Strange fruit of the Black Pacific : imperialism's racial justice and its fugitives / Vince Schleitwiler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schleitwiler, Vince, author.

Series:

Nation of nations (NYU Press)

Nation of nations : immigrant history as American history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Filipino Americans.

Intellectual life.

Japanese Americans.

History.

African Americans--Migrations.

Race relations.

Insular possessions of the United States.

Imperialism--Social aspects.

Imperialism.

Pacific Area--Race relations--History--19th century.

Pacific Area.

Pacific Area--Race relations--History--20th century.

Imperialism--Social aspects--Pacific Area--History.

United States--Insular possessions--Race relations--History.

United States.

African Americans--Migrations--History.

African Americans.

Japanese Americans--Migrations--History.

Filipino Americans--Migrations--History.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

Japanese Americans--Intellectual life.

Filipino Americans--Intellectual life.

Physical Description:

xiii, 300 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2017]

Summary:

"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"--From publisher's website.

Contents:

Overture: The good news of empire

The violence and the music, April-December 1899

Shaming a diaspora

Love notes from a Third-conditional World

What comes after a chance

The rainbow sign and the fire, every time Los Angeles burns

Afterthought: The passing of multiculturalism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781479864690

1479864692

9781479857081

1479857084

OCLC:

946161353