Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
in public spectacle, the film unmistakably repeats the logic—or the training in an aesthetics of rationality—that structures ritualized lynching. This structure manifests as a narrative trajectory from prehistoric to modern, vertiginously captured in the iconic image of the great ape battling airplanes from the top of the skyscraper, and mediated by the white woman’s body, as Dunham famously concludes: “It wasn’t the aviators. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” The sacrifice and consumption of a primal essence redeems a white nation threatened by overcivilization, restoring its organic capacity for growth and regeneration: civilization’s sublimation of the savage is a life-giving act of sexual violence. Kong’s capture and killing make Jack more of a man, Ann more of a woman, and their resulting heterosexual union more normatively white. This ritualized narrative, what you might call the lynching form, miraculously births whiteness through the violent incorporation of blackness, a ceremony of communion whose celebration constitutes a white—that is, imperial—nation.9
The resemblance between spectacle lynching and other communion rites has long been noted, an analogy highlighting both the desire invested in the sacrificial object and the endless repetition of ritual. Because the reproduction of whiteness is the effect of a ceremonial performance constituted by the screening of the film, it is not actually represented within the narrative: the conjugal union of Jack and Ann takes place only after the story ends. If audiences tend to forget Jack, who is largely superfluous to the climactic sequence in Manhattan and never achieves normative masculinity on screen; if their desires tend to fix on Kong and his captive, a primitivized figure of female sexual vulnerability not yet restored to a properly gendered norm; if the film reads as a tragedy whose hero’s death is rescinded in the afterlife of innumerable remakes and new adventures across genres and media—all this may be a consequence of the lynching form’s ritual temporality: it is cyclical, mortal, always insufficient, requiring repetition, again and again and again.
Just as Filipinos and African Americans do not actually appear in the film, as signifiers rendered “nonfictional” by troublesome histories of racialization, the fictional Kong appears extraneous to historical analyses of U.S. imperialism and its production of racial categories. But Kong, you might say, is the fabled “missing link” that makes the logic of U.S. imperial racism coherent: because the black Pacific did not exist, he had to be invented. His story portrays the logic, or aesthetic, of the bond between discrepant racial subjects forged by the violence of the U.S. civilizing mission, held together by the abstract ideal of a primal essence posited by imperial desire. In seeking the embodiment of its sexual fantasy, this violence functioned to conflate Negro and Filipino racialization, and yet all its ritual recurrences, whether in cinematic and literary representations or in grisly live reenactments, could never conjure the fantasy into existence.
Indeed, for those African Americans who journeyed across the ocean, on ships or in the pages of print or the shadows of the cinema, and for Filipinos across empire, writing at the seam of metropolitan and colonial racial formations, it was the discrepancy between racial forms, the disjunctive doubling of savage stereotype in the superimposition of Negro and Filipino, that provided motive and mobility. Drawing on Brent Edwards’s theorization of décalage as the discrepancy or gap in articulations of diaspora enabling movement, understood as the absence of some artificial “prop or wedge” (“Uses” 65–66), you might say that it was the removal of the black Pacific “missing link” that allowed articulations of Negro-Filipino relations to be set in motion. If the identity posited by the fusion of these racial forms could only be a trap, the incitement of violence, the difference between them might serve as a pivot in another direction. How this difference was operated, in what manner and toward what ends, I will take up throughout this book.
freedom from love
To state that King Kong is a celebratory reenactment of lynching is merely to express an open secret, one consistent with lynching’s own logic: as Jacqueline Goldsby has shown, the simultaneity of spectacle and secrecy is crucial to understanding this violence. In the film and its remakes, audiences are called upon to simultaneously see and not see lynching’s manifestation, the same training of perception that made the perpetrators of spectacle lynching disappear before the sight of the law. Yet this history of violence seems incompatible with the curious love adhering to the character, in all his unlikely vagabondage through global popular culture. Where audiences’ love for the renegade ape largely serves to dissociate their narrative investment in lynching’s reenactment, it is the perceptual foregrounding of lynching, the insistent calling of attention to the visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic evidence left in its wake, that banishes explicit recognition of the erotic dynamics suffusing Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.” To love Kong, viewers of the film must all but forget they are enjoying a lynching; to attend to lynching, listeners to the song must all but forget that its performance gathers in a space consecrated to love.
As a reader of such reenactments, learn not to forget there is danger here.
The danger inheres, first of all, in the condition of being overwhelmed, which any attempt to speak the violence struggles to restrain but cannot fully deny. When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick, Holiday writes.10 It takes all the strength out of me (95). Earnestness or anger, a politics of righteousness, may disavow its insufficiency only by substituting the work of exorcism for the appeal to justice. For the dead have not been saved, and justice has not come. It reminds me of how Pop died. To say otherwise, to proclaim justice’s establishment in a haunted land, on behalf of those living who would claim the name of the dead—as a nation, race, or species; as rightful heirs—is to willfully misperceive your privilege as freedom. To be open to the radical force of the appeal to justice demands the vulnerability of understanding the violence as ongoing. But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South (95). In short, to speak of lynching is to render your own ethical failure, whether you admit it or not—not only to acknowledge justice’s failure to redress a harm but to bear forward the work of the violence out into the world.
Coming after the first is a second danger, weaving leisurely in its course, but swiftly registered by a certain attentive presence within Holiday’s audience. For example, the civil rights journalist and community leader Evelyn Cunningham recalled: “Many times in nightclubs when I heard her sing the song it was not a sadness I sensed as much as there was something else; it’s got to do with sexuality. Men and women would hold hands, they would look at each other, and they would pretend there was love going on, or something sexual. They would get closer together and yet there was a veneer—and just a veneer—of anger and concern” (qtd. in Margolick 81). The hesitance in Cunningham’s guarded testimony pauses over what seems to be an actual confusion, another presence in the crowd, something else that is not but has got to do with sexuality. Righteousness, a thin skin of affect as the badge of a politics, fails to conceal what is nonetheless only pretense: as if “there was love going on, or something sexual.” Looking at the stage and at each other, holding hands, the men and women perform for Cunningham’s gaze, in the dark, as if they do not know they are being watched, as if they do not know what possesses them.
In her characteristically blunt memoirs, Holiday remarks on this strange presence:
Over the years I’ve had a lot of weird experiences as a result of that song. It has a way of separating the straight people from the squares and cripples. One night in Los Angeles a bitch stood right up in the club where I was singing and said, “Billie, why don’t you sing that sexy song you’re so famous for? You know, the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees.”
Needless to say, I didn’t. (95)
It is tempting to imagine the woman as merely unknowing, deficient in awareness or ability, what Holiday refers to as a square or cripple or both. But her request, as Holiday reports it, suggests a more deliberate cruelty.11 Unlike the cautious Cunningham or the unwitting couples she observes, the figure called bitch bears knowledge but lacks care, setting loose a force she cannot really control. Meeting her affront with greater knowledge and equal fearlessness, Holiday’s account enacts a curt dismissal whose brevity contains volumes—outstripping speech not because there is nothing to say but because there is too much, an excess of meaning. Yet it is needless to say because Holiday works the