Margins
The East Is Black book cover
The East Is Black
Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination
2000
First Published
3.86
Average Rating
275
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
3.86
Number of Ratings
37
5 STARS
19%
4 STARS
57%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Robeson Taj Frazier
Author · 2 books
Taj Frazier is Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved