The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination

During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals-including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams-traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China's role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.


Author: Robeson Taj Frazier
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 12/26/2014
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.30w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780822357681

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/13/2015 pg. 18

About the Author
Robeson Taj Frazier is Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.