Tzu-Chun Wu, Judy. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Summary
Judy Tzu-Chun’s book, Radicals on the Road, is a story about significant yet “underrecognized historical figures” who made international journeys during the Vietnam War. These figures of varying ages, races, sexual identities, class backgrounds and religious faiths all believed that the US war in Vietnam was immoral and unjustified and identified themselves as “internationalists.” The political views of these individuals, Tzu-Chun posits, were inspired by the physical journeys and “the face-to-face contacts that they established with people outside of the United States” and the underground press syndicate that charted their travels and experiences. (3-4). They formed an “internationalist consciousness” that both “challenged and reinscribed Western perceptions of Asia.” Tzu-Chu thus conceives these experiences as a form of “radical orientalism,” in which “American activists romanticized and identified with revolutionary Asian nations and political figures.” (4) These individuals “followed an orientalist tradition of perceiving a dichotomy between the East and the West, specifically between decolonizing Asia and imperial America.” (5) Simultaneously, Asian individuals worked with US activists to foster a “radical orientalist sensibility.” “By serving as a source for alternative values,” Tzu-Chun writes, “revolutionary Asia assisted American activists in imagining new political possibilities.” (6) Taken collectively, this exploration of internationalism, orientalism, and feminism contributes to a better understanding of the long 1960s activism: travel re-frames the anti-war movement in an international context (Suri) and how Vietnamese engaged with non-state actors from the U.S.; how individuals of diverse backgrounds developed political partnerships and built a multiracial anti-war movement (it was not just a white movement); and finally how gender shapes the conduct of work and engagement in political activism. At the core, Tzu-Chun acknowledges, is a tension between orientalism and internationalism (binary vs. cosmopolitanism); however, she argues that these tension allowed “American activists to develop a sense of social responsibility and mutuality with those from the east.”