The Asian American Writing Movement and Black Radicalism

Asian and Black Literary Masculinities

In the November 1972 edition of Changes magazine, noted authors Ishmael Reed and Al Young discuss the relationship between literature and cultural revolution during the zenith of the Black Arts movement and third world liberation. Both affirm the central role of art and representation as a prerequisite for political transformation within broad social movements. Reed, who describes his own aesthetic practice as “Neo-HooDooism,” places importance upon who controls the means of cultural production within U.S. culture. The Black Arts Movement, which Larry Neal (1968) had pronounced “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept” (p. 29), had influenced post–civil rights writers like Reed, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Shawn Wong. By calling into question the prescriptions of Afro-Asian racialization, especially model minority vis-à-vis black pathology discussions, these literary pioneers challenged Eurocentric aesthetics, critique, mythology, and knowledge as the universal power center and standard in American life. Later, when Reed laments the obscurity of Chester Himes and Zora Neale Hurston, he addresses the conditions for the publication not only of Black literature but also of other minority literatures, “all of us who were under the thumb,” including Asian American, Chicano/a, and Puerto Rican works (Young, 1972, p. 12). In the middle of the magazine interview, friend and fellow writer Frank Chin walks into Reed’s house and jokes, “all the people who don’t publish us are in New York [laughter]” (Young, 1972, p. 12).

Through insider humor, Asian and Black male writers mutually affirmed, during the birth of Asian American literature and the explosion of African American writing, a parallel experience of exclusion in attempting to publish their respective works. Chin’s quip binds through synecdoche the “thumb” of white liberalism that burdens the publication of Asian American literature with the same institutional difficulties African American writers have faced. Because the American literary canon almost exclusively favored white writers, Asian and Black writers would form their own multiethnic coalitions and fulminate their voices in U.S. national culture. Later, Reed called for a wholesale process of “decentralization” whereby minority writers would produce works outside the mainstream publishing industry. In discussing liberal whiteness in New York and the publication of multiethnic literature, he commented, “The liberals are afraid of our competition. Even more so, I think sometimes, than the Right Wing” (Young, 1972, p. 16). Despite the inroads made by Black writers under the banner of Black Power, Reed envisioned a different axis of racial solidarity through horizontal rather than vertical camaraderie, with an important caveat about antiracist coalition building:

I mean, we all don’t have to love each other; I don’t have to love Frank [Chin]. . . . We may not even be able to work together on certain issues. . . . But we’re on the right track in that we are trying to assert our independence, which is something new. (Young, 1972, p. 16)

Reed’s comment directs our attention to the promises of self-determination movements and the limitations of interracial cooperation. Although focused on an antiracist initiative, Reed’s vision of coalition building is contingent and issues based, reflecting Kandice Chuh’s (2003) assertion of a “subjectless discourse” in which common interests rather than identity are crucial for sustained counterhegemonic projects.

This article begins with the inspired exchange between Reed and Chin in order to position the Asian American writing movement as a process of Afro-Asian collaboration, multiethnic vision, and remaking of Asian American masculinity. Asian and Black men formed powerful literary bonds, a horizontal structure of identification, whereby Black male writers and Black presses recognized and validated the significance of Asian American literature. Despite the divisive imperative of comparative racialization, Asian and Black masculinities crossed the color line, joining up on the intrepid journey for artistic recognition, public voice, and manly respect. And no bond of affiliation was more important than that between Reed and Chin, due to the groundbreaking publication of Yardbird Reader 3 (Chin & Wong, 1974) and Aiiieeeee! (Chin, Chan, Inada, & Wong, 1974). While Aiiieeeee! has been recognized in Asian American literary circles, Yardbird Reader 3 has received inadequate attention and is out of print. Analyzing both anthologies as extensions of each other, I examine more fully the Afro-Asian mode of cultural production that activates the genre of Asian American literature. I specify how both collections set the cornerstone for the emergence of Asian American literature by remaking the legal category “non-white” into a moniker of resistance, race, and remasculinization. Writers of color morphed the category of non-white, first designated in the 1790 Naturalization Act, to fit the necessities of multiethnic coalition building under the banner of third world liberation and cultural revolution. Formed in reaction to perpetual Black exploitation by white supremacy, the Black Power movement affected Asian American consciousness and literary production. Blackness provided the inspiration for multiethnic coalitions and became a lodestar for oppressed people of color around the globe, and Asian Americans were no exception. This article examines Chin’s unpublished letters, Yardbird Reader 3, and Aiiieeeee! to explain the “polycultural” bonds between Asian and Black masculinities at the genesis of Asian American literature.

In the anthology AfroAsia, Reed (2008) chronicles his manifold collaborations with Chin through literary and homosocial bonding. At a book party in 1969, celebrating the publication of 19 Necromancers from Now, the future editors of Aiiieeeee!, whom Reed lauds as the “Four Horsemen of Asian American literature”—Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong—became acquainted for the first time. Reed helped publish Chin’s “A Chinese Lady Dies” and The Year of the Dragon and Wong’s Homebase, the first novel to be published by an American-born Chinese male; he made the important introduction between Charles Harris of Howard University Press and the Aiiieeeee! editors. Throughout the post–civil rights era, moreover, Reed had sponsored the literary careers of Asian American women writers including Jessica Hagedorn, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Cyn Zarco.

