The best-loved celebration of lynching in U.S. popular culture locates the origins of its savage victim-hero on a fictional island in Southeast Asia. If you read this character as black, as the logic of white terror has commonly been understood to imply, then King Kong must be the most famous black figure to hail from the Asia/Pacific region until the rise of a Hawai‘i-born, Jakarta- and Honolulu-raised law professor, organizer, and memoirist named Barack Obama. Of course, the election of the first African American commander in chief surely signifies hope in the unfolding promise of racial justice—in the teeth of a national history of not only slavery and Jim Crow but also ongoing imperial warfare in Asia. By contrast, admitting the presence of race in Kong’s story privileges a history of sexualized violence, white supremacy, and conquest that appears as the very antithesis of racial justice. Between these oddly paired icons and the seemingly incompatible forces they represent lies a terrain of forgotten and forgetful desires, of vivid and resonant shadows, out of which is inscribed a hundred years or more of the history of race—that epoch heralded in 1899 by W. E. B. Du Bois as the century of the color line. It is a space and a time that this book asks you to enter.
Tempting as it may be, the “black Pacific” is not the appropriate name for this terrain. That term I will reserve for a specific lure within it, the engendering chaos of the object or essence posited by the erotic violence of imperial race-making. Call it a historical nonentity, for it never actually existed except as speculative fantasy, yet its material consequences persist—a paradoxical condition, to be sure, but one that should hardly be unfamiliar to scholars of race. The black Pacific, you might say, is the indispensable blank or blind spot on the map; the empirically observable terrain, within which it makes its absence felt, is a transpacific field, charted by imperial competition and by the black and Asian movements and migrations shadowing the imperial powers. Within this field, the fictive lure calls forth contradictory processes of conquest that endlessly pursue it—so attending to this black Pacific may allow you to apprehend the bonds between the unfolding promise of racial justice and the overwhelming sexualized violence heralding the expansion of justice’s domain.
In describing this book’s geographic reach as transpacific, I refer less to a fixed oceanic unit than to a kind of tilting of space and time, a dizzying pivotal shift in the centrifugal and centripetal forces moving empires and their shadows. Its measure might be taken from Georgia to Luzon via Hong Kong, or, just as surely, between two towns in the Mississippi Delta. The transpacific is not a place, but an orientation—if at times, as you will see, a disorientingly occidented one. Similarly, the historical setting, between the rise of the United States and Japan as Pacific imperial powers in the 1890s and the aftermath of the latter’s defeat in World War II, is periodized less in the sense of termination or punctuation than of a course of movement whose roiling currents might toss an observer’s vessel to and fro, or of the calculation of an orbit based on the shifting relations of bodies and vantages across vast distances. Put differently, this book conceptualizes its field of inquiry, not through a singular racial, national, imperial, or even oceanic formation,1 but through the interrelation of competing figures of movement—multiple circuits of black and Asian migrations cutting across Du Bois’s meandering, world-belting color line. Because the comparison necessary to this approach is also the method every imperialism seeks to monopolize, this book reads comparison against a horizon of imperial competition, in the period culminating in U.S. ascendancy as heir to Western global power, even as its foregrounded objects of analysis remain territorially bounded within U.S. rule.
Intersectional and contrapuntal readings in African American, Japanese American, and Filipino literatures provide the book’s material and method, tracing how each group’s collective yearnings, internal conflicts, and speculative destinies were unevenly bound together along the color line. Their interactions—matters of misapprehension and friction, as well as correspondence and coordination—at times gave rise to captivating visions of freedom binding metropolitan antiracisms with globalizing anti-imperialisms. Yet the links were first forged by the paradoxical processes of race-making in an aspiring empire: on one hand, benevolent uplift through tutelage in civilization, and on the other, an overwhelming sexualized violence. Imperialism’s racial justice is my term for these conjoined processes, a contradiction whose historical legacy constitutes the tangled genealogies of racism, antiracism, imperialism, and anti-imperialism. Because uplift and violence were logically incommensurable but regularly indistinguishable in practice, imperialism’s racial justice could be sustained only through an ongoing training of perception in an aesthetics of racial terror. This book takes up the task of reading, or learning how to read, the literatures that take form and flight within the fissures of imperialism’s racial justice, while straining to hear what the latter excludes, or what eludes it.
The method of this interdisciplinary book is ultimately literary, less in the choice of its objects than the mode of its articulation, marshalling the capacities of a peculiar tradition of reading destined to never stop overreaching its own grasp. By glossing “reading” as “learning how to read,” I invoke the characteristic linking of literature, in African American cultural traditions, with a knot of questions around literacy, wherein the task of learning how to read is always problematized, critical, and unfinished, never reducible to formal processes of education. It troubles the privileging of either print or oral media, the visual or the aural; it is associated with mobility, as both dislocation and flight; it signifies both the possibility of freedom and the threat of its foreclosure. Put differently, I emphasize that the task of learning how to read the literatures of black and Asian migrations is not subsidiary to social and historical analysis. It is not simply to use literary texts as evidence for a critique of dominant histories, to mine them for traces of forgotten historical formations, nor to locate their work within proper historical contexts. It is also, and more importantly, to recognize that the work of these texts is not finished, not limited to the past, and to activate them in the present, undertaking one’s historical and theoretical preparations so that their unpredictable agency might be called forth in the process of reading.
This book’s method, finally, is the expression of a political desire. It is staked on the chance that the practice of reading as learning to read could open social reality to imagination’s radically transformative power, even as it pursues this chance by dwelling in moments of subjunctive negation and foreclosure, fingering their jagged grain. While I participate in a broader aspiration to recuperate the antiracist and anti-imperialist visions of twentieth-century black and Asian movements, what I will term their third-conditional worlds, I do not presume that my hindsight suffices to liberate those visions from the racist and imperialist discourses of their emergence, for to do so would be to posit a freedom my present-day politics has not itself achieved. Instead, this book seeks to read them as they take form and flight within structures of thought whose presumptions I find objectionable, on the chance that they might diagnose a predicament of unfreedom I share.
The book is divided into three parts. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview, theoretical framework, and methodology of reading for studying race across U.S. transpacific domains. It turns to the figure of W. E. B. Du Bois on the threshold of the century he gave over to the problem of the color line, recovering the transpacific geopolitical context of that prophetic formulation, and the radical poetics of his response to racial terror. Stepping back, it surveys two major aspects of an Asian/Pacific interest within African American culture, exemplified by imperial Japan and the colonized Philippines, as well as corresponding black presences in Filipino and Japanese American culture. The second part, in two linked chapters, considers the ambivalent participation of African Americans in the colonization of the Philippines, as soldiers, colonial officials, intellectuals, and artists, alongside the development of an Anglophone Filipino intelligentsia from the colony to the metropole. Pressing the limits of the diaspora concept, it asks how these movements shaped emerging gendered forms of Negro and Filipino collectivity over against their conflation by sexualized imperial violence, and how they bore the echoes of alternative realms of belonging-across-difference that did not come into being. The third part, also in two chapters, reads the history of black urbanization alongside Japanese American incarceration and resettlement, complicating the canonical modernizing narratives of the Great Migration and the Internment. It explores how these forms of nonwhite difference provided each