Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific

Imperialism's Racial Justice and Its Fugitives

Vince Schleitwiler

• Éditeur: NYU Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479805884
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Études asiatico-américaines

Set between the rise of the U.S. and Japan as Pacific imperial powers in the 1890s and the aftermath of the latter’s defeat in World War II, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific traces the interrelated migrations of African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos across U.S. domains. Offering readings in literature, blues and jazz culture, film,theatre, journalism, and private correspondence, Vince Schleitwiler considers how the collective yearnings and speculative destinies of these groups were bound together along what W.E.B. Du Bois called the world-belting color line. The links were forged by the paradoxical practices of race-making in an aspiring empire—benevolent uplift through tutelage, alongside overwhelming sexualized violence—which together comprise what Schleitwiler calls “imperialism’s racial justice.” This process could only be sustained through an ongoing training of perception in an aesthetics of racial terror, through rituals of racial and colonial violence that also provide the conditions for an elusive countertraining.
With an innovative prose style, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific pursues the poetic and ethical challenge of reading, or learning how to read, the black and Asian literatures that take form and flight within the fissures of imperialism’s racial justice. Through startling reinterpretations of such canonical writers as James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Toshio Mori, and Carlos Bulosan, alongside considerations of unexpected figures such as the musician Robert Johnson and the playwright Eulalie Spence, Schleitwiler seeks to reactivate the radical potential of the Afro-Asian imagination through graceful meditations on its representations of failure, loss, and overwhelming violence.

1.

The Violence and the Music, April–December 1899

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (36)

Improvisation must be understood, then, as a matter of sight and a matter of time, the time of a look ahead whether that looking is the shape of a progressivist line or rounded, turned. The time, shape, and space of improvisation is constructed by and figured as a set of determinations in and as light, by and through the illuminative event. And there is no event, just as there is no action, without music.

—Fred Moten, In the Break (64)

a false start

The story with which I begin you’ll have heard before, familiar in form even if its content appears as new. It’s an old-fashioned story of modernity, an abortive tale about coming of age, a parable of racial meaning as a product of world-belting mass migrations mapped onto the scale of a single body, on a walk down a city street. Well-worn by countless retellings, the story is autobiographical, if admittedly less the way something actually happened than a way to make what happened move in the eyes of those who might gather to hear it. It’s the story of a false start.

James Weldon Johnson spun a version in his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Ralph Ellison recorded a cover in Invisible Man; Carlos Bulosan never stops telling it in America Is in the Heart, repeating it with such frequency and dizzying speed that, by the end, you can’t tell if it’s finished or just beginning. But the book I open now is by W. E. B. Du Bois, his polygeneric 1940 volume with the teetering, ambiguous title, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept. My text is found in a chapter recounting Du Bois’s early academic career, his rivalry with Booker T. Washington, and his departure from Atlanta University for the editorship of The Crisis, as processes exemplifying the world-historical forces of the chapter’s title, “Science and Empire.” The plot of the chapter is captured, in miniature, in an anecdote of a walk down Atlanta’s Mitchell Street in April 1899—a journey much shorter than anticipated, a detour whose duration would extend beyond his long and eventful life:

At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the University. I did not meet Joel Chandler Harris nor the editor of the Constitution.

Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing, as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming. I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man’s idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true. (Writings 602–3)

Du Bois’s memory is not entirely reliable in this case. A consultation of “the evident facts,” heroically compiled by Ida B. Wells, reveals that Hose did not kill his landlord’s wife; in fact, while he admitted killing his employer, Alfred Cranford, in self-defense during a dispute over payment, he denied widespread rumors that he’d assaulted Cranford’s wife (Wells 14).1 But in this brief passage, autobiography takes the form of a fable or parable—not the science of history but the higher art of propaganda, in Du Bois’s terms.2 As the rest of Dusk makes clear, this anecdote both exaggerates the naïveté of his ambitions and telescopes his long transformation, that eventual disruption of his work, to provide his readers with the narrative kernel of an example—not quite I once was blind, but now I see, but rather: I thought I could see, but I was blind. Or, more expansively: in the arrogance of my youth, thrilled by the dawn of a modern age, I thought enlightenment would suffice to dispel racism, and that if I served the light, others would be glad to see—but they preferred to see differently.

