by Yuichiro Onishi
May 22, 2020
In 2013, I published a book on Afro-Asian solidarity called Transpacific Antiracism (NYU Press). The title, however, was not my own choosing. Initially, I suggested one that brought life and texture to solidarity-building pushing back against empire.
The book hones in on instances in which intellectuals and activists enmeshed in the social and political struggles of the twentieth century in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa forged solidarities through political imagination and organizing.
For instance, I introduce such leading Black activists and thinkers as Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph, Andy Razaf, and W.E.B. Du Bois who scandalized the prevailing conception of democracy and internationalism during the first half of the twentieth century via solidarity with Japan. Amid deepening Jim Crow racial order in the United States and colonialism the world over, they engaged in what I call “pro-Japan provocation,” all the while being fully cognizant of the fact that Japan was an imperialist and a colonizer within Japan proper and across Asia, not at all a champion of the Darker World.
I also talk about how Japanese and Okinawan intellectuals and activists discovered the Black conception of democracy rooted in historical struggles through curious paths: the Esperanto movement; 19th-century U.S. transcendentalism and abolitionism; Marxism in the United States, especially the revival of the U.S. Popular Front of the 1930s in post-surrender Japan; antiwar GI organizing during the Vietnam War era; and opposition to the U.S. occupation of Okinawa and U.S.-Japan security imperialism.
The book explores the nature of these little known unlikely, contradictory, and quotidian coming unities. The racial appellation, “Afro-Asia,” which sits at the core of solidarity-building, incubated multiple currents of resistance: anti-imperialist, anticolonial, anti-war, and antiracist.
But what made “Afro-Asia” to become generative for solidarity in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa?
In all honesty, transpacific antiracism, the book title, was not the answer I had in mind, although it was one of the important vectors. Instead, I argued that the overlapping experience of race that was contingent and contradictory engendered a “culture of liberation” that was transpacific. I borrowed this conceptual language from the towering scholar of Black radicalism Cedric Robinson. By stepping into the transpacific culture of liberation, activists and intellectuals in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa learned how to band and struggle together for liberation. To capture the dynamism of this domain, I originally titled the book, “Moving in a Racial Groove,” which was derived from Du Bois’s thought. This framing, I thought, best captured the labor of forging Afro-Asian solidarities that was intricate and layered. I especially wanted to underscore its very musical quality and character that this solidarity-building would require to shape the communities of struggles.
Afro-Asian solidarity, then and now, has never been understood by activists as an end in itself. Rather, the stress is always placed on a process; the work of liberation demands a certain kind of posture, awareness, consciousness, and reflexivity, all essential faculties that help activate reciprocity, cooperation, ethics of care, creative authority, and politics, too.
In this spirit, the East Side Freedom Library is excited to launch a new forum called the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conversation Series. I will be curating this space with ESFL staff and its collaborators throughout this summer and hopefully beyond.
Our inaugural forum will feature Emma Sapong, an award-winning Liberian American journalist and writer. I will be in dialogue with her. This conversation will be posted on ESFL’s Facebook page on June 9, 2020 at 7:00pm. Mark your calendar and join us on our East Side Freedom Library Facebook live stream or the ESFL YouTube channel.
We will focus on Emma Sapong’s MPR enterprise story that she published in October 2016, particularly her labor of creating it. It is a tale of African immigrants and Hmong farmers finding each other at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. This story elicits an ethos that is essential in the world upended by COVID-19. It amplifies the importance of mutual aid. The story invites us to locate grounding in ordinary everyday lives that can be best described as Afro-Asian enchantment.
To read Sapong’s story, click here.
To hear my book talk at the ESFL, click here.
Yuichiro Onishi is a board member of the East Side Freedom Library. He is the Acting Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota and an Associate Professor of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies at the University.