Black and Yellow Power: The intersections of identity politics and literary study

"Black and Yellow Power: The Intersections of Identity Politics and Literary Study," interrogates the "Power" moment in African American and Asian American politics and literature to open a dialogue about the usefulness of post-coloniality to the study of African American and Asian American literature by tracing colonialism evolution from political strategy to literary paradigm for understanding identity and difference. My project makes visible a connection between the recognition of colonialism as a new mechanism for identity formation for African Americans and Asian Americans, the adoption of anti-colonialism as a political strategy, and colonialism as a literary paradigm. At present, globalized and diasporan paradigms dominate Asian American and African American literary study. These paradigms arose partly to counter criticisms of post-coloniality as not particular, specific, or relevant to American politics and thereby American culture and literature. My project intervenes in this discussion to recover American appropriations of colonialism, which we can then use to broaden our understanding of the "power" period beyond chauvinistic thuggery and romanticized ethnocentrism. My comparative and interdisciplinary interest in African American and Asian American literature and culture are part of a larger concern with the ways that we theorize the literature of people of color in America.; For example, the first chapter, "Who('s)(e) Fanon: Black and Yellow Power and American Appropriations of Colonialism," decodes academic and political appropriations of Fanon and repositions him as a node for Black and Asian American ideological cooperation. These appropriations of colonialism through Fanon led to the development of what I call the "guerilla aesthetic." This guerilla posture or relationship to American colonialism, proved useful as a location for launching political and social critiques of American culture. While this position was first thought of as a political one, the figure of the armed, guerilla fighter soon came to denote a generalized antagonistic relationship towards American society signified by changes in dress, hair, and other cultural practices. This slippage, I argue, is a result of conflations of revolutionary and cultural nationalism which eventually stripped the figure of its ideological and political specificity, leaving this counter-hegemonic identity open to cooptation.