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Overture

The Good News of Empire

Diversity is America’s manifest destiny.

—Ronald T. Takaki

cipher

They built a wall so they could keep him on the inside.	(Justice.)
From time to time they try to get him to come out.	(Love.)
When they see him they want to kill him.	(Justice.)
Instead they give him a woman, so they can imagine what he does to her.	(Love.)
Some of them think a blonde one is worth six of the black ones.	(Race.)
Some of them think that’s a poor trade.	(Gender.)
Now they want him on film.	(Love.)
Now they want him on stage.	(Justice.)
Now they want him in the air.	(Freedom.)
Now he is in the air.
What happened to the women? What happened to the monkey? What happened to the cook?

Somewhere on the island, the women all live together. There are caves and a hidden beach. Before they came here, they used to work as extras.

“Where have they taken him?” asks one.

“To their own home,” says another.

“Will he come back?” asks the one.

“I think they have killed him,” says another.

“Should we find a new one?” asks the one.

“They will make a new one,” says another.

“Will we protect him?” asks the one.

“He will find care,” says another.

“Where will he find it?” asks the one.

in want of a map

The best-loved celebration of lynching in U.S. popular culture locates the origins of its savage victim-hero on a fictional island in Southeast Asia. If you read this character as black, as the logic of white terror has commonly been understood to imply, then King Kong must be the most famous black figure to hail from the Asia/Pacific region until the rise of a Hawai‘i-born, Jakarta- and Honolulu-raised law professor, organizer, and memoirist named Barack Obama. Of course, the election of the first African American commander in chief surely signifies hope in the unfolding promise of racial justice—in the teeth of a national history of not only slavery and Jim Crow but also ongoing imperial warfare in Asia. By contrast, admitting the presence of race in Kong’s story privileges a history of sexualized violence, white supremacy, and conquest that appears as the very antithesis of racial justice. Between these oddly paired icons and the seemingly incompatible forces they represent lies a terrain of forgotten and forgetful desires, of vivid and resonant shadows, out of which is inscribed a hundred years or more of the history of race—that epoch heralded in 1899 by W. E. B. Du Bois as the century of the color line. It is a space and a time that this book asks you to enter.

Tempting as it may be, the “black Pacific” is not the appropriate name for this terrain. That term I will reserve for a specific lure within it, the engendering chaos of the object or essence posited by the erotic violence of imperial race-making. Call it a historical nonentity, for it never actually existed except as speculative fantasy, yet its material consequences persist—a paradoxical condition, to be sure, but one that should hardly be unfamiliar to scholars of race. The black Pacific, you might say, is the indispensable blank or blind spot on the map; the empirically observable terrain, within which it makes its absence felt, is a transpacific field, charted by imperial competition and by the black and Asian movements and migrations shadowing the imperial powers. Within this field, the fictive lure calls forth contradictory processes of conquest that endlessly pursue it—so attending to this black Pacific may allow you to apprehend the bonds between the unfolding promise of racial justice and the overwhelming sexualized violence heralding the expansion of justice’s domain.

In describing this book’s geographic reach as transpacific, I refer less to a fixed oceanic unit than to a kind of tilting of space and time, a dizzying pivotal shift in the centrifugal and centripetal forces moving empires and their shadows. Its measure might be taken from Georgia to Luzon via Hong Kong, or, just as surely, between two towns in the Mississippi Delta. The transpacific is not a place, but an orientation—if at times, as you will see, a disorientingly occidented one. Similarly, the historical setting, between the rise of the United States and Japan as Pacific imperial powers in the 1890s and the aftermath of the latter’s defeat in World War II, is periodized less in the sense of termination or punctuation than of a course of movement whose roiling currents might toss an observer’s vessel to and fro, or of the calculation of an orbit based on the shifting relations of bodies and vantages across vast distances. Put differently, this book conceptualizes its field of inquiry, not through a singular racial, national, imperial, or even oceanic formation,1 but through the interrelation of competing figures of movement—multiple circuits of black and Asian migrations cutting across Du Bois’s meandering, world-belting color line. Because the comparison necessary to this approach is also the method every imperialism seeks to monopolize, this book reads comparison against a horizon of imperial competition, in the period culminating in U.S. ascendancy as heir to Western global power, even as its foregrounded objects of analysis remain territorially bounded within U.S. rule.