Subsequently, numerous literary works, critical journals, writers’ organizations, publishing houses, festivals, and regional theaters embodied the multiethnic coalition building that Reed exhibited, particularly expressing an Afro-Asian sensibility. The transition from racial essentialisms, supported by cultural nationalists such as Ron Karenga and Elijah Muhammad, into multiethnicity and interracial bonds is also reflected in the direction and substance of Young’s interview with Reed. William Harris (1981) suggests that “by the mid-70s black writers such as Al Young and Ishmael Reed were beginning to envision literature as multiethnic instead of mono-ethnic” (p. 72). Reed’s racial positioning showcased the morphing of the Black Power concept to the contours of multiethnicity and multiculturalism, as initially an extension of racial and cultural revolution in the post–civil rights era. “[N]either . . . movement apologist[s] nor advocate[s]” (Reed wasn’t invited to participate because he “was considered an integrationist”), Reed and Chin reference the theoretical diversity within broad social movements and the multiple, interlocking contestations along race, gender, class, and sexuality lines at this time (Salaam, 1997, pp. 70-74). Chin and Reed were not considered political radicals in the same sense as the Red Guard of San Francisco’s Chinatown or Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, yet their respective works illuminate Antonio Gramsci’s historic bloc, which, Michael Denning (1998) writes, “connotes both an alliance of social forces and a specific formation. The connection between the two lies in the concept of hegemony” (p. 6). From the sanctuary of his prison, Gramsci expressed an important theory of alliances, which may be structured by similar goals and interests even though the participants may have different backgrounds. Through their belief in cultural revolution, Asian and Black men challenged white supremacy, specifically East Coast liberal whiteness in the publishing industry and cultural assumptions about the creative inferiority of minority writers.

Understanding the important relationship between Reed and Chin as well as the impact of Black radicalism on the rise of Asian American literature offers three points of consideration for scholars of comparative racialization and multiethnic literatures. First, for Asian American literary scholars, the Afro-Asian mode of cultural production may contribute to a more fully realized understanding of the material, social, and political realities that empowered the Asian American writing movement. Much of this work is just beginning and not yet fully conceptualized (Maeda, 2009). D. Kim (2006), for one, has written a remarkable study tracing the homophobic and misogynistic tendencies in Chin’s work, “to gain some sort of analytic purchase on how and why it is that the things most useful and even moving about Chin’s writings are inextricably linked with what is most hateful” (p. 128). Because many scholars have rightly charged male writers of this era as cultural nationalists, much of the scholarship about the literary formation of Asian American studies that occurred at this time seems to focus on the limitations of this anachronistic position, in the process leaving Chin to “the dustbin of literary history” (D. Kim, 2006, p. 125). If cultural nationalism is defined as an ethnocentric, homophobic, and masculinist construction of an essentialist oppositional identity, then Asian and Black masculinities collaborating across color and gender lines present a more complicated portrait of the contradictions and revolutionary aspirations embedded within it. This might seem surprising to those who associate Reed and Chin with the cultural nationalist project, but it is important to acknowledge that Reed’s and Chin’s involvement displayed expansive theoretical flexibility, including support of women of color writers. For example, to theorize the conditions of Asian American literary exclusion, the Aiiieeeee! editors gave prominence to the author Sui Sin Far, who published short stories “that [were] neither Asian nor white American. And interestingly enough, in her work, there is no cultural conflict between East and West” (Chin et al., 1974, p. 3). That the editors would elevate Far to the first page of their introduction as an exemplar of Asian American writing about cultural hybridity—an assertion later made by poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists in Asian American scholarship—illustrates that their remasculinization project is neither a wholly male-dominated discourse nor without theoretical forethought. In fact, they also promote Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter as a prime example of how Asian American writing can explain the function of William Peterson’s model minority stereotype and the role of silence as a pervasive condition of Asian American double consciousness, a dual-heritage model structured by the investment in national assimilation. Because of these paradoxes, the Aiiieeeee! editors’ brand of cultural nationalism was inconsistent and had porous boundaries, often defining a racial essence for national inclusion through homophobic and patriarchal impulses while simultaneously envisioning a rebellious ethos of transgression that included the work of female writers of color and other racialized literatures in their anthologies.

This elastic back-and-forth between fixity and fluidity encompasses, to some degree, Robin Kelley’s idea of polyculturalism, which Vijay Prashad (2001) expands upon in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: “The framework of polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture” (p. 65). Prashad illustrates the Afro-Asian connections in the history and origins of Garveyism, showing how Lajpat Rai and Hucheshwar G. Mugdal aided Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey in the international struggle against racial and colonial domination. The concept of polyculturalism extinguishes all notions of purity and origins, contending that we are all infused with the cultures and histories of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Nodal points emerge always, dependent only on the depth of our looking glass. The transracial and cross-gender formations found in anthologies of cultural nationalist literature gesture toward an incipient polycultural understanding of shared experiences and histories, a transgression that should be more widely acknowledged. Although not outside of reproducing power relations, the Afro-Asian mode of cultural production within Asian American cultural nationalism was the first theoretical writing to explore the mutuality of epistemological and ontological conditions connecting Asian American and Black literature.

As the most prominent proponent of cultural nationalism in Asian American literature, Chin has been overshadowed by his jeremiad directed at Maxine Hong Kingston. Despite the existence of earlier Asian American anthologies, including Kai-yu Hsu’s Asian American Authors and David Hsin-fu Wand’s Asian American Heritage, the 1974 publication of Aiiieeeee! has been widely acknowledged as marking the successful emergence of Asian American literature from cultural obscurity. Yet, subsequent critical work on Aiiieeeee! emphasizes the feminism of Asian American women and the cultural nationalism of Asian American men. Hero worship meets the feminist revolution: This was the choice of Asian American critics analyzing the literary tree of Asian American writing, deeply entrenched, with roots formed from this opposition (Cheung, 1990). However, the famous and productive debate between Chin and Kingston focused little attention on how African American people helped shape the contours of this intraracial and gendered conversation.

