Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam War

In Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu explores the international journeys of antiwar and anti-imperialist activists from the United States during the Vietnam War era (1959–1975). Wu argues that the experiences of these figures in Vietnam, China, Korea, Cambodia, and Canada inflected their political consciousness and propelled their antiwar activism. For Wu, these activists came to see themselves as “internationalists” and embodied a “radical orientalism” that romanticized the East as an exemplar of decolonization and the West as arbiter of violent imperialism. By examining the experiences of such activists, their often uneasy collaborations with one another, and their connections to varying representatives from socialist Asia, Wu explores how race, ethnicity, and gender complicates and inflects the political terrain through which these figures arrive at their political moorings and activism. What emerges is a geographically expansive and theoretically complex depiction of social activism and cross-ethnic/cross-racial collaboration during the long 1960s. In so doing, Wu provides key contributions to historical narratives of social activism during the 1950s to 1970s and to theoretical conceptualizations emerging in comparative race studies.

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