Intersectional and contrapuntal readings in African American, Japanese American, and Filipino literatures provide the book’s material and method, tracing how each group’s collective yearnings, internal conflicts, and speculative destinies were unevenly bound together along the color line. Their interactions—matters of misapprehension and friction, as well as correspondence and coordination—at times gave rise to captivating visions of freedom binding metropolitan antiracisms with globalizing anti-imperialisms. Yet the links were first forged by the paradoxical processes of race-making in an aspiring empire: on one hand, benevolent uplift through tutelage in civilization, and on the other, an overwhelming sexualized violence. Imperialism’s racial justice is my term for these conjoined processes, a contradiction whose historical legacy constitutes the tangled genealogies of racism, antiracism, imperialism, and anti-imperialism. Because uplift and violence were logically incommensurable but regularly indistinguishable in practice, imperialism’s racial justice could be sustained only through an ongoing training of perception in an aesthetics of racial terror. This book takes up the task of reading, or learning how to read, the literatures that take form and flight within the fissures of imperialism’s racial justice, while straining to hear what the latter excludes, or what eludes it.

The method of this interdisciplinary book is ultimately literary, less in the choice of its objects than the mode of its articulation, marshalling the capacities of a peculiar tradition of reading destined to never stop overreaching its own grasp. By glossing “reading” as “learning how to read,” I invoke the characteristic linking of literature, in African American cultural traditions, with a knot of questions around literacy, wherein the task of learning how to read is always problematized, critical, and unfinished, never reducible to formal processes of education. It troubles the privileging of either print or oral media, the visual or the aural; it is associated with mobility, as both dislocation and flight; it signifies both the possibility of freedom and the threat of its foreclosure. Put differently, I emphasize that the task of learning how to read the literatures of black and Asian migrations is not subsidiary to social and historical analysis. It is not simply to use literary texts as evidence for a critique of dominant histories, to mine them for traces of forgotten historical formations, nor to locate their work within proper historical contexts. It is also, and more importantly, to recognize that the work of these texts is not finished, not limited to the past, and to activate them in the present, undertaking one’s historical and theoretical preparations so that their unpredictable agency might be called forth in the process of reading.

This book’s method, finally, is the expression of a political desire. It is staked on the chance that the practice of reading as learning to read could open social reality to imagination’s radically transformative power, even as it pursues this chance by dwelling in moments of subjunctive negation and foreclosure, fingering their jagged grain. While I participate in a broader aspiration to recuperate the antiracist and anti-imperialist visions of twentieth-century black and Asian movements, what I will term their third-conditional worlds, I do not presume that my hindsight suffices to liberate those visions from the racist and imperialist discourses of their emergence, for to do so would be to posit a freedom my present-day politics has not itself achieved. Instead, this book seeks to read them as they take form and flight within structures of thought whose presumptions I find objectionable, on the chance that they might diagnose a predicament of unfreedom I share.

The book is divided into three parts. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview, theoretical framework, and methodology of reading for studying race across U.S. transpacific domains. It turns to the figure of W. E. B. Du Bois on the threshold of the century he gave over to the problem of the color line, recovering the transpacific geopolitical context of that prophetic formulation, and the radical poetics of his response to racial terror. Stepping back, it surveys two major aspects of an Asian/Pacific interest within African American culture, exemplified by imperial Japan and the colonized Philippines, as well as corresponding black presences in Filipino and Japanese American culture. The second part, in two linked chapters, considers the ambivalent participation of African Americans in the colonization of the Philippines, as soldiers, colonial officials, intellectuals, and artists, alongside the development of an Anglophone Filipino intelligentsia from the colony to the metropole. Pressing the limits of the diaspora concept, it asks how these movements shaped emerging gendered forms of Negro and Filipino collectivity over against their conflation by sexualized imperial violence, and how they bore the echoes of alternative realms of belonging-across-difference that did not come into being. The third part, also in two chapters, reads the history of black urbanization alongside Japanese American incarceration and resettlement, complicating the canonical modernizing narratives of the Great Migration and the Internment. It explores how these forms of nonwhite difference provided each other with aesthetic resources to meditate on the distinction between freedom and graduated privilege, and to recall and release the unspeakable violence by which this distinction is elided. Finally, a brief Afterthought reflects on the “passing” of multiculturalism, inquiring into the ongoing transformations of imperialism’s racial justice in the aftermath of the Cold War and the election of an African American president.

