Heartbeat of Struggle

The Rondezvous of Remembrance and Revolt daniel widener (bio) Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. By Diane Fujino. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. By Laura Pulido. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. By Cynthia Young. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) I once spent a chilly winter afternoon at the Ibdaa Cultural Center, a multipurpose community arts facility in the Dheisheh refugee camp. Located just outside of Bethlehem, Dheisheh ranks among the most famously and consistently militant of Palestinian refugee camps. Despite the closures, military attacks, and constant humiliations that shape life under the Israeli occupation, the ICC maintains an active program of youth and adult activities, including an annual basketball tournament that was on hand the week that I arrived. Amid the universally recognized irony of the random arrival of an African American visitor during a basketball tournament, I found myself drawn into a conversation that took me somewhat aback. Having paused to assure me that the women's and men's teams from the camp were the best in Palestine (and, it turns out, among the best in the Arab world), one of my hosts pulled me aside to ask, in relatively straightforward terms, what was going on with the black people in America. When I asked what he meant, the middle-aged activist replied that, where once the members of his generation had seen black Americans as an allied force, engaged in a parallel struggle against [End Page 199] American imperialism, they now saw only Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and other symbols of African American investment in U.S. foreign policy. I often tell students of my conversation with Ziad Abbas, generally on a day when I show them images of Black Panther leader Huey Newton embracing Yasser Arafat, W.E.B. DuBois and Mao Tse Tung laughing uproariously (at who's expense we can only guess), and an unnamed black Cuban physician working alongside an equally obscure North Korean doctor in a nameless field hospital in the Central African Republic. I tell the students about David Fagan's defection to the camp of Emilio Aguinaldo, about Katayama Sen and the formation of two COMINTERN resolutions on "the negro question" in the United States. We read primary texts, like Ho Chi Minh's 1924 essay on lynching and Mao's response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, as well as the growing body of work by scholars like Vijay Prashad, Daryl Maeda, Fred Ho, Bill Mullen, Andrew Jones, Nikhil Singh, Moon-Ho Jung, May Fu, Jason Ferreira, and others. I try to fit our discussion into a broader conversation that encompasses Chicanos and Che, Algeria and nonalignment, Pontecorvo and the Spook Who Sat By the Door. Finally, if we're in spring, I try to remember to remind the students that May 19th is the shared birthday of Ho Chi Minh, Malcolm X, and Yuri Kochiyama. Each of the works under discussion here, Diane Fujino's Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolution Life of Yuri Kochiyama, Laura Pulido's Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, and Cynthia Young's Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, charts new ground in uncovering the ideas and ideals of revolutionary antiracist solidarity that emerged in the course of the "long" 1960s. The books differ methodologically, with Fujino's political biography, Pulido's social scientific survey and Young's cultural history marshalling distinct evidentiary bases, encompassing related, yet divergent, themes, and fitting within identifiably different historiographical and scholarly literatures. These distinctions notwithstanding, their books share important aspects, including the common themes of racial justice and political radicalism, the overlapping time period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the problematic of the relationship between domestic radicalism and the world beyond the borders of the U.S. nation state. Tracing something of these similarities, as well as noting where they depart, helps us to understand anew a historical moment whose contested legacy continues to animate struggles for racial justice, inspire new visions

Art · Black Power · Heartbeat · New Left · Physics · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Soul · Theology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

• Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen

  Open Access•Daryl Joji Maeda•American Quarterly•2005

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