The relative absence of Chin’s work in Asian American literary criticism should be revisited, not to canonize his oeuvre but instead to complicate the easy binary opposition between hero worship and feminist critique. To this end, I theorize how his homosocial bonding with Black masculinity is arbitrated by his failure of intimacy, both artistic and personal, with Asian American women. Chin wrote in an unpublished letter to Kingston, “I was rigged against going for yellow women cuz I was a hot yellow artistic type, and yellow women in the arts were rigged against going for me” (Chin, 1976a). A nostalgic and somewhat bitter lament, we read from this correspondence that Chin initially sought more intimate and personal relationships with Asian American women writers. His hopes for artistic and romantic connections were dashed, as he did not get the validation and encouragement he needed, however much he may have contributed to his own alienation. Because of these failures, Chin’s desire for mutual confirmation with Asian American femininity, a reciprocal gaze, was redirected elsewhere. Consequently, as I posit later, Chin found his artistic validation through Black masculinity and masculine homosocial bonds, where the homosocial always has an economy of erotic desire (Sedgwick, 1990). Chin’s letter connects the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality impacted the triangulation between Asian masculinity, Black masculinity, and Asian femininity as a nuanced supplement to C. J. Kim’s (1999) model of triangulation between whites, Asians, and Blacks.

A second point of consideration regarding the impact of Black radicalism on the rise of Asian American literature is that the Afro-Asian mode of cultural production in Asian American literary anthologies was instrumental in the birth of Asian American literature in the post–civil rights era. It revived lost, forgotten work and built a foundation of prominent writers who would later become the literary voices of the Asian American writing movement. Themes were often about identity and national belonging, settlement communities and everyday life, the processes of assimilation, the conditions of immigrant work, relations between parents and children, the deployment of ethnic vernaculars, the role of humor and gossip, and the carrot-and-stick pursuit of the American Dream. Yardbird Reader 3 and Aiiieeeee! fall under the category of general anthologies and include Afro-Asian content in their prefaces. In fundamental ways, the Afro-Asian mode of cultural production apparent in both prefaces inaugurates the discipline of Asian American literature and illustrates an early cultural formation that resists the rivalrous framework of comparative racialization.

In so many ways, literary anthologies with Afro-Asian sensibilities often excavate lost works rather than commemorate well-known writing. If traditional anthologies have been synonymous with nation building insofar as they render literature and nationalism synthetic, then Asian American anthologies with an Afro-Asian exchange established an entire field by contesting such homogeneous, modernist constructions of national identity. This event horizon, a point of no return, catapulted a whole booklist of Asian American literature into public discussion, university syllabi, and cultural prominence, and generated later anthologies such as Forbidden Stitch: An Anthology of Asian American Women’s Writing, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Asian American Fiction, and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. As such, no anthology has had quite the impact of the original Aiiieeeee! on the study of Asian lives in America. And theorizing Yardbird Reader 3 in relation to this event horizon more clearly defines the polycultural context of Asian American literature. Therefore, these anthologies contest rather than canonize; they validate racialized alienation rather than exclude through racial cannibalism; and they reveal context, movements, and power relations rather than aestheticize through internal and intertextual New Critical approaches that dominated the period.

And, as for the third consideration, in my analysis of Asian and Black masculinities in Yardbird Reader 3 and Aiiieeeee!, I specify how, as cultural historian Maeda (2009) theorizes, “performances of blackness catalyzed the formation of Asian American identity” (p. 75). The editors of Aiiieeeee! and Yardbird Reader 3 rejected the Black-white framework of U.S. racial discourse. As a means to find a point of immanent critique, they mirrored Black protest masculinity—an example of interracial identification and mimesis. The process of dissimulation, through the performance of interracial mimesis, countered the dominant discourse of Asian ethnic assimilation into an uncritical white identity or, as a Newsweek article celebrated, “outwhiting the whites” (“Success Story,” 1971). During the post–civil rights era of racial realignment, Black radical thought was the counterpoint to forced Asian ethnic assimilation; this Asian-Black sensibility challenged an uncritical complicity with white supremacy that had suppressed Black revolution. In Aiiieeeee!, the editors employed the vernacular languages, performance styles, and oppositional consciousness of Black masculinity as a means to expose the contradictions of market democracy and the violence of racialization. Shirley Hune (2001) suggests that the Black-white paradigm of race has bulldozed over “a multiplicity of simultaneous racial group dynamics that included horizontal subordinate-subordinate or minority-minority relations” (p. 236). The Asian-Black interface constructs the contours of cultural citizenship through the racialization of another-Other, and thus the editors complicated the fixed, closed identity of cultural nationalism. Despite the productive engagement between Asian American and Black American voices in Aiiieeeee!, this article also explores those points in the work at which interracial alliance through mimesis becomes self-congratulatory and addresses the limitations of such maneuvers. I emphasize this idea to dissect the critical axis of race and gender and to point out where remasculinization and the tenets of anti-Blackness fall into this mapping.