This red ray was cast much farther than Mitchell Street. Wells, for one, made certain of it, catching and projecting it through the global circuits of modern mass media, compiling an account from Atlanta’s white newspapers and commissioning a report from a white Chicago detective for her pamphlet Lynch Law in Georgia, to spread to the world the news of the migrant laborer known as Sam Hose or Samuel Wilkes. Yet while the transatlantic circuits of Wells’s antilynching campaign are better known, news of this case also reached as far as the Philippines, where a nationalist resistance was waging war against U.S. colonial occupation. Indeed, as evidenced by the casual reference to this exceptionally American ritual in José Rizal’s incendiary 1891 novel, El Filibusterismo (360), Filipino nationalists may have been aware of lynching long before its introduction to the Philippines by the U.S. military.3 Seizing upon this news, the nationalists reflected it back upon their adversaries. By August, exiled leaders in Hong Kong had composed propaganda imploring African American soldiers to reconsider their loyalties, which appeared in placards concluding, “The blood of your brothers Sam Heose [sic] and Gray proclaim vengeance.”4 Among those who responded to this call was a young corporal of the 24th Infantry from Florida, David Fagen, whose exploits as an officer in General Emilio Aguinaldo’s forces became legendary both in the Philippines and the United States.5 Promoted from first lieutenant to captain under General José Alejandrino, he was referred to as “General Fagen” both by his own troops and by the front page of the New York Times.6 An official military investigation, spurred by wild rumors of his escape to California in 1901, revealed that an accused bicycle thief in L.A. had assumed his name in defiant tribute.7 Fagen persisted in guerrilla warfare even after Aguinaldo and Alejandrino surrendered, bedeviling the U.S. general Frederick Funston, whose vain intentions to lynch him were so well known that his own sister-in-law mocked them at a Christmas dinner, conjuring a vision of Fagen’s hanged body in a playful bit of light verse!8

shades of a world problem

Given the dizzying reflections and refractions of this red ray, how might you begin to theorize the traveling operations of race across the domains of early twentieth-century U.S. imperialism? These movements flicker across what have been historically understood as two regionally distinct racialized regimes: Negro segregation, in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South, was consolidating both in law (as in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision) and in extralegal violence, while in the Philippines, U.S. colonial governance was being established through military conquest. Further, for U.S.-based scholarship, such historical understanding passes through and is inflected by two additional settings: the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, like Wells’s Chicago, where small black communities would be dramatically expanded by the long process of African American urbanization known as the Great Migration, and the West Coast, where the Asiatic exclusion movement, already turning from the Chinese to the Japanese, would eventually encounter a wave of Filipino migrants, establishing the conditions for their inscription in what would one day be termed Asian American history.

To draw together these historically and geographically distant domains, you must first acknowledge that the conditions of such articulation have their genesis in acts of overwhelming violence. But while a link between black and Filipino racialization was initially forged by U.S. imperial conquest, it was quickly seized upon by Filipino nationalists, in the Sam Hose propaganda, to foresee a different destiny for both groups, surpassing the telos of inclusion within the United States, as nation or as empire. And it was not only the Filipino nationalists who saw this.

In seeking a theorization of race sufficient for this task, I turn to Du Bois’s concept of the color line. Best known from his epochal 1903 Souls of Black Folk, it appears in an earlier speech at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, “To the Nations of the World,”9 but its most comprehensive formulation is found in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” Du Bois’s presidential address for the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., in December 1899.10 It is likely, if perhaps impossible to definitively prove, that this is the first text in which his oft-quoted declaration of the problem of the twentieth century appears.11 More to the point, where the others merely present this statement as a striking premise, only this text presents it as a thesis to be demonstrated. Indeed, its express purpose is to establish the claim. Read closely, it offers a series of insights upon which the methodological and historical framework of this book is built.

