25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
interesting but frustrating, April 8, 2006
This is not a straightforward book by any means. Vijay Prashad has written a book that is by turns, illuminating, fascinating and maddening.
In many ways, reading this book is like one of those lively and entertaining conversations you have in British pubs with the local sagacious man: Prashad describes some tantalizing connections between Black and Asian liberation struggles and just as you think, "Aha, here comes the good bit", he does the authorly equivalent of popping off to the lavatory. And when he comes back, he has another bright idea to tell you about, and there's no sign at all of the first one.
In all fairness to Prashad, the tidbits he has to recount are pretty interesting. For example he notes that W.D. Fard, the inspiration behind Elijah Mohammed's bizarre origin myth for the Nation of Islam was actually a New Zealander (half South Asian and half Maori) who came across the US border with Canada as an illegal immigrant in 1913. He also talks briefly about the truly inspiring AJA leftist Yuri Kochiyama, who worked with Malcolm and cradled his head as he lay dying at the Roseland ballroom. But there's no follow through. We wonder in vain as to what the implications or lessons of these vignettes are but Prashad never tells us.
The most useful part of the book is the first half where Prashad presents a very useful theoretical analysis of the way race has been conceptualized and can be conceptualized in the future as a path to more effective and ongoing coalitions and hence to more effective social justice work.
Prashad distinguishes 4 different modes for thinking about race: colorblindness, primordialism, multiculturalism and what he calls polyculturalism.
Color blindness is the approach currently favored by mainstream conservatives (including many white liberals and elites of color) which argues that race should be ignored because the state and all our decisions as groups and individuals should be "above" race. As Prashad notes, colorblindness assumes the neutrality or benevolence of existing social and power relations. Prashad's discussion and analysis follows the standard radical critique of this way of thinking.
Primordialism for Prashad is a kind of essentialist thinking about racial identity, where biology determines cultural, moral and intellectual qualities. Proponents of primordialism include the extremist supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan but Prashad also discusses groups amongst communities of color who subscribe to similarly essentialist notions such as the Nation of Islam, Afrocentrists and Dalitcentric thinkers. For Prashad, race must be viewed within the context of capitalism and the effect of capital on different groups of people in different nation-states and different historical moments. Race alone is not an accurate descriptor of all the dimensions of privilege and oppression that exist within a society.
In multiculturalism different races and ethnicities are treated as essentially equal aspects of identity and where tolerance (rather than engagement) is the requirement of the day. Here Prashad does a excellent job of deconstructing the way in which multiculturalism is in many ways simply aimed at the incorporation of communities of color into a consumer capitalist economy as consumers or producers of goods and services. In multiculturalism, diversity becomes a matter of management rather than a site at which people genuinely learn about, respect and deal with conflicts with one another.
Prashad's response to these three conservative approaches is to propose a more radical "polyculturalism": In this view, cultures are not autonomous and isolated, but are interpenetrated and influence one another in a dynamic fashion. Prashad also encourages us to pay attention to issues of class and of orientation towards "success" in a culture that emphasizes competition and hierarchical ranking.
The final chapter, on kung fu and the uses made by US revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party of Third World liberation struggles (particularly in Vietnam and the People's Republic of China) was, at least to my mind the least satisfying chapter. While no-one would doubt the popularity of Bruce Lee, nor his significance in the personal pantheons of young men and women of all races, one wonders what if anything this symbolic affinity does. Does liking Bruce Lee or respecting his abilities allow you to respect the abilities or empathize with the life stories of real Asian Americans or Asian immigrants or even people in Asia? Once we get past the recognition of incidents of common suffering at the hands of a common oppressor, what else is there?
I am very much conscious of the probability that, as with hip-hop among Asian Americans, modern African American interest in Asia and Asian cultures generally emerges from the context of entertainment and spectacle rather than cultural critique. Whilst Bakari Kitwana encourages us to see the creation of real trans-racial solidarity based on love of an artform, the people involved almost always concieve of themselves as atomized individuals, and their journeys towards participation in the liberation struggle are seen as personal journeys of discovery and respect rather than political acts of alliance.
Prashad in fact provides a few tantalizing examples of exactly the kind of response to this question. In one chapter he proposes (following Eric B. and Rakim) "It ain't where you from, it's where you at": that a common sense of place may be one avenue that enables people to unite across differences. Unfortunately he does not really develop the argument further.
In the end, I'd say that this book has a great deal of value, particularly as a place to start asking some hard questions: What commonalities existed between various different groups? How did people create and maintain solidarity? How are people able to expand their personal politics to embrace other groups and to see their interests as being interwoven with those of others? While the book gives a sense of a large number of different cases of black and asian interaction, in the end, I would have liked to see more discussion of the specific circumstances under which these kinds of alliances became more than symbolic.
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