Afro-Asian Bonds and Literary Manhood

The editorial collective of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers consisted of Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong. In 1974, for the first time in American literature, the editors centered Asian American masculinity as the subject of history and literary production in U.S. national culture. Consisting of excerpts from novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, the Aiiieeeee! anthology chronicles the literary voices of 10 men and 4 women from various Asian ethnicities (predominantly Chinese and Japanese American), literary genres, and historical periods. Aiiieeeee! introduced readers to the study of Asian American literature including Louis Chu, Hisaye Yamamoto, Monica Sone, Diana Chang, and John Okada. Authors Carlos Bulosan, Oscar Peñaranda, and Sam Tagatac are also in the collection, representing Filipino diasporic literature. Above all, by anthologizing these forgotten authors, the editors were literary pioneers, the first movers who detailed rigorously the heterogeneity of Asian American identity, articulated the unique blend of Asian American experiences, and deconstructed the engine of white supremacy in Asian American life.

These Asian American male writers performed a literary coup d’état in the Bay Area to expose “America’s dishonesty—its white racist supremacy passed off as love and acceptance—[that] has kept seven generations of Asian-American voices off the air, off the streets, and praised us for being Asiatically no show” (Chin et al., 1974, p. xvi). Frantz Fanon (1963) rebukes this kind of racist white love in his classic The Wretched of the Earth. In her groundbreaking text Asian American Literature, E. Kim (1982) suggests that Chinese American male writers, Chin’s “Chinatown Cowboys,” needed to clarify “their uniquely American identity” (p. 18), after the legacy of Vietnam and civil rights politics. As a centerpiece of Asian American letters, Aiiieeeee! launched the revolutionary birth of the Asian American writing movement in reaction to conditions in which “the first Asian-American writers worked alone within a sense of rejection and isolation to the extent that it encouraged Asian America to reject its own literature” (Chin et al., 1974, p. xlviii).

Aiiieeeee! starts off with three introductions: “Preface,” “Preface to the Mentor Edition,” and “Fifty Years of Our Whole Voice.” Using historical, theoretical, and literary analyses of the status of Asian American literature, the editors map the transition of Asian American writing from orientalized invisibility into a known Asian American sensibility with its own voices, vernaculars, and unique cultural blend. It was the first time Asian Americans were imputing their collective humanity in American literature. In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, Lowe and Lloyd (1997) write that culture “constitutes a site in which the reproduction of contemporary capitalist social relations may be continually contested” and where politics “must be grasped instead as always braided within ‘culture’ and cultural practices” (p. 26). Aiiieeeee!’s editorial collective carved a literary space where discussions of assimilationist literature, minority relationships, Asian American manhood, and the force of comparative racial hierarchy are examined. In doing so, the editors, using Black masculinity as a model of protest, embarked upon a project of remasculinization by underscoring the importance of cultural integrity for Asian America’s identity, consciousness, and survival—the languages employed, point of view, writing topics, literary genealogies, and political viewpoint. However, since the anthology’s publication and subsequent critical reflections, the Afro-Asian connections found in Aiiieeeee!—the influence of Blackness—is never mentioned and should be more widely celebrated as a historic instance of building coalitions during cultural revolutions.

First, Aiiieeeee! was published by Howard University Press, a publishing house just starting up in one of America’s historically Black universities. Asian American writers had found difficulty getting published by mainstream U.S. publishers, and it was a Black press that gave Aiiieeeee! and its authors literary life. This step was unprecedented and extremely important. While mainstream presses ignored Asian American literature for most of its history, Howard University Press’s reception and distribution of Aiiieeeee! established an Asian-Black literary alliance that created a material foundation for the anthology’s Afro-Asian content. In a succinct personal letter, Howard University Press editor Roberta Palm wrote to Chin: “Obviously, the introductions hit them where it hurts” (Palm, 1974). Palm’s letter indicates her press’s willingness to be an editorial accomplice to Chin’s incendiary introduction in Aiiieeeee! Most writers realize the importance of editors who understand the purpose of their work and the impact of this appreciation in supporting their artistic vision. Because white critics and publishing houses rejected the initial manuscript of Aiiieeeee! as trivial and sophomoric, Chin archived his brief correspondence with Howard University Press as a reminder of this historic participation between Black decision makers and Asian American writers.

Second, the important gesture by the editors of Aiiieeeee! to seek identification with Black radical masculinities is a rare inscription of Asian-Black content in Asian American literature. By identifying with Blackness, the editors put forth representations of Black masculinities as the political personalities that they aspired to be—vocal in electoral politics, shapers of U.S. national culture, and desirable as sexualized men. In one passage, the editors write,

Thus, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation Asian Americans are still looked upon as foreigners because of this dual heritage, or the concept of dual personality which suggests that the Asian American can be broken down into his American part and his Asian part. This view explains Asian American assimilation, adaptability, and lack of presence in American culture. This sustaining inner resource keeps the Asian American a stranger in the country in which he was born. He is supposed to feel better than the blacks, whose American achievement is the invention of their own American culture. American language, fashions, music, literature, cuisine, graphics, body language, morals, and politics have been strongly influenced by black culture. They have been cultural achievers, in spite of white supremacist culture, whereas Asian America’s reputation is an achievement of that white culture—a work of racist art. (Chin et al., 1974, pp. 9-10)

