analogizes the project of political liberation to Lee’s masculine athleticism. ²² In very different ways, then, Afro-Asian critiques exhibit what Susan Fraiman calls a “cool masculinity,” ²³ in which left cultural scholars and artists present a “repeated association of masculinity with ‘true’ oppositional politics.” ²⁴ However, because scholars figure this association as historically grounded in archival evidence, the affective and aesthetic dimension of their work is coded as empirical.

Much of this scholarship, we thus argue, upholds a limited model of cross-racial brotherhood, as queer and women’s experiences are marginalized, rendered illegible, or simply elided. These lacunae often reflect the patriarchal views held by the historical and cultural subjects upon which these studies focus. As Yuichiro Onishi acknowledges in his recent Transpacific Antiracism (2013), many prominent twentieth-century public figures engaged with anti-imperial internationalisms “without interrogating the operations of gender and sexual normativity that reified diplomacy and international affairs as spheres of male activity.” ²⁵ In response to these fraternal Afro-Asian formations, we frame this special issue as an intervention into heteropatriarchal cultures and histories of cross-racial struggle and resistance. The contributors to this issue seek to elucidate cultural representations of alliance that complicate the commonly cited Afro-Asian trinity of kung fu films, hip hop, and jazz.

Some meaningful attention has been given to the role that gender and sexuality play in cross-racial histories of public intellectualism and cultural production. A number of contemporary ethnic studies scholars, for example, have explored the way that queer and feminist artists deploy hip hop – as both musical genre and an everyday cultural practice – to challenge heteropatriarchy across racial lines. ²⁶ Scholars like Daniel Kim, Laura Pulido, Helen Heran Jun, Julia H. Lee, and Vivek Bald, meanwhile, have focused on gender and sexuality in their historical and literary comparative racialization projects. ²⁷ Elizabeth Armstrong has also identified the rise of an anti-imperialist women’s internationalism, beginning with the 1949 Conference of the Women of Asia, as an under-examined feminist precursor to the global “South-South commonalty and third-world agenda” of Bandung. ²⁸ And Bill Mullen and Diane Fujino have attended to the cross-racial activism of Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama, respectively. ²⁹

Yet, even within these efforts, limitations persist. Mullen, for example, characterizes the “wonderfully surprising” interracial marriage of Grace and James Boggs as an “exclamation point for what remains to be understood as the most significant personal Afro-Asian collaboration in U.S. radical history.” ³⁰ Heterosexual couplehood is here idealized as structuring conditions of possibility for cross-racial solidarity. As we suggest, this naturalization of heterosexuality – and the unmarked structure of heteronormativity more broadly – constitutes a wider pattern in the field of Afro-Asian studies. The field either imagines heterosexual couplehood as an expression of radical shared struggle, as in the example of Boggs (and, often, Kochiyama), or it prioritizes social relations that implicitly cohere within a heteronormative logic. Where women are marginalized within Afro-Asian studies, queer histories and relations are largely unintelligible.

To be clear, in critiquing the ways that historiographical methods produce heteronormative framings of Afro-Asian studies, we do not view the collective work of this issue as simply that of identifying a negligent way of thinking about alliance, or of issuing a demand for recognition or inclusivity. As scholars committed to cross-racial analysis, we instead identify Afro-Asian studies as constrained by an epistemological blindspot that demands queer and feminist interventions and methods. We set forth these observations in hopes of pushing the field to realize its full radical potential.

In their groundbreaking anthology Strange Affinities, Grace K. Hong and Rod Ferguson elaborate upon persisting aporias in comparative studies of race. They observe that the epistemological structures of comparative methods based in minority nationalisms have remained largely unmarked. They also argue that the activation of feminist of color and queer of color critiques in projects of comparison can destabilize normative methods of comparison. Understood as comparative analytics rather than identity categories, feminist of color and queer of color critiques treat objects of comparison as dynamic and shifting and not always “empirically observable.” ³¹ They thus allow us to see, for example, how the differential incorporation of Asian Americans into the state and cultural fold has occurred over and against the perceived gender non-normativity and sexual immorality of other racial groups, like African Americans. ³² This example shows how gender and sexual variegations shape racial difference. Existing work in Afro-Asian studies has tended to presuppose the compulsory heterosexuality of liberal social formations like the “nation” or “capital,” and has thus reproduced, however inadvertently, a heteronormative and male-centered genealogy of cross-racial alliance.