Announcing itself as a characteristically ambitious inquiry into race “in its larger world aspect in time and space” (95), Du Bois’s address takes his audience on a whirlwind tour of social conflicts spanning five continents and four centuries of world history, to argue that a crisis of accelerated imperial competition is generating intensified processes of racialization within imperial states, at their borders and at their centers, legitimizing both conquest and mastery in racial terms, whose ultimate horizon is global. This is the crisis he is naming in his proposition that “the world problem of the 20th century is the Problem of the Color line” (104). Crucially, he secures this claim at the end of his section on Europe, where “the question of color” arises unpredictably in a new racialization of metropolitan populations, as in the controversy over “the Jew and Socialist in France,” and in aspiring powers’ pursuit of global standing—for example, Russia’s whiteness is questioned when contrasted with Germany but enhanced in conflicts with “the yellow masses of Asia” (103). Du Bois’s color line, then, is better understood not as a binary or a bar to be lifted or crossed, but as a traveling analytical concept for examining how race is made and remade, in uneven and unpredictable ways, across a global field of imperial competition.

If this concept helps theorize the circulation and reconfiguration of race in the Philippine-American War, this is no accident. For the war, Du Bois claims, was the occasion for his address: “But most significant of all at this period is the fact that the colored population of our land is, through the new imperial policy, about to be doubled by our ownership of Porto Rico, and Hawaii, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines. This is for us and for the nation the greatest event since the Civil War and demands attention and action on our part” (102, emphasis added).12 The text’s internal logic and historical context together indicate that what’s decisive in this event is the U.S. decision to conquer the Philippines. In the transition from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the Philippine-American War, African American popular opinion had largely turned against military-imperial policy, and the Philippines focalized a range of heated debates over U.S. expansion and African Americans’ place within it. While Du Bois, who opposed the war, obliquely criticizes its prosecution later in the text, here he takes conquest, if not annexation, as a fait accompli, in order to contemplate the consequences of a massive increase in the nonwhite population including eight million Filipinos.

This event, Du Bois argues, must be embraced as a problem, an opportunity, a duty, depicted in ringing patriotic terms: “What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them? Manifestly it must be an attitude of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance. We must stand ready to guard and guide them with our vote and our earnings. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities” (102). What began as a matter of demographics attains world-historical importance, as Du Bois continues, assimilating these new populations to a benevolent project of racial uplift whose privileged American Negro subject ascends to autonomy on the geopolitical stage: “We must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty millions of brown and black people under the protection of the American flag, a third of the nation, and that on the success and efficiency of the nine millions of our own number depends the ultimate destiny of Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Indians and Hawaiians, and that on us too depends in a large degree the attitude of Europe toward the teeming millions of Asia and Africa” (102–3). Here, Du Bois’s attitude looks disturbingly similar to McKinley’s infamous justification for conquest as a duty “to educate … and uplift and civilize and Christianize” Filipinos deemed “unfit for self-government” (qtd. in Rusling). But Du Bois turns from this implicit mimicry of McKinley to signify explicitly on Rudyard Kipling: “No nation ever bore a heavier burden than we black men of America, and if the third millennium of Jesus Christ dawns, as we devoutly believe it will upon a brown and yellow world out of whose advancing civilization the color line has faded as mists before the sun—if this be the goal toward which every free born American Negro looks, then mind you, my hearers, its consummation depends on you, not on your neighbor but on you, not on Southern lynchers or Northern injustice, but on you” (103). In his elegant rhetorical sweep, Du Bois drives the ideology of the civilizing mission to the occidented conclusion that its manifest destiny is the end of white world supremacy, and presumes his American Negro audience’s global solidarity with the brown and yellow, while exhorting them to assume self-determining moral agency in achieving it.

This autonomy, a liberating burden, arises as racial uplift shifts from a national struggle for equal opportunities to a transimperial crusade. The global phenomenon of “groups of undeveloped peoples brought into contact with advanced races under the same government, language and system of culture” establishes the world-historical significance of American Negro striving: “German Negroes, Portuguese Negroes, Spanish Negroes, English East Indian[s], Russian Chinese, American Filipinos—such are the groups which following the example of the American Negroes will in the 20th century strive, not by war and rapine but by the mightier weapons of peace and culture to gain a place and a name in the civilized world” (107). Note that while the text heralds an internationalism of the darker races—a politics of correspondence and even coordination—the color line does not itself figure that politics, whether as ideology or as organized alliance, but merely its preconditions. As a concept-metaphor, the color line enables a geopolitical analysis that, typically for Du Bois, is coldly pragmat...