This chapter explores Hughes’s historic visit to Shanghai in 1933 and his encounter with the reverberating Shanghai jazz scene in the interwar era. It situates Hughes’s account of his trip in I Wonder as I Wander (1956) during the Bandung period, examining Hughes’s subsequent response to Afro-Asian engagements with the language of jazz. Against the overarching premise of Afro-Asian solidarity, music in Hughes’s work becomes an alternative site of politics, simultaneously conveying Bandung-era optimism and the limits of Afro-Asian solidarity underpinned by the nation-state and its racial categories. Music in Hughes’s world as practice metaphorically sensitizes the many nuances of interracial dynamics, that is, Sino-Japanese tension, in ways that necessitate reconfiguration of the global color line.

Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, founder and president of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME) in Chicago, was a working-class black intellectual who advocated Afro-Asian solidarity during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a long tradition of black internationalism, she pursued an alliance with Japan in the years leading up to World War II. Her political vision, however, contradicted the ideas of mainstream black leaders of the period. Although Gordon had limited formal education she developed inventive strategies to communicate with her mostly working-class audience. Black nationalist women such as Gordon were the most ardent supporters of recruiting Japan as an ally, even if they disagreed on the concrete political projects that should underpin Afro-Asian solidarity. Gordon opposed black migration to Japan’s conquered territory of Manchuria, preferring a ‘return to Africa.’ In Gordon, readers encounter an organic intellectual with a distinct class position, who searched for practical ways for people of color to bring white empire to an end.