The remainder of this Overture introduces the book’s central themes, in an extended reflection on the glinting opacity of the epigraph, which the late Ron Takaki cheerily sprinkled through his lectures, interviews, and writings. In turn, each section provides a gloss on a keyword from the book’s title: imperialism’s racial justice, black Pacific, strange fruit, and fugitives.

spreading gospel

Over the past fifteen years, scholarship across ethnic studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies has critiqued the appropriation of the grammar and lexicon of antiracism by U.S. imperialism, from the consolidation of an official multiculturalism in the first Iraq war and its deployments in the so-called War on Terror, to its historical precedents in Cold War racial liberalism. With the post–Cold War dissolution of a Third Worldist idea predicated on the continuity of antiracism and anti-imperialism, it became necessary to rethink the relation between imperialism and racial justice, within a broader account of the dramatic shifts and mundane continuities of national and global racial orders after the disavowal of segregation and colonialism.

Yet imperialism’s reliance on a language of racial justice is nothing new. If you aim to identify what is distinctive or peculiar to a post–World War II or post–civil rights racial regime, you should know that the phenomenon of an imperialism enunciated as the expansion of racial justice, in word and deed, is no recent innovation. In this book, I trace these concerns to a period when terms of racial justice are close enough to seem familiar, even as the more genteel forms of white supremacism were hegemonic, and American exceptionalism found triumphal expression in overseas territorial colonialism. Because the post–World War II U.S. racial order claims the formal equality of races (against white supremacism) and the formal independence of nations (against colonialism) as the foundation of its disavowal of racism, which it thereby represents as the very exemplar of injustice, it seems odd that the language of racial uplift that once motivated an entire spectrum of black political movements was deployed, in the name of Anglo-Saxon superiority, to justify the conquest of the Philippines.

While lingering in this sense of historical disorientation might be instructive, a few brief hypotheses on race, imperialism, and justice should suffice to proceed. First, if the term “racism” refers at once to structured relations of inequality and to patterns of attitude, thought, and representation, then the latter must serve to uphold and extend the former—which is to say, racism must be understood as always a justification of its own material conditions. This means, curiously enough, that racism must always present itself as the proper form of racial justice, its culmination or terminal phase, beyond which lies chaos or decay. So if some of the more insidious recent forms of racist ideology claim the legacy of civil rights, in the name of “color-blindness,” this is nothing new, but a feature common to previous racisms—only the historical terms of what is promised as racial justice have changed.

Second, imperialisms are always in competition, a claim that holds at least on contingent empirical grounds in recent eras, if not definitionally. The late nineteenth-century rise of U.S. global power involved the incitement of animosity toward Spanish decadence and cultivation of racial fraternity with England, even as it aimed finally to supplant its European predecessors. Such competition is never entirely friendly, but neither is it entirely unfriendly—it served both U.S. and Spanish purposes to stage the conclusion of the 1898 war in the Philippines as an exchange between equals, with Filipinos excluded. Ultimately, imperialisms seek to be universal and to fully and finally monopolize the very terms of universality—an impossible task. Yet because their power cannot be total, because their dominion cannot be coextensive with the universe, imperialisms must always pursue expansion—preemptively countering the threat of encroachment by some other expansionist force, real or imagined, out to universalize dominion on alien grounds. Imperialisms cannot be satisfied with any victory because their aspiration to total power is insatiable; as such, they will invent an enemy if none can be found.