Asian American racial formation hinges upon a dual-worlds model of identity and the tenets of anti-Blackness, “to feel better than the blacks.” However, Aiiieeeee! challenges this condition of post–civil rights citizenship in which Black culture becomes a sphere of cultural integrity and creative renewal, a nobility of survival. The editors disputed the racial classifications that defined Asian American identity as perpetually foreign to the U.S. nation-state. Sustained to reinforce the entitlements of wness, the dual-heritage model splits the Asian American body politic symmetrically between normative whiteness and inscrutable alien. In The Possessive Investment in whiteness, George Lipsitz (1998) intimates that “as the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name” (p. 1). In contrast, race and resistance are staples of Black social consciousness and cultural practice, whereas the silence found in Asian American assimilation produces “a work of racist art.” That the benchmark is “the amount and kind of noise of resistance generated by the race” (Chin et al., 1974, p. 9) indicates a diagnosis of Asian American self-determination as significantly more quiet than radical Black expression. Stephen Sumida (2000) relays that the editors attacked the dual-identity concept and its fundamental link to white assimilation, and this literary noise animated a new opening for other writers.

Later, the editors connected Asian masculine physical stereotypes to literary production with language as the main trope for investigation. Theorizing the ontology of the Asian male body in problematic terms, they explained the emasculation of Asian American manhood from hegemonic masculinity:

The white stereotype of the acceptable and unacceptable Asian is utterly without manhood. Good or bad, the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst the Asian American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, physical courage, and creativity. (Chin et al., 1974, p. 14)

Chin, in an unpublished letter to Maxine Hong Kingston, wrote,

In my lifetime, white men have always favored yellow women over yellow men and yellow women have always put down yellow men for not being all them nice white things, from aggressive to original, to sexy . . . just like you (Chin, 1976b).

The complicated relationship between Chin and Asian American female writers is illuminated by his experience of twofold rejection by both white masculinity and Asian American femininity. Through the matrix of white manhood and the entitlements of heroism, Chin’s letter to Kingston and Aiiieeeee!’s preface bind the experiential to the theoretical whereby racialized desire produces anxiety due to separation from both homoeroticism with white men and heterosexual union with Asian American women.

The editors concluded their discussion by echoing the famous New York City speech by Malcolm X, when they allegorize Asian American cultural voice by raising the volatile distinction between field slaves and house slaves:

The deprivation of language in a verbal society like this country’s has contributed to the lack of a recognized Asian American cultural integrity (at most, native-born Asian-Americans are “Americanized” Chinese or Japanese) and the lack of a recognized style of Asian-American manhood. These two conditions have produced “the house nigger mentality,” under which Chinese- and Japanese-Americans accept responsibility for, rather than authority over the language and accept dependency. (Chin et al., 1974, p. xxxviii)

Cultural integrity, the means to produce a recognizable Asian American cultural imprint, is equivalent to the language, tongue, speech, and writing of a people to activate their sense of uniqueness and cultural vitality. Depicting both public and private spheres of failed recognition, the triangulated relationship between Asian American men, Asian American women, and Blackness sets the cornerstone that exemplifies Aiiieeeee!’s archival project as a treatise informed by conditions of manhood and representational control.

To be sure, this gesture was an Asian-Black birth of a sensibility, and it was central to the success of Aiiieeeee! as an important work. D. Kim (2004) notes that Asian American literature is “a site where racial invisibility that reigns in the political order can be compensated by the kinds of representations to be attained in literary culture” (p. 232). The editors had borrowed Black rage and militancy and incorporated the audacity of Black Power, and thus situated Afro-Asian hermeneutics as a style of thought and vision in the formation of an Asian American consciousness:

White racism has failed to convince the blacks that they are animals and failed to convince the Indians that they are living fossils. They did not destroy their impulse to cultural integrity, stamp out their literary sensibility, and produce races of people who would work to enforce white supremacy without having to be supervised or watch dogged. (Chin et al., 1974, p. xxvi)

Novels such as Ronyoung Kim’s Clay Walls and John Okada’s No-No Boy, and Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story, “A Fire in Fontana,” fictionalized scenes of Afro-Asian interaction in American life. Yet, it was not until the publication of Aiiieeeee!, specifically elucidated in the preface, that Asian American writers conceptualized the lived contours and theoretical implications of an Afro-Asian literary imaginary and movement. For the editors, Asian American manhood was literary recognition. Refusing the expected capitulation of Asian ethnic assimilation, this important identification allowed the editors an expressive form that could reveal their own sense of racialized alienation and displacement from national manhood (Nelson, 1998). In many ways, the editors realized the difficulties involved with Asian ethnic assimilation in the post–civil rights era, a period of comparative racialization that had positioned as rivals the social construction of Asian masculinity over and against Black masculinity. In Narrating Nationalisms, Jinqi Ling (1998) argues that one should reread Aiiieeeee! from the point of view of the discursive moment in which it came forth, adding that the anthology’s “ideological thrust” constituted for the first time in over a century “a public claim on rights” (p. 25). In States of Injury, Wendy Brown (1995) posits that the emancipatory power of rights is always historically and culturally situated, whereby rights are “protean and irresolute signifiers, varying across time and culture, but across the other vectors of power whose crossing they are sometimes deployed to effect” (p. 97). In this way, the editorial collective pinpointed the main locus of citizenship in the cultural sphere, through national inclusion, further commenting that a lack of such cultural legitimacy produced forms of ideological violence structured by masculinized inferiority and literary alienation. All this is persuasively performed by cross-racial desire and the mimicry of Black radical masculinity. Who better to exemplify the violence and anguish of emasculation than the abject Black male body?

