Journal of Asian American Studies

As a Chinese American baritone saxophone player, Afro-Asian scholar, essayist, political activist, Luddite, Marxist–Leninist, matriarchal ecosocialist, and cancer warrior, Fred Ho has been a significant contributor to various political movements, the Asian American movement in particular. As an African American performance scholar and practitioner struggling to locate my own politics of identity around what performance can do, I was initially drawn to Ho’s combination of martial arts and jazz in order to create his Afro-Asian martial arts jazz operettas. As anyone who has known Fred Ho can attest, he is a layered, complex, but also gracious and generous collaborator. This becomes most apparent when reading his writings and experiencing his performances. Those genuinely interested in the transgressive and transcendent potential of performance and cultural production as well as the political power of transcultural solidarity would do well to engage Yellow Power Yellow Soul. Edited by Roger N. Buckley and Tamara Roberts, the project is an anthology of essays, poetry, and interviews by artists, intellectuals, activists, and friends who best know Ho’s work.

Buckley, who has been responsible for creating the Fred Ho Archives at University of Connecticut, pays tribute in a brief and poignant forward. Roberts acknowledges earlier works, such as Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader and introduces the project locating three aesthetic-political strategies that have been fundamental to Ho’s work in order to organize the text into a triumvirate of themes consisting of revolution in music, the aesthetics of politics, and life in a community. The first section demonstrates how Ho employs African American and Asian American traditions as a form of “musical decolonization” that promotes anti-imperialist interracial and intercultural solidarities. The second section examines how Ho plays “high and low” through the use of popular culture idioms and media as anticapitalist critique. The final section focuses on how Ho seeks a “new left vision” by cultivating an artistic and political community to extend his work—training musicians, challenging audiences, and using music making as a model for social justice.

Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “popular,” Kevin Felleze focuses on Ho’s articulation of a “popular avant-garde,” exemplified by the influence of such figures as Bruce Lee and the martial arts action film genre as a way of educating audiences and providing models of revolutionary counterhegemonic narrative. Ho’s Afro-Asian multicultural music draws from Ming era literature as popular folk tradition, just as much as it does from black musical tradition as [End Page 118] seen in Max Roach and John Coltrane. Coltrane and Lee become synonymous in their improvisatorial approach to experimentation and transformation. Ruth Margraff offers a glimpse into the duo’s thirteen-year collaboration resulting in multiple Afro-Asian martial arts jazz performance pieces beginning with Night Vision: A Third World to First World Vampyre Opera (2000) and the most recent Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon! (2013). Margraff paints picturesque moments of personal connection as well as the nauseating exhaustion of chemotherapy against the New York City landscape. Arthur Sabatini uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the dialogic and carnivalization in order to reveal how Ho’s operas draw on particular images or forms that combine to resist, undermine, or otherwise expose oppositional tendencies and subversive meanings in texts while simultaneously celebrating the carnivalesque relationships produced through the interweaving of Asian instruments, songs, and musical forms in African American jazz and martial arts dance.

Diane Fujino’s analysis places Ho’s work in conversation with Amilcar Cabral by “returning to the source” of Ho’s political activism. Similar to Cabral’s centrality of culture in the struggle for national liberation, Fujino argues that Ho’s artistic practice is rooted in his involvement in the Asian American movement, I Wor Kuen, and League of Revolutionary Struggle—organizations from which Ho eventually...