Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
its passage from dependence to independence—it is impossible when imagined prospectively: to require another’s recognition of your capacity for self-determination is to be incapable of self-determination. To wait upon the grace of uplift is endless, for it is only ever bestowed after the fact.
In the colony, Anglo-Saxon uplift always deferred the autonomy it claimed to produce. One way to resolve this problem required internalizing tutelage within the collective and individual racial body, which is how Negro uplift sought its autonomy. By taking autonomy as a given, retrospective accounts tend to obscure the unstable intraracial split such tutelage produces—whether between the black middle-class subject and the benighted masses or within that precarious middle-class subject itself—behind the unifying force of racial pride as self-love. Both Anglo-Saxon and Negro uplift, then, heralded the emergence of an internally divided nonwhite subject who belongs in and to a transimperial realm of civilization while remaining marginal to any existing state capable of recognizing that subject as its citizen.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that these forms of uplift are equivalent, nor that one is less authentic or derivative of the other. Negro uplift differs in its primary emphasis on intraracial relations, though it was nonetheless profoundly shaped by interactions with colonized nonwhite populations, as well as the Anglo-Saxon uplift whose hypocrisies it exposed—black observers could excoriate white soldiers and officials in the Philippines while upholding the imperial mission’s ideals. But just as Negro uplift saw itself as more fully and properly embodying the ideals proclaimed by Anglo-Saxon uplift, it also shared an essential relationship to violence, moralized and moralizing: unable to recognize the autonomy of its inter- or intraracial object, racial uplift construes its prerogative of coercion as benevolent. Similarly, their shared historical conditions make them alienating to present-day sensibilities in analogous ways. As the prevailing form of racial justice in a period when white supremacism was hegemonic, both forms of uplift contain elements that appear to hindsight as unmistakably racist.
They also shared a more curious feature: the presumption, as a structural premise, of inevitable European civilizational decline, against which uplift’s subject was positioned as subordinate but rising, through a generative relation with its own, less civilized wards. Where uplift offered its lowly objects a tutelage in civilization leading, someday, to autonomous selfhood, it promised its advanced subjects protection from decadence or “overcivilization” through reinvigorating contact with primitive vitality. Underwriting uplift was a model of civilization joining hierarchical classification and the forward, upward movement of historical progress to the cyclical rhythms of birth, maturation, reproduction, and death. To be at the pinnacle of this civilizational schema is to anticipate a natural decline. Both varieties of uplift sought to engineer new forms of racial privilege as heirs-apparent to European empires, known and constituted by intercourse with more primitive groups. Among African American intellectuals in the period, the word “Occidentalism” was sometimes used to distinguish a desire for Western ideals from a disdain for white people who claimed them,2 a term even more striking if you recall its etymological origin—the identification of the west as the direction of the setting sun. Hence, I take occidented as my term for this shared orientation, upholding the primacy of Western civilization as the very promise of its downfall.
the missing link
The recent resurgence of an Afro-Asian comparative interest out of disparate investments within African American and Asian American studies, black diaspora studies and critical Asian studies, and American studies and ethnic studies3 has largely evaded the gravitational pull of the term “black Pacific,” as a parallel formation to Paul Gilroy’s phenomenally successful if often misunderstood 1993 book, The Black Atlantic.4 However, the phrase appears in two critical interventions worth noting. In “Toward a Black Pacific,” his afterword to Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s AfroAsian Encounters, Gary Okihiro points out that “the Pacific” as metonym “often and mistakenly stands in place of or in reference to Asia, especially East Asia” (313). As a brief corrective to this erasure of indigenous histories, he sketches “three intersections between Pacific Islanders and African Americans” (316): overlapping histories of bonded labor migration linking enslaved Africans, Chinese “coolies,” and Polynesian captives in Peru; networks of colonial education tying Tuskegee and Hampton to Hawai‘i; and circuits of popular culture bringing new styles of Hawaiian and African American music in contact since the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, an excavation of the historical confluences of Pacific Islander and black cultures is beyond the capacity of this book, whose comparative scope is already ambitious. Though it cannot substantively redress the erasures of indigenous Pacific histories and perspectives, I hope at least to unsettle their reinscription, and I follow Okihiro in emphasizing the multiplicity of racial categories that “the Pacific” invokes.
Another intervention is signaled by Etsuko Taketani’s essay, “The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way,” which tracks the multiple accounts Johnson gave of his participation, as consul, in the 1912 U.S. intervention in Nicaragua that led to twenty years of military occupation—an incident, he argued, that partly responded to rising Japanese influence, and that would be cited to defend Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Challenging the tendency in recuperative scholarship to explain black sympathy for Japanese imperialism as “mistaken,” Taketani rejects the unexamined assumption that “African Americans are not accountable for globe-carving imperialism” (82), arguing that Johnson’s agency cannot be severed from its position within, and influence upon, a politics hindsight finds objectionable. Recognizing “the complicity of imperial modes and a black internationalism” (103) leads her to an instructive reading of Johnson’s interrogation of “the very continuity between his position and a position he repudiates as evil” (91).5
In this book, I refer to the transpacific to account for differentiations within imperial racial formation—noting, for example, that certain features characterizing Filipino and Hawaiian racialization correspond with Negro racialization in this period, by contrast with the racialization of Chinese and Japanese. Acknowledging African Americans’ productive complicity in U.S. imperialism reveals how this correspondence conditioned the agency of black soldiers, colonial officials, and intellectuals, as they recast the meanings and destinies of race through encounters with Philippine colonization, as well as how advocates of uplift pursued autonomy through imaginative affinities with imperial Japan. Attending to the transpacific allows me to extend Taketani’s exploration of black internationalism’s alignments with various imperialisms, while to negotiating the continuity of black and Asian theories and representations of race with positions that now appear unambiguously racist.
By contrast, this book poses the black Pacific with a certain irreducible irony. In its inherent volatility, the term might most precisely be described as a joke. If it functions in scholarly endeavors as a lure that misapprehends its own “discoveries,” then rather than disavowing the desire that produced it, you might allow it to turn back on that desire as instruction—in the same way the “joke” of passing played by the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man turns back on his narrative as a bitter lesson on distance between racial privilege and freedom. I propose “the black Pacific” to name, not a subfield of academic enterprise, but a mythic preserve within which the desired object of U.S. imperial violence was imagined to live and breed.
Like “race” more broadly, this black Pacific is a social fiction with material consequences, though none of the groups ensnared under its particular manifestations sought to appropriate it as a category of affirmative collectivity. Hence it can be described more emphatically as a historical nonentity, in that its existence, as a fantasy with real effects, was recognized only through negation and disavowal. Indeed, it was an indispensable negativity for a range of modernizing projects, the specter each needed to invoke in order to exorcize. It was the object of a white imperial desire, which sought at once to consume it and to banish it from perception, whether through overwhelming violence or benevolent tutelage. As the violent tropical zone where Negro and Filipino racialization did not merely overlap but actually converged, it was the slanderous precondition of would-be autonomous forms of Negro and Filipino uplift, which sought to disprove it through the performance of civilized gender norms. In extravagant revenge fantasies of the Negro incarnation of Japanese imperial might, it offered