Radicals on the Road

Radicals on the Road makes several contributions. First, it highlights the experiences of a much broader range of social actors than is usually portrayed in most of the existing literature. The book's focus on nonstate actors from diverse background who created partnerships—some successful and some quite challenging— provides valuable insight into how ideological and physical boundaries can be crossed. Second, these cases demonstrate how international travel sparked contributions to a variety of social movements, answering questions about participation, motivation, retention, and experiences in the aftermath of collective action. Finally, Radicals on the Road is a wonderful example of careful and rigorous scholarship that avoids simplistic narratives of failed partnerships or accolades to global sisterhood. Instead, it delves head first into the complexities of creating national and transnational partnerships among diverse communities for a unified goal. This contribution to me is by far the largest. In Wu's studies, social actors are never painted in black and white but rather taken in their social and historical context, illuminating what was at stake in arguments, divisions and failed partnerships and what worked in relationships that overcame such challenges.

-- Nicky Fox * Mobilization *

"By expanding the geopolitical framework and focalizing on the "political partnerships" between social activists of different nationalracialethnicgenderand religious backgroundsWu makes more complex the picture of social activism during the Vietnam era. In additionby focusingon travelWu shows how the discursive registers of race and gender also shift across space as they are produced and reproduced in different contexts and for different political purposes." —Quyne Nhu Le

* Journal of Asian American Studies *

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has taken the theory of orientalism and applied it in a fascinating way to her study of U.S. anticolonial activists who traveled to Asia during the Vietnam War. She has combined thorough research and sophisticated analysis with lively prose to create a work that will impress an academic audience but also engage a broad readership. Wu's study undoubtedly will inspire future scholarship, including work that explores the complicated realities of the nations that the Anti-Imperialist Delegation and other U.S. activists idealized.

-- Heather Marie Stur * The American Historical Review *

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's book Radicals on the Road is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the varied and unpredictable circuits of U.S. internationalism. In particular, she privileges the role of African American, Asian American, and feminist activists in shaping an alternate vision of 'Asia,' and she argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, antiwar proponents adopted their own 'radical orientalism.'...Wu’s work opens the pathways for new research, particularly on Asian American, African American, and women’s roles in the antiwar movement...Wu’s work simultaneously respects her subjects’ radical pasts while also recognizing the limitations of their 'radical Orientalism.' In the end, antiwar activists’ 'radical orientalism' and romantic views of Asia continued to demonstrate far more about U.S. racial and political culture than they ever could reveal about the far more chaotic and contested politics of revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia.

-- Jana K. Lipman * Journal of American Ethnic History *

Wu seeks to broaden perspectives on the movement that opposed US involvement in Indochina, offering a racially rooted, gendered, and internationalist perspective.... A valuable work.

* Choice *

A dazzling contribution. Its focus is encounters between North American activists and East Asian peoples during the Vietnam War, often through travel to the 'enemy' nations of North Vietnam and communist China. Documenting both literal and ideological journeys, Tzu-ChunWu demonstrates the prominent place of East Asia in the imaginary of the American left. Activist attitudes toward Asia were developed through particular lenses of nation, race, ethnicity, and gender. These lenses encouraged Americans' sense of connection to Asian peoples, while often deeply dividing activists among themselves. Chronicling this dynamic with remarkable detail, Tzu-Chun Wu offers an impressive account of both the power and perils of the categories of belonging and analysis animating the American left.

-- Jeremy Varon * The Sixti