In Blackface, White Noise, Michael Rogin (1996) argues that blackface is the performance of racial identity rooted in European imperialism, a material and psychological investment made by both colonizer and colonized in the world capitalist system. It inverted and assigned a system of racial classification by fixating Blackness as an immutable and transparent category. Blackface formed ideologies of national belonging. It was performed on the stage, in vaudeville, in traveling shows, in Hollywood films, and on the radio. Racial cross-dressing helped produce an imagined community in which white anxieties concerning African American miscegenation, citizenship demands, and criminality were contained by rigid boundaries of racial difference that only whites could transgress (Rogin, 1996). Moreover, tales of racial passing have been historically tales of citizenship and modernization. From novels such as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to Nella Larsen’s Passing, from films like Old San Francisco to Gone With the Wind, narratives of passing disrupt the certainty of fixed racial categories and reconceptualize the visual dependence of racial hierarchy in constituting the nation. Archetypal figures like the tragic mulatto and moral panics like the fear of miscegenation have revealed the deep anxiety of whiteness and its fear of mongrelization. But passing narratives have mostly centered the white, heterosexual male as the signifier of desire, the subject to pass for and thus to masquerade as. Yet, for the Aiiieeeee! editors, the horizontal crossing of the Asian-Black color line complicated the vertical cross-dressing that Rogin addresses. Through cross-racial identifications, the editors mimicked the voice of African American trauma, national belonging, and public authority. Therefore, in many ways, this type of racial transgression is the moral and taxonomic opposite of the nation’s previous representations of racial passing.

The narrative of racial passing rests in its theatrical approach to masculinization. Minstrelsy and blackface incorporated the use of makeup, costumes, dialogue, and staging. These stylistic, theatrical elements were transferred to Hollywood production codes in the Big Studio era and colored up white performers for the mass entertainment of white audiences. The stage or screen had been the mirror, a transgressive carte blanche showing racial narratives of passing that helped construct the American imagined community, which moved white settlers and ethnics into the melting pot by keeping minorities out. As for the editors of Aiiieeeee!, their theatricality rested in their performance of language: the style, tone, metaphors, and polemics that laid out their play on words. In the context of language and literary production, they stated, “There is no conflict between East and West. That is a modern invention of whites and their yellow goons—writers who need white overseers to give them a license to use the English language” (Chin et al., 1974, p. xxi). They re-created a kind of textual theater in which “yellow goons” played assimilationist writers, “white overseers” represented mainstream publishers, and the “conflict” established the dramatic crisis. With characters in place and the plot in motion, not only did they call out performances of Asian American writers who had passed across the Asian color line but they also re-created the color line by reproducing the flattening and homogenizing gaze of whiteness.

Donning racialized accoutrements, the editors deployed a contradictory performance of Black masculinity through the performance of cross-racial masquerade. First, this type of masquerade is the transitional, processional, and ongoing rearticulation of racial discourses and transformation by donning the mask of Black radical masculinities. However, making these interracial identifications, the allusion to slavery as a prime example, comes with many contradictions. Slavery as an etched cultural memory in America’s racial imaginary is the racial terror of de jure segregation, but linking that history to another aggrieved group ignores the ways in which the legal apparatus of the state enacts processes of racialization unevenly at different historical moments. This is the point at which the editors’ Asian-Black cultural connections break down into a paradoxical quagmire. The bold invocation of African American injury onto Asian American bodies conflates Black and Asian difference as discursively homogeneous and reduces the institution of slavery and Asian ethnic assimilation as a Janus face of history.

Nevertheless, Aiiieeeee! shows that Asian American cultural politics can and should engage more critically with Black liberation through Asian American literary production and interrogate what Gwendolyn Brooks (1993) has called “the politics of everyday oppression.” This critical approach is important to acknowledge, because how we remember and what we remember conceptualize our understanding of political injury and form our conceptions of nation and manhood. Stuart Hall (1999) has indicated that we have to think about identity in relation to others and difference. In this sense, the Asian-Black interface in the Asian American writing movement portrays how interracial expressions of radicalism and cross-racial identifications were crucial to the genesis and development of necessary cultural institutions that explored the workings of nation, masculinity, and racial difference. Furthermore, during this pioneering era of coalition building and multiethnic vision, the Aiiieeeee! editors revolutionized Asian American consciousness, voice, and recognition, whereby Asian Americans represented themselves. Through incendiary language and remasculinized verve, the Four Horsemen of Asian American literature reshaped Asian America’s social contract with whiteness: the terms of assimilation, the masculine dimensions to literary emasculation, and the decolonization of the mind from white supremacy’s gaze of inferiority. No such Asian American literature exists today; or, in the words of poet Ishle Yi Park’s (2005) performance piece “Sa-I-Gu,” “Where are our Malcolms? Our Martins . . . no eloquent, rapid tongue.” Aiiieeeee!, in many ways, signaled the arrival of Asian American tongues through the manifold ways in which the radicalism of Black masculinities helped forge its emergence.

