“Mao Freed China”: Dennis Brutus’s Chinese Vision and Leftist Orientalism in the Cold War

Dr. Flair Donglai SHI
Warwick University

***All are welcome***

Abstract:
This talk will focus on “positive Orientalism” in Dennis Brutus’s bilingual poem collection China Poems, published in the US in 1975 with Chinese translations by Ko Ching-po (高清波). Brutus was the only non-white South African poet who went to China during apartheid, when there were no official diplomatic relations between the two countries. His Orientalist appropriations of what he thought as traditional Chinese poetics was conditioned by his deep investment in international struggles against racism, and against the apartheid government in particular. However, this special poem collection has been ignored by scholars working on Brutus and at times outright dismissed as misplaced political naivety and embarrassing ideological blindness. Via a detailed historical contextualization of Brutus’s visit to China as an international sports activist, I look at the ways in which the poems’ stylistic characteristics have been influenced by Maoist ideas on literature as well as his reading of translations of Mao’s own poetry. I argue that not only is China Poems a valuable resource for the study of cultural resistances to “Yellow Peril”/“Red Peril” discourses in non-Western contexts during the global Cold War, but it also showcases unique phenomena with regards to the politics of cultural appropriation and translation.