Nation, Narration, and the Afro-Asian Encounter in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
Nation, Narration, and the Afro-Asian Encounter in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
This chapter discusses the question of what Afro-Asian political alliances and personal relationships might look like, and in what kinds of spaces they might exist and flourish. Both Dark Princess (1928) and East Goes West (1937) imagine an Afro-Asian alliance in the early twentieth century through their revisions of novelistic conventions. The Afro-Asian encounters depicted in these novels are deeply invested in bringing a transnational perspective to explicating and resolving tensions in interracial relations. They attempt to demolish the nation-state's power of racial exclusion, as well as to classify labor by reworking the conventions of the genre most closely associated with that political body. Both texts recognize that racialized labor exploitation acts as the bridge between a domestic program of political exclusion and the West's colonizing projects in Africa and Asia.
Keywords: Afro-Asian alliance, Dark Princess, East Goes West, interracial relations, racial exclusion, Africa, Asia
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