Richard Wright gave voice to being an outsider. That and his opposition to post-1945 colonialism led to his own exile. Fred Ho's African and Asian themes in music and activism simultaneously reflect both cultures. Grace Lee and James Boggs turned their individual cultures and politics into a powerful partnership. Denying the exclusive nature of r

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, rase-based, or narrow conceptions of ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, calling on scholars in these fields to reimagine their critical enterprises as mutually constituting and politically interdependent.