To the East, Blackwards: Bandung Hopes, Diasporic Dreams, and Black/Muslim Encounters in Sam Greenlee's Baghdad Blues

Abstract

This piece explores Sam Greenlee's novel Baghdad Blues (1976), which narrates the global dimensions of race during the Cold War by imagining Black identities diasporically—particularly in relation to the Muslim worlds. In many ways a literary complement to Bandung, Greenlee's novel narrates the relations between the national and the international, slavery and imperialism, and Blackness and Islam, while also reclaiming the terrain of African American anti-colonialism and internationalism compromised by the Cold War.

Keywords:

• anti-colonialism
• African American
• Afro-Asian
• Bandung
• Black
• Cold War
• diaspora
• internationalism
• Islam
• Muslims

Notes

The Godfather II, (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). Paramount Pictures.

Peep the real deal on Henry Luce. And for more information on the Project for A New American Century, visit their website at www.newamericancentury.org.

Sohail Daulatzai, “War At 33 1/3: Hip-Hop, the Language of the Unheard and the Afro-Asian Atlantic,” in The Vinyl Ain't Final: Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture, Basu & Lemelle (eds), (London: Pluto Press, 2006).

I use the term “Third World” as the empowering term it was for many in Africa and Asia during the anti-colonial moment – as it was used to designate a “Third” option from the limited Cold War possibilities offered by the U.S. and the Soviet Union -- not in its derogatory usage that suggests “under/un-developed.”

Audio Recording, Malcolm X: Message to the Grassroots.

Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 40.

Von Eschen, p. 3

Von Eschen, p. 97.

See Thomas Bortelsmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) and Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Von Eschen, p. 97.

See Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

My current manuscript entitled Return of the Mecca: Islam and the Cultures of Black Radicalism explores race within a global context by examining the relationship of African American Islam to Black Internationalism in the post-World War II era through the lenses of social movement history, jazz, literature, sports, cinema and hip-hop culture.

Interview with Sam Greenlee, Los Angeles, CA -- June 2004.

Greenlee interview, June 2004.

Greenlee interview, June 2004.

See Christine Acham, “Subverting the System: The Politics and Production of The Spook Who Sat By the Door” in Screening Noir (Fall/Winter 2005).

Greenlee interview, June 2004.

These histories are included in my current manuscript Return of the Mecca: Islam and the Cultures of Black Radicalism.

Greenlee interview, June 2004.

Sam Greenlee, Baghdad Blues (New York: Bantam Book, 1976), p. 34.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 70.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 48.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 57.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 82.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 21.

Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 1.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 134.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 152.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 160.

Greenlee interview, June 2004.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 120.

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 134.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 178–179.

Greenlee interview, June 2004.

Greenlee, Baghdad Blues, p. 179.