Third, imperialism, in its various manifestations, is necessarily a multiracial, multiracialist project. Imperialism is, among other things, the desire to rule over difference. It seeks to extend its dominion across peoples and territories thereby defined as other, a process necessarily grounded in coercion rather than consent; yet it must always seek to legitimize that extension, however violent, as the arrival of justice. Put differently, racial justice is imperialism’s gospel, the good news it is compelled to express in and as violence. The claim to do justice to difference provides imperialism with its moral authority, political legitimacy, and ideological engine. Writing amid the din of war in 2003, Edward Said asserted, “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort” (xxi). Exceptionalism, in other words, is a formal characteristic of every imperialism’s claim to justice, a kind of hallmark, in what is merely one of the phenomenon’s lesser paradoxes.

That the racialized population imperialism would rule must be constructed as incapable, or not yet capable, of giving their consent does not cancel this requirement for justification. Rather, justice emerges, first and foremost, as a terrain of struggle between competing imperialisms, and between the imperial subjects who constitute, at least in principle, a transimperial community of judgment. This figurative gathering is positioned above and before the possible engineering of a colonized subject capable—again, in principle—of provisional membership in that hierarchical community. On such terms, it may be easier to understand how an annihilating violence may be one form of this justice. Yet even then, the imperative of expansion guides violence in the direction of inclusion. Just as those racializing processes typically understood as inclusion’s opposite actually prove to be modes of incorporation—for example, Jim Crow segregation and Oriental exclusion, in practice, bound unfree subjects within heavily restricted and regulated socioeconomic locations—so, too, should processes of inclusion be understood as necessitating a differentiating and refining violence.

Readers who seek to refashion and reactivate the allied projects of antiracism and anti-imperialism, rather than merely perform their critical autopsy, may find these propositions disabling. To think of contemporary U.S. imperialism’s deployment of diversity-talk as an appropriation requires imagining a chain of appropriations and counterappropriations stretching back to the onset of European imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade, and positing that the conception of racial justice properly originates with the agents of conquest. Such a model may itself be too simplistic, in seeking to secure a transhistorical autonomy of legitimate and illegitimate conceptions of justice—even if, in local practice, it makes sense to oppose the pragmatic compromises of a liberatory movement to the disingenuous propagandizing of an oppressive regime. Nonetheless, I contend that imperialism’s racial justice should be approached as an animating contradiction, logically necessary but unpredictably volatile. No mere alibi, it must be taken seriously even—especially—if you hope to reject it.

What readers of any political inclination may find most difficult to accept is that imperialism’s claims to justice are not immediately and unambiguously debarred by its reliance on forms of excessive, repetitive, and spectacular violence. Even so, it may be acknowledged that civilizing missions past and present have at times been indistinguishable in practice from overwhelming violence. If such violence proceeds from intentions and premises reflexively represented as benevolent, innocent, and idealistic, this paradox may be explained away as betrayal, corruption, or human frailty, or dismissed as deception or bad faith. Across a political spectrum, histories of imperial violence become separable from theories of racial justice. Against this common sense, I contend that violence is the vehicle of imperialism’s racial justice, the very means of its actualization, and that the practical identity between the two is experienced as a quotidian reality. How, then, does their separation come to be taken for granted?

To approach this question as a problem of ideology or epistemology may not sufficiently express how deeply the operations of race pervade social experience. What manages the contradictions of race and justice is also a matter of aesthetics: a set of enabling constraints on the senses that conditions perception. Students of black literature and culture will be familiar with its paradox of invisibility and hypervisibility, and scholars of race will recall the duplicitous language of color-blindness, two examples of a larger dynamic not reducible to the visual or to any single sense. Angela Davis captures it succinctly in asking why older forms of racism are called “overt,” as if racism is somehow “hidden” in the post–civil rights era (“Civil Rights”). Similarly, Patricia Williams describes the successful police defense in the Rodney King case as less a rationalization than a painstaking lesson in an “aesthetics of rationality” (54). An elaborate system of looking, charged with fear and desire, which intuitively apprehends a prone black body as a threat demanding overwhelming preemptive force; or again, the socialized habits of perception that instruct you to perceive mass incarceration as a natural function of government, and that evoke the specter of the prisoner to teach you to see yourself as free—such are the broader set of phenomena I conceptualize as an aesthetics of racial terror, a training of attention that allows its subjects to distinguish between forms of freedom and unfreedom, between differently racialized and gendered bodies, and between the gospel of imperialism’s racial justice and its expression as overwhelming violence.