By calling for queer and feminist approaches to comparative racialization, this issue brings the overlapping genealogies of women of color feminism and queer of color critique to bear on Afro-Asian studies. ³³ These genealogies require that our models of solidarity not only rewrite racial and national divisions, but also challenge the gendered and heteronormative structures of power upon which these divisions rest. When we consider that coalition-building across national differences is one of the central concerns of transnational feminism, and that a critique of identity politics and non-normativity is a core strength of queer studies, it seems clear that an intersectional cross-racial analysis would deepen the intervention that comparative racialization presents for state-based nationalisms and racial divisions. This task seems crucial if our aim within the fields of ethnic, American, postcolonial, and diaspora studies is to decolonize knowledge production. In deploying queer and feminist modes of cultural critique and possibility, we thus take up Gayatri Gopinath’s call to “produce alternative understandings of what constitutes the political. ³⁴ This special issue asks: How can we imagine a counterdiscourse that challenges not only racism, imperialism, and class disparities, but also heteropatriarchy and sexism? How might this counterdiscourse make for a more politically robust conceptualization of Afro-Asian alliance as a model of collective organizing and consciousness? What discursive forms of political agency can we envision besides – and as what Eve Sedgwick calls “beside” ³⁵ – race-based oppositional practices like direct action, armed militancy, and public intellectualism?

1. This special issue has benefited from the support of many people: Tami Navarro and a diverse group of peer reviewers offered insightful editorial comments on the articles collected here, Carolyn Yates provided meticulous copyedits and Austen Osworth enthusiastically shepherded the issue through to production. In addition, we have been inspired and influenced by the thoughtful questions and suggestions we received on this topic at the following conferences: the 2012 Asian American Studies Association Conference, the 2013 Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference, and the 2014 American Studies Association Annual Meeting. In particular, we want to acknowledge Nitasha Sharma for her generous and consistent engagement with this project.[↑]
2. Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 4.[↑]
3. Ibid., 16.[↑]
4. David Scott, “The Archaeology of Black Memory: An Interview with Robert A. Hill,” Small Axe 5 (1999): 82.[↑]
5. Deborah A. Thomas, “Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence,” Small Axe 21 (2013): 27.[↑]
6. Ibid., 37.[↑]
7. Ibid., 41.[↑]
8. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 156.[↑]
9. Colleen Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” PMLA 123, 5 (2008): 1732.[↑]
10. For more on the latter, see Fred Ho and Bill Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 6-7.[↑]
11. This shift in the privileging of professional immigrants resulted from family reunification and the diversification of immigration law in the 1990s. For more on this history see, for example, Chandan Reddy’s “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family” in Social Text 84-5, 23, 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2005): 101-19.[↑]
12. See, for example: Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds., “The Afro Asian Century,” special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 11, 1 (March 2003); Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia; Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: NYU Press, 2013).[↑]
13. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 78.[↑]
14. Martin Luther King, Jr., “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi” in The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project 5: 231, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol5/July1959_MyTriptotheLandofGandhi.pdf.[↑]
15. See, for example, Vijay Prashad, “Bandung Is Done: Passages in AfroAsian Epistemology” in Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters, xi-xxiii.[↑]
16. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 236.[↑]
17. Saidiya V. Hartman, Review of Saltwater Slavery by Stephanie Smallwood, in The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 66, 4, Abolishing the Slave Trades: Ironies and Reverberations (October 2009): 1003.[↑]
18. Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon.[↑]
19. Grace K. Hong, Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 1. Hong’s concept of patrilineage refers to Lorde’s critique of the way memorializations of Malcolm X overlook the role of black lesbian feminists within the Black Power movement.[↑]
20. Anantha Sudhakar, “Conditional Futures: South Asian American Cultural Production and Community Formation,” PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2011, 139.[↑]
21. Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, 132.[↑]
22. Ibid., 132. 149.[↑]
23. Susan Fraiman, Cool Men and the Second Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xviii.[↑]
24. Ibid., 158.[↑]
25. Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 12.[↑]
26. See Nitasha Sharma, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (New York: NYU Press, 2016).[↑]
27. Kim, Writing Manhood; Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow; Jun, Race for Citizenship; Lee, Interracial Encounters; and Bald, Bengali Harlem. See also Cheryl 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,” in Mullen and Ho, Afro Asia; and Onishi’s historical study, Transpacific Antiracism, in which Onishi explores Yoriko Nakajima’s role as a leading voice in Japan’s post-World War II black studies movement; and Tamara Roberts’s recent Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).[↑]
28. Elizabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 41, 2 (2016): 306. [↑]
29. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism; Diane C. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).[↑]
30. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, 119.[↑]
31. Grace Kyunwong Hong and Rod Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 9.[↑]
32. Hong and Ferguson, Strange Affinities, 9.[↑]
33. We say “overlapping” because we, following Ferguson, understand the queer of color critique as a method that emerges out of the unfinished political project of women of color feminism.[↑]
34. Gayatri Gopinath, “Affect, Archive, and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-visions,” Political Emotions, ed. Janet Staiger et al. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 168.[↑]
35. Sedgwick frames “beside” as a differentiated, but nondualistic, preposition that opens up new approaches to political critique in Touching and Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).[↑]