Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
necessary condition for recovering an affirmative notion of blackness irreducible to its constitution by white racism. Thus, one of its more surprising variants provided a lexicon for alternative stylizations of female and queer nonwhite sexualities, in the appropriated Orientalisms of writers such as Marita Bonner, Nella Larsen, and Richard Bruce Nugent.
The final collision between U.S. and Japanese imperialisms in World War II, and the subsequent reshaping of the world order, drastically revised the terms of this interest, both dispersing and intensifying it. Sympathies for Japan were largely forgotten, helped by active efforts of suppression during the war, by government officials—over eighty members of black organizations, including Muhammad, were arrested on charges of sedition or draft evasion in September 1942—as well as black intellectuals.23 Meanwhile, a continuing series of wars brought more black soldiers to Asia, binding many closer to U.S. imperial interests while baptizing others in forms of radical internationalism.24 One strain of the interest turned toward Third Worldist politics, particularly Maoism,25 while another manifested in pop-cultural obsessions with kung fu and in Afrofuturist explorations of outer space by musicians like Sun Ra.
But Du Bois’s early transpacific analyses are not merely useful for a taxonomy of black cultural formations. More broadly, they anticipate how the subsequent course of black history may be approached through an Afro-Asian interpretation of the twentieth century, which identifies the social and political advances of black and Asian peoples as the era’s defining event, and the jaggedly articulated strivings of metropolitan minorities and colonized or imperially subjugated populations of color as its indispensable condition. In the most straightforward way, this is the prophecy of the color-line thesis. Yet the cold pragmatism of Du Bois’s geopolitical analyses can seem disconcerting to the liberatory spirit driving recent recuperations of black internationalism and Afro-Asian sympathies. The epochal break he saw in 1905 would be generally recognized after World War II, and while he has been rightly accused of insufficiently critiquing Japanese imperialism,26 his larger theme, shared by Corrothers and Bruce, was actually vindicated by the war: in contesting U.S. imperialism’s monopolization of the terms of racial justice, Japanese imperialism helped create unprecedented openings that were seized by black freedom movements, even if its own dubious claims proved disastrous for populations under its sway.
Put differently, what feels insufficient in the otherwise reasonable revisionist identification of an “Afro-Asian century”27 is the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the extravagant visions of freedom it prophesied and the bitter realities it left behind, culminating in the impoverished conditions of formal national independence and formal racial equality. Moreover, the geopolitical conditions that enabled those visions no longer obtain. The color line is not the problem of the twenty-first century, in Du Bois’s sense; even as racism persists and expands, questions of racialization no longer provide the dynamic link through the social conflicts driving global change. To understand this trajectory of the prophecy, and to understand why its radical potential is not yet exhausted, I turn to the second aspect of the Asia/Pacific interest in African American culture.
This aspect traversed the pathways of U.S. imperialism, which offered fragile opportunities for black performances of colonial privilege, most extensively in the Philippines and Hawai‘i.28 Not reducible to simple patriotism or Afro-Asian solidarity, this aspect of the Asia/Pacific interest illustrates the fraught yet generative racial, sexual, and gendered contradictions embodied by American Negro uplift emerging within transpacific imperial competition. The ambivalent participation of black soldiers in the controversial Philippine war provided the first major nexus of this history, along with debates over their conditions of service and their relationship to other nonwhite groups. Another linked post-Emancipation debates over black education to U.S. imperialism in a complex transpacific circuit, connecting white American missionary education in Hawai‘i, via Samuel C. Armstrong, to the Tuskegee model of industrial education championed by his protégé, Booker T. Washington, which subsequently served as a model for U.S. officials in Manila. Meanwhile, African American educators found opportunities for professional advancement under the colonial regime, including a young Carter G. Woodson, who wrote approvingly of the experience in his 1933 Mis-education of the Negro.
A third nexus involved debates over colonial migration, whether by upwardly mobile individuals or en masse; the Philippines briefly served as the focus for black emigration schemes, and the U.S. government entertained proposals to import black labor to the colony. Finally, the complex global circuits of modernizing popular entertainment brought black musical culture to the colonies, returning the latter to the metropole in cultural practices, memory, and fantasy. James Weldon Johnson, with Bob Cole and his brother Rosamond Johnson, wrote a groundbreaking 1906 play, The Shoo-Fly Regiment, about soldiers in the Philippines, as part of a brief fad of similarly themed productions, including works by Black Patti’s Troubadours and the Pekin Stock Company. As late as 1927, the New York playwright Eulalie Spence could offhandedly introduce a character as “one of these here Philippine gals” (Her 139). While memories of the colonial period faded quickly after the 1946 end of direct U.S. rule, traces persisted among veterans and their families: Ralph Ellison recalled his father’s service in Cuba, the Philippines, and China in his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man (xiii), while Ann Petry helped to preserve the letters of an uncle who served in the Philippines and an aunt who taught in Hawai‘i (E. Petry 2005).
If Du Bois’s 1899 address sketches the contours of a future Asia/Pacific interest in African American culture, the methodological implications of its comparative spirit entail a contrapuntal narration of Afro-Asian history, which is why this book also takes up reciprocal, if uneven, interests in blackness in Japanese American and Filipino migrant cultures. As Vicente Rafael and Paul Kramer have shown, race-making under U.S. colonialism in the Philippines was contradictory: anti-insurgent warfare tended to conflate territories and populations into a singular racial enemy, while the exigencies of civilian colonial rule demanded the proliferation and classification of racial differences into a progressive hierarchy, whose heterogeneity was yet to coalesce into nationhood.29 Intraimperial migration further complicated matters, and Filipino intellectuals frequently deployed figurations of blackness to negotiate the conjunctures of metropolitan and colonial racial formations, in the long advent of Philippine formal independence.
Japanese Americans in this period similarly relied on figurations of blackness in navigating a trajectory amid the competing claims and disavowals of Japanese and U.S. imperialisms. At times, they contrasted Negro servility to Japanese virility and militancy—persistent stereotypes in U.S. culture prior to World War II that were even employed didactically, if in a different spirit, by black intellectuals. At other times, drawing on overlapping experiences of segregation in the West, they figured blackness to imagine communal, if not necessarily nonhierarchical, relations outside of white supremacy. Through to the present, black presences in Japanese American culture typically signify the chance of multiracialism to which all imperialisms lay claim; thus, as Japanese Americans contemplated their destiny in the shadows of transpacific imperial competition, blackness came to figure histories of racial violence whose repression could be exchanged for degrees of privilege, but whose unleashing might be the condition of an unimaginable freedom.
Comparative and global inquiry, in Du Bois’s color-line writings, was organized in terms of continents, in 1899, and of empires and transimperial movements, in 1924. They have rightly been cited as a precedent for transnational approaches to American studies and ethnic studies, as those fields seek to escape the geopolitical imagination of post–Cold War American exceptionalism. In drawing a methodology from Du Bois’s color line, I approach the histories of black and Asian racialization in terms of migrations, rather than geopolitical units defined by past or present state borders, as processes in and of motion rather than geographical fixity. By “migrations,” I refer to the large-scale and long-term resettlement of racialized labor, but also the transient movements of casual workers, military personnel, and displaced groups, as well as the individual journeys of students, educators, government officials, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. These bodily travels, furthermore, shaped and were shaped by proliferating modern telecommunications media. Thus, I conceptualize migrations as multidirectional and interrelated processes of physical movements and cultural circulation, rather than the unidirectional passage between fixed locations in classic U.S. narratives of immigration.
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