STRANGE FRUIT OF THE BLACK PACIFIC
NATION OF NATIONS: IMMIGRANT HISTORY AS AMERICAN HISTORY
General Editors: Rachel Buff, Matthew Jacobson, and Werner Sollors
Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America
Ji-Yeon Yuh
Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
Thomas J. Ferraro
Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation
Lisa D. McGill
Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship
Sara K. Dorow
Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction
Jeffrey Melnick and Rachel Rubin
From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era
Edited by Elliott R. Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan M. Kraut
Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Alicia Schmidt Camacho
The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship
Edited by Rachel Ida Buff
Rough Writing: Ethnic Authorship in Theodore Roosevelt’s America
Aviva F. Taubenfeld
The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946
Rick Baldoz
Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America
Helen Heran Jun
Entitled to Nothing: The Struggle for Immigrant Health Care in the Age of Welfare Reform
Lisa Sun-Hee Park
The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden
Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow
Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism
Nadine Naber
Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
Lisa Marie Cacho
Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California
Simone Cinotto
Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War
Cindy I-Fen Cheng
Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America
Catherine Ceniza Choy
Who’s Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity
Jennifer Nugent Duffy
Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority
Zareena Grewal
African and American: West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America
Marilyn Halter and Violet M. Showers Johnson
From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora
Khatharya Um
The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration: Gender, Race, and Media
Leah Perry
Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives
Vince Schleitwiler
Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific
Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives
Vince Schleitwiler
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2017 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-6469-0 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5708-1 (paperback)
For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress.
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A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
Some people manage to stay free.
—Mosquito (Gayl Jones)
CONTENTS
Overture: The Good News of Empire
1. The Violence and the Music, April–December 1899
3. Love Notes from a Third-Conditional World
5. The Rainbow Sign and the Fire, Every Time Los Angeles Burns
Afterthought: The Passing of Multiculturalism