Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler

a problem of perception before it is ethics or epistemology.

      This red ray, put simply, is a figure for what transforms Du Bois from a scholar to a political activist. But his activism continues to involve the production of knowledge and of writing. In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde describes a “quality of light” that has “direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes we hope to bring about through those lives,” defining poetry as a practice that “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change” (36). In this sense, the figure of the red ray captures something of the quality of light that shapes and is shaped by Du Bois’s developing poetic method, his epistemology and his aesthetics, in his relentlessly polygeneric, interdisciplinary, multimedia writings from Souls onward. The optic is just one aspect of this, of his ongoing improvisational orchestration of what Fred Moten calls “the ensemble of the senses”—Souls, for example, combines not only autobiography, sociology, history, biography, and fiction, but concludes with and is constantly interrupted by inscriptions of music.

      With that in mind, I want to shift from reading the red ray as a strictly visual metaphor to think of this quality of light as having a sound, and to consider how it resounds or is re-sounded, not just in the sense of an echo but of a transformation or translation, as it moves along a global color line. It may be set to work, as in Du Bois’s case, on the apparently impossible task of imagining racial justice beyond the terms laid down by imperialism’s own justifications, which determine what can be perceived even before they dominate what can be known and represented. For Du Bois in this period, and arguably throughout his career, the agenda remains a form of uplift, but the sound of this red ray begins to bend his vision of black modernity onto a different course.

      The red ray may be perceived at any number of locations along the color line—the site where modern racial subjects were incarnated and incorporated, where uplift and violence, logically incommensurable but regularly indistinguishable in practice, converged in a kind of blind spot of racialized perception, the occasion of aesthetic training and countertraining. As preparation to hear a quality of light, you may turn to the resources of black aesthetic traditions, following the guidance of poet-theorists like Lorde, Moten, Brent Edwards, Nathaniel Mackey, and others. Attending to the ways black cultural practices work the material edges of multiple representational media simultaneously—not to privilege the oral over the literary or imagine some combination adding up to total knowledge, but to mobilize the invisible and unspeakable at the limits of any medium or sense—you may find a pedagogical function in aesthetic form.

      What I call reading as learning how to read, invoking the radical theorizations of literacy characteristic of black literary traditions, submits to this improvised aesthetic training beyond the historical constraints of racialized perception. Pursuing this reading along the color line, this method seeks to activate the imaginative longings within literary resoundings of the red ray, which open up a field of political engagement even as they are effaced in the historical record of social action. Persisting in their texts as a muffled call, they await a collective response enacting as-yet unknown forms of belonging across difference, while training reading as learning the conditions of collective responsibility.

      In Du Bois’s anecdote, the red ray emerges from a comparative moment within the heterogeneity of the category “Negro,” but extending comparison’s range across racial categories and formations can open up the unequal relations and unpredictable possibilities subsumed within a single term. His color-line concept expresses how racial forms produced at any one location always allude to others, whose exotic distance might function in excess of their capacity to signify in a local racial order. This allusive excess, found at the intersections of black and Asian migrations, signals a fugitive trajectory. Following lessons from Du Bois, the remainder of this book examines encounters between tokens of uplift and violence along the color line. If the violence of imperial racialization at times imposed a fictive identity conflating blacks and Asians, the resounding of the red ray emitted by these encounters served to operate an articulation of and through difference. The texts I consider, emerging from within the history of imperialism, did not triumph over its violence, and largely reproduced its civilizationist grammar and lexicon; yet by attending to their translations, striving to hear their quality of light, you might learn to read for what is excluded by, or eludes, imperialism’s racial justice.

      a fugitive end

      In conclusion, I take up two further translations of the red ray, as it recedes into the dimming recollections of guerrilla warfare across the Pacific. The first appears in the aforementioned Sam Hose propaganda generated by the Filipino nationalist resistance. Here is one version of the full text:

      TO THE COLOURED AMERICAN SOLDIERS.

      It is without honour nor profit that you shed your costly blood.

      Your masters have thrown you to the most inicuous (sic) fight with double purposes.

      In orders (sic) to be you the instrument of their ambition.

      And also your hard work will make soon the extinction of your race.

      Your friends the Philipinos (sic) give you this good warning.

      You must consider your situation and your history.

      And take charge that the blood of your brothers Sam Heose (sic) and Gray proclaim vengeance.33