Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting By Vijay Prashad: An Analysis

At this point in time, race is something that is unescapable. When a child is born race is one of the first things implicated onto them. The classification and separation of different people has been around since the early expeditions of the Indian Ocean region and has become more prevalent and advanced as time has gone on. In the book, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting by Vijay Prashad he focuses specifically on “the peoples who claim the heritage of the continents of Asia and Africa” (Prashad, x). When he dissects the past struggles of these people and the evolution of white privilege throughout the book he discusses the antiracist framework of multiculturalism. However, Prashad is quick to dismiss multiculturalism, as he believes it replaces the biological hierarchy of racism with …show more content…
Instead, he sheds light on the theory of polyculturalism. In this paper, I am going to analyze how Prashad believes polyculturalism provides solidarity in the antiracist framework.
“Polyculturalism, unlike multiculturalism, assumes that people live coherent lives that are made up of host lineages… a ferocious engagement with the political world of culture, a painful embrace of the skin and all its contradictions.” (Prashad, xii) My awareness on how polyculturalism is a step in the right direction in the antiracist framework is brought to life by Prashad explaining how people of the past were not tolerating, or trying to diminish each others cultures but embracing them and growing. From as early as 863 C.E. the first interactions of Asian and African cultures have been documented, with the Chinese explorer Duan Chengshi, Arab trader al-Mas’udi and later Zheng He, an admiral for the Ming Dynasty, traveling to parts of Africa. I was able to gain knowledge of the two interacting, trading with one another and the influence it had