Writing Asian America Through Multiethnic Coalitions

A collective of 10 people founded Yardbird Publishing Incorporated in 1971, with Wayne Daniels as chairman of the board and Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and William Lawson as editorial directors. As part of the third world effort to transform U.S. national culture, Yardbird Publishing circulated five volumes of literature and visual art, naming Yardbird Reader 3 the “Asian American issue” due to the guest editorship of Frank Chin and Shawn Wong. If the preface of Aiiieeeee! showcased Afro-Asian performance in its content, Yardbird Reader 3 explicitly detailed the material support from Black publication houses, which initiated the Asian American writing movement. Significantly, Yardbird Reader 3 cannot be simply labeled as an Asian American literary anthology because it also includes a collage of photographs, interviews, visual art, and literature by Native American and Black writers. Perhaps this explains Yardbird Reader 3’s remarkable absence in Asian American literary scholarship, because ethnic studies has balkanized into monoracial analysis for most of its institutional history. Yet, in this section, I want to highlight the anthology’s significant contribution to understanding the comparative racialized and cultural formations between the Asian American writing movement, Black Power writers, and third world liberation. Inspired by Black writers and Black self-determination in publishing, Yardbird Reader 3 celebrates Afro-Asian collaboration more powerfully in scope than Aiiieeeee! On the dedication page, the editors salute John Okada, Louis Chu, Duke Ellington, and William Gardner Smith. Without a point of reference, this dedication seems incongruous and perplexing. However, Okada and Chu were unknown writers until the publication of Aiiieeeee! in 1974, and Ellington and Smith were, respectively, important musical and literary figures who both died in 1974. Coupled together, the placement of Asian and Black men in the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth set the tone for Yardbird Reader 3 as a milestone in Afro-Asian literary collaboration at such a historic convergence.

The front cover shows a childhood passport photograph of James Wong Howe, adorned with the shaved head and pigtails of the Qing Dynasty. He would later become a leading cinematographer in Hollywood, with 10 Oscar nominations and a career spanning over six decades. On the back cover, the editors of Aiiieeeee! smile on a wooden front porch, a black-and-white shot capturing the Four Horsemen during a leisurely moment. In text printed underneath the photograph, Ishmael Reed relates the multicultural dimensions of Yardbird Publishing: “We proved them wrong and now this is our third issue, THE ASIAN AMERICAN ISSUE, edited by Frank Chin and Shawn Wong which includes leading contributors to the ASIAN-AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. American People. Our folks” (Chin & Wong, 1974, p. back cover). Reed validates Asians in America as political and cultural citizens of the nation-state, “[o]ur folks” in his vernacular. He defines Asian American writing as a “renaissance,” reflecting his tutelage and affirmation of Asian American literature by bestowing an equal camaraderie. Later in the back-cover copy, he writes, “Political revolution means nothing if hearts and minds are unchanged. Join in a real revolution by supporting YARDBIRD, the Reader of a New America!” (Chin & Wong, 1974). The political agenda of minority writers expresses a radical turn in the cultural trajectory of the United States, one inspired by reinventing the epistemology and ontology of cultural revolution. From front cover to back cover—the passport photo indicating Howe’s immigration history, the Four Horsemen captured at rest, and Reed’s tribute to Asian American citizenship—Yardbird Reader 3 is a special record of the progress of Asian American writing at a critical juncture for multicultural, multiethnic, and Afro-Asian collaboration.

Following the dedication page, Chin pens his most direct appraisal of Asian and Black race relations in the United States. While Aiiieeeee!’s editors do not mention Howard University Press in their preface, Yardbird Reader 3’s preface establishes the special collaboration between a Black press and Asian American literary production in the very first sentence: “YARDBIRD PUBLISHING is a black company” (Chin & Wong, 1974, p. iv). Forward and concise, this statement establishes the explicit Afro-Asian connections for publication that Aiiieeeee! failed to explicate. Later, Chin documents the residential and classroom intimacies between Asians and Blacks on the West Coast, incorporating the diction of hybridized Chinese English, longtime Californ, to chronicle the uniquely American temporal and spatial proximity between the two communities. Yet, what follows is a diagnosis of Asian American citizenship that pivots on the tenets of anti-Blackness and Black American ridicule of Asian American assimilation into the category of honorary whiteness. As a condition of racial hierarchy, the architecture of comparative racialization in full measure, the racialization of the model minority versus Black resistance is a prominent topic in the early pages of the reader. However, Chin makes an adept move in response to this contradictory condition of proximity and negation, intimacy, and contempt, in suggesting that writers such as Young, Reed, Wong, and himself are not “attempting some kind of racial literary coup d’état with a mixed junta. This volume of YARDBIRD READER is no inter-racial treaty” (Chin & Wong, 1974, p. iv). Setting the limitation for any interracial utopia, Chin simply says that he does not think there is much hate between the two communities. This revelation is extraordinary for acknowledging the vast differences between Asian and Black communities while revealing the possibility for something greater. Given that Asian and Black people have lived together, attended the same schools, and even formed literary bonds, Chin suggests that race mongering generated by comparative racialization cannot supplant the experiences and intimacies that Asian Americans have shared with Blackness.

According to Chin, the expression of hate toward Black America is a condition of Asian American racial oppression and “racial self-esteem.” He directs his attention internally at Asian America, an intraracial diagnosis of the state of Asian American consciousness, historical memory, and artistic practice. Many Asian Americans belittled the artistic pursuit by Chin and Wong as simply mimicking white culture, which is similar to how Black Americans mocked the aspirations of Richard Wright in Mississippi. The exclusion of Asian American three-dimensional representations in U.S. national culture and historiography produces legacies of internalized inferiority, what Kenneth Clark’s doll test evinced in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Organizations like the Japanese American Citizens League, the only mainstream political mouthpiece allowed by the U.S. military, advocated literary critics like Allan Beekman and Bill Hosokawa, whom Chin chastises as the epitome of the white critical gaze setting out to critique Asian American literary merit and ultimately Asian American humanity. This diagnosis of Asian America in 1974—the interpellation of anti-Blackness for Asian American citizenship, the growth of intraracial self-contempt, and the influence of white literary criticism—offers the provenance to recognize the editorial intent that Chin and Wong invested in Yardbird Reader 3.

