eBook

Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific

Vince Schleitwiler

2017

Overview

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 Pacifictraces 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 Pacificpursues 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.

• Publisher: NYU Press,New York University Press
• Subject: African Americans / African Americans -- Intellectual life / African Americans -- Migrations -- History / Asian / Asian American Studies / Ethnic Studies / Filipino Americans / Filipino Americans -- Intellectual life / Filipino Americans -- Migrations -- History / Imperialism / Imperialism -- Social aspects -- Pacific Area -- History / Japanese Americans / Japanese Americans -- Intellectual life / Japanese Americans -- Migrations -- History / Language & Literature / LITERARY COLLECTIONS / LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Asian / General / Pacific Area -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century / Pacific Area -- Race relations -- History -- 20th century / SOCIAL SCIENCE / SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies / Sociology / United States / United States -- Insular possessions -- Race relations -- History
• ISBN: 9781479864690, 1479864692, 1479857084, 9781479857081