The violence’s tendency toward repetition and excess points to its intrinsic inability to fully and finally achieve its ends, revealing an anxiety over the limits of domination and the nonidentity of coercion and consent. By the same token, its corresponding tendency toward spectacle and ritualization suggests how that anxiety demands a periodic renewal of its lessons. These must be compulsively reenacted in an increasingly formalized manner, whose slightly disjunctive relation to any given situation both extends their temporal reach and invites their eventual collapse. Because the violent operation of imperialism’s racial justice is unable to fix its terms, they are shown to be historically contingent. What passes for racial justice under imperialism in one period—expulsion, wholesale slaughter, engineered extinction, religious conversion, cultural erasure—might provide the very definition of racial injustice in another, even as the extent to which imperialism dominates the terms of what can be imagined as racial justice in the present is difficult to properly perceive.

This is why I do not turn to the past to recover an exemplary politics. Such an impulse rests on unacknowledged presumptions regarding history as progressive enlightenment, upholding images of freedom’s betrayal in an unfree past to train its optics to mistake the privileging of hindsight for freedom of judgment in the present. By contrast, this book seeks to dwell within the strangeness of the past as a means of defamiliarizing the present, casting its lot within the predicaments of the past in order to read a shared condition of unfreedom in the desire to become estranged to it. This task of reading, or learning how to read, draws on the aesthetic resources of black radical traditions that improvise a countertraining of perception, whose appearance may be anticipated within the ritual sites of training in the aesthetics of racial terror—in its very forms, practices, and protocols. It pursues the chance that what imperial inclusion in the violence of its embrace must exclude bears the clues to what yet eludes it.

* * *

The predominant form of imperialism’s racial justice discussed in this book, recent enough to seem at once familiar and foreign, is racial uplift. At the twentieth century’s dawn, uplift encompassed both the range of projects to improve the social conditions of African Americans and the guiding rationale for U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Looking back through a perspective shaped by post–World War II conjunctions of formal racial equality and formal national independence, on one hand, and Third Worldist antiracism and anti-imperialism, on the other, these two senses appear incommensurable. Examples of Negro uplift, as collective protest or moralizing conservativism, are regularly represented as antecedents of various contemporary strains of African American politics. By contrast, the attitudes and expressions of Anglo-Saxon uplift, when not ignored or discarded, are recognized as outmoded or racist. Whether the racial politics of U.S. colonialism are seen as aberrations or vestiges in an essentially benevolent tradition, or as alibis or paternalistic delusions exposing the immorality of power, their discontinuity from traditions of racial justice is taken for granted. Yet at the time, black intellectuals regularly presumed the coherence and continuity of an overarching category of uplift, upholding it most strongly when they subjected its Anglo-Saxon variant to criticism. On what terms can this continuity be understood?

In his influential work on uplift, Kevin Gaines argues that an older sense of the term rooted in “antislavery folk religion” (Uplifting the Race, 1) largely gave way, after Reconstruction, to an ideology stressing “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth.” While “espousing a vision of racial solidarity uniting black elites with the masses,” Gaines argues, uplift ideology functioned to establish a fragile class division within the race. In the teeth of racism, “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority; hence the phrase, so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance, ‘uplifting the race’ ” (2). Tenuous and aspirational, this social distinction intensified the values and practices of service and duty to the race, inscribing it even as they worked to overcome it.

Anglo-Saxon uplift was similarly concerned as much with its privileged subject as with its benighted objects. While the stated aim of conquest was to better a native deemed unfit for self-government, its underlying objective was to establish a white American racialized capacity for imperial rule, as illustrated by Rudyard Kipling’s famously bitter counsel to his Anglo-Saxon brethren to “take up the White Man’s burden” in the Philippines. Though ingratitude, sabotage, and failure may be the results of the colonizer’s efforts, the poem suggests, he must be satisfied by the “judgment of [his] peers,” veterans of other civilizing missions, upon his “manhood.” Counterposing this racialized fraternity to the sour travesty of “silent sullen peoples” impassively “weigh[ing] your Gods and you,” the poem illustrates how imperialism constitutes white manhood as a transimperial community of judgment, even as judgment is thereby made available to appropriation by the colonized (291).

This understanding of U.S. conquest as a trial of white manhood, a liberating burden, was not merely an invention of the poet. Cast in decidedly sunnier terms, uplift was President William McKinley’s own reported justification for the war. In a notorious 1899 interview, first published by James Rusling in 1903, McKinley insists he had no initial interest in colonization. After nights of soul searching, however, he finds no alternative: returning the islands to Spain “would be cowardly and dishonorable,” handing them to another European power “would be bad business and discreditable,” and recognizing their independence would be disastrous, as “they were unfit for self-government.” “There was nothing left for us to do,” he concludes, “but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died” (22–23). However authentic the anecdote, it accurately illustrates the official rationales for war, recast as a moral challenge—encountered first before a transimperial community of whiteness, as a test of manhood (the gendered capacity for valor, honor, and credit), and second, in the face of a racialized population, recognized only as the object of responsibility. Uplift, in other words, is a moral duty, in the form of conquest.

Broadly speaking, what’s historically particular to uplift as a form of racial justice is its imagination of a benevolent relationship between subjects positioned differently in a hierarchy of civilization. As it worked to establish, certify, and justify inequality, its internal logic cast this relationship as a form of tutelary love. McKinley’s official policy of “benevolent assimilation,” as Vicente Rafael glosses it, is “a moral imperative” devoted to a “civilizing love and the love of civilization” (21), manifested primarily in education—the governing trope and signature policy concern of Anglo-Saxon uplift in the Philippines, as well as a primary field of debate for competing visions of Negro uplift.

The problem of tutelage holds an inherent paradox, what you might call uplift’s miraculous core: it aims to produce a free, self-determining subject through an imposed, coercive process disallowing that subject’s capacity to evaluate its fitness for self-rule. While this process may function in retrospect—an autonomous subject can narrate its passage from dependence to independence—it is impossible when imagined prospectively: to require another’s recognition of your capacity for self-determination is to be incapable of self-determination. To wait upon the grace of uplift is endless, for it is only ever bestowed after the fact.

In the colony, Anglo-Saxon uplift always deferred the autonomy it claimed to produce. One way to resolve this problem required internalizing tutelage within the collective and individual racial body, which is how Negro uplift sought its autonomy. By taking autonomy as a given, retrospective accounts tend to obscure the unstable intraracial split such tutelage produces—whether between the black middle-class subject and the benighted masses or within that precarious middle-class subject itself—behind the unifying force of racial pride as self-love. Both Anglo-Saxon and Negro uplift, then, heralded the emergence of an internally divided nonwhite subject who belongs in and to a transimperial realm of civilization while remaining marginal to any existing state capable of recognizing that subject as its citizen.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that these forms of uplift are equivalent, nor that one is less authentic or derivative of the other. Negro uplift differs in its primary emphasis on intraracial relations, though it was nonetheless profoundly shaped by interactions with colonized nonwhite populations, as well as the Anglo-Saxon uplift whose hypocrisies it exposed—black observers could excoriate white soldiers and officials in the Philippines while upholding the imperial mission’s ideals. But just as Negro uplift saw itself as more fully and properly embodying the ideals proclaimed by Anglo-Saxon uplift, it also shared an essential relationship to violence, moralized and moralizing: unable to recognize the autonomy of its inter- or intraracial object, racial uplift construes its prerogative of coercion as benevolent. Similarly, their shared historical conditions make them alienating to present-day sensibilities in analogous ways. As the prevailing form of racial justice in a period when white supremacism was hegemonic, both forms of uplift contain elements that appear to hindsight as unmistakably racist.

They also shared a more curious feature: the presumption, as a structural premise, of inevitable European civilizational decline, against which uplift’s subject was positioned as subordinate but rising, through a generative relation with its own, less civilized wards. Where uplift offered its lowly objects a tutelage in civilization leading, someday, to autonomous selfhood, it promised its advanced subjects protection from decadence or “overcivilization” through reinvigorating contact with primitive vitality. Underwriting uplift was a model of civilization joining hierarchical classification and the forward, upward movement of historical progress to the cyclical rhythms of birth, maturation, reproduction, and death. To be at the pinnacle of this civilizational schema is to anticipate a natural decline. Both varieties of uplift sought to engineer new forms of racial privilege as heirs-apparent to European empires, known and constituted by intercourse with more primitive groups. Among African American intellectuals in the period, the word “Occidentalism” was sometimes used to distinguish a desire for Western ideals from a disdain for white people who claimed them,2 a term even more striking if you recall its etymological origin—the identification of the west as the direction of the setting sun. Hence, I take occidented as my term for this shared orientation, upholding the primacy of Western civilization as the very promise of its downfall.

the missing link

The recent resurgence of an Afro-Asian comparative interest out of disparate investments within African American and Asian American studies, black diaspora studies and critical Asian studies, and American studies and ethnic studies3 has largely evaded the gravitational pull of the term “black Pacific,” as a parallel formation to Paul Gilroy’s phenomenally successful if often misunderstood 1993 book, The Black Atlantic.4 However, the phrase appears in two critical interventions worth noting. In “Toward a Black Pacific,” his afterword to Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s AfroAsian Encounters, Gary Okihiro points out that “the Pacific” as metonym “often and mistakenly stands in place of or in reference to Asia, especially East Asia” (313). As a brief corrective to this erasure of indigenous histories, he sketches “three intersections between Pacific Islanders and African Americans” (316): overlapping histories of bonded labor migration linking enslaved Africans, Chinese “coolies,” and Polynesian captives in Peru; networks of colonial education tying Tuskegee and Hampton to Hawai‘i; and circuits of popular culture bringing new styles of Hawaiian and African American music in contact since the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, an excavation of the historical confluences of Pacific Islander and black cultures is beyond the capacity of this book, whose comparative scope is already ambitious. Though it cannot substantively redress the erasures of indigenous Pacific histories and perspectives, I hope at least to unsettle their reinscription, and I follow Okihiro in emphasizing the multiplicity of racial categories that “the Pacific” invokes.

Another intervention is signaled by Etsuko Taketani’s essay, “The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way,” which tracks the multiple accounts Johnson gave of his participation, as consul, in the 1912 U.S. intervention in Nicaragua that led to twenty years of military occupation—an incident, he argued, that partly responded to rising Japanese influence, and that would be cited to defend Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Challenging the tendency in recuperative scholarship to explain black sympathy for Japanese imperialism as “mistaken,” Taketani rejects the unexamined assumption that “African Americans are not accountable for globe-carving imperialism” (82), arguing that Johnson’s agency cannot be severed from its position within, and influence upon, a politics hindsight finds objectionable. Recognizing “the complicity of imperial modes and a black internationalism” (103) leads her to an instructive reading of Johnson’s interrogation of “the very continuity between his position and a position he repudiates as evil” (91).5

In this book, I refer to the transpacific to account for differentiations within imperial racial formation—noting, for example, that certain features characterizing Filipino and Hawaiian racialization correspond with Negro racialization in this period, by contrast with the racialization of Chinese and Japanese. Acknowledging African Americans’ productive complicity in U.S. imperialism reveals how this correspondence conditioned the agency of black soldiers, colonial officials, and intellectuals, as they recast the meanings and destinies of race through encounters with Philippine colonization, as well as how advocates of uplift pursued autonomy through imaginative affinities with imperial Japan. Attending to the transpacific allows me to extend Taketani’s exploration of black internationalism’s alignments with various imperialisms, while to negotiating the continuity of black and Asian theories and representations of race with positions that now appear unambiguously racist.

By contrast, this book poses the black Pacific with a certain irreducible irony. In its inherent volatility, the term might most precisely be described as a joke. If it functions in scholarly endeavors as a lure that misapprehends its own “discoveries,” then rather than disavowing the desire that produced it, you might allow it to turn back on that desire as instruction—in the same way the “joke” of passing played by the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man turns back on his narrative as a bitter lesson on distance between racial privilege and freedom. I propose “the black Pacific” to name, not a subfield of academic enterprise, but a mythic preserve within