If Aiiieeeee! explores the literary contributions of Asian Americans through a genealogical record, then Yardbird Reader 3 expands upon this strategy to include other multiethnic dimensions of culture and identity. The preface concludes with familiar names found in Aiiieeeee! including Louis Chu, John Okada, Sui Sin Far, Hisaye Yamamoto, Monica Sone, Lawson Fusao Inada, Toshio Mori, Bee Fee, and Sam Tagatac. Yet, the inclusion of Native Americans such as Simon Ortiz and Leslie Silko, and African Americans like Mbembe (Milton Smith) and Joe Johnson, showcases the dynamic and improvisational moment of Yardbird Reader 3’s multiethnic literary formation.

The second preface in Yardbird Reader 3 is more personal and geohistorical. It begins with Chin and Wong narrating their relationship with David Ishii in Seattle, the home of John Okada, Monica Sone, and James Sakamoto. The reader senses, through more traditional storytelling, the practical friendships and serendipitous experiences among small-scale booksellers such as Ishii and others that nurtured the survival and growth of Asian American literature. At Ishii’s bookstore, customers could purchase the first collection of Asian American essays, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, edited by Victor and Brett DeBary Nee, Shawn Wong, and Connie Young Yu. Chin and Wong refer to Washington state as the center of Asian America, more so than California or New York, and Yardbird Reader 3 testifies to its geographic and historical importance to the maintenance of Asian American identity. Thus, the second preface expands the locations of knowledge and showcases the regional diversity embedded in the Asian American writing movement. The editors proclaim, “The state of Washington has always been the capital of Asian American culture” (Chin & Wong, 1974, p. vi). In comparison, San Francisco holds a special space in their geography of U.S. racialization, a “racist kennel,” in their words, that withheld Asian American political participation for more than 140 years. To differentiate between space and place, Peter Taylor (1999) suggests that “spaces, therefore, are the outcome of top-down processes; places can be the site for bottom-up opposition” (p. 102). Yardbird Reader 3 designates San Francisco as a space of racial exclusion from civic participation and Seattle as a place of important everyday interactions among ordinary but committed people. Washington state, the editors assert, is a place where mobility and obstruction to citizenship coexist in contradictory fashion. They list prominent Asian Americans from Washington whom they designate as either wholly assimilationist, such as Bill Hosokawa, author of Nisei: The Quiet Americans, and Keye Luke, the “number one son” in the Charlie Chan movie series. Yet, they also distinguish, quite problematically, Asian Americans who embody successful citizenship such as superior court judge Warren Chan, councilwoman Ruby Chow, rodeo champion Willie Wada, and the abovementioned James Wong Howe. This second preface is the only place where the editors name Asian Americans outside the field of literature, and their binary distinction between what they would later identify as “real” and fake” in The Big Aiiieeeee! suggests that they use the nation-state and depth of assimilation as benchmarks for their appraisals.

Returning to the question of publishing, Chin and Wong define the moment of recognition that would launch Asian American literature as a site of investigation, national acclaim, and literary merit. They write, “Yardbird Publishing is the first Berkeley–San Francisco based national publication to acknowledge the existence of an Asian American cultural tradition that is not mere mimicry or exotic artifact” (Chin & Wong, 1974, p. vi). The construction of validation, for which judgment is a prerequisite, is an important communal process in the creation of multiethnic social movements; “validation is an enabling, confirming, and supportive process” (Rendón Linares & Muñoz, 2011, p. 12-33). Validation’s function is to subvert and question systemic invisibility; it is a moral judgment whose “development . . . articulation, and . . . progress to methodological status . . . is required by the community” (Churchill, 1959, p. 203). Thus, the preface continues, “the blacks were the first to take us seriously and sustained the spirit of many Asian American writers” (Chin & Wong, 1974, p. vii). This, in short, is the core exchange at the heart of the Afro-Asian mode of cultural production: a tangible building of intellectual, emotional, and literary capacities that produces possibility when all around expound the impossible.

With Afro-Asian support, Aiiieeeee! and Yardbird 3 together inaugurated the field of Asian American literature and helped establish the necessary institutions to make it flourish. Revisiting this moment of arrival in conjunction with antiracist social movements allows for an understanding of how multiracial coalitions form and gives us a blueprint for how future coalitions may come into existence. During the early period of Afro-Asian racialization, Asian and Black male writers rejected cannibalistic gestures toward their respective racialized counterparts. This article has illuminated the personal, professional, and textual interconnections between Asian and Black masculinities at the historical intersection between Black Power and the Asian American writing movement. By expressing interracial sensibilities, theorizing multiethnicity, and practicing constructs of validation, these writers built important literary futures for minority literatures, enabling them to gain institutional, mainstream, and national acclaim. Their legacy of mutuality and affirmation suggests the power of an Afro-Asian mode of cultural production to imagine alternative communities and social relations, a march toward human recognition and literary respect. Through what Russell Leong (1995) describes as “lived theory,” readers learn about the vital literary visions and conditions of struggle that are required for any lasting social transformation. Although many imperfections can be found in the texts, both Aiiieeeee! and Yardbird 3 assumed the monumental task of being the first movers in a literary world being shaken by historic Afro-Asian pioneers. This is why we look toward cultural vanguards, for they show us a different path, a mirror to our own lived experience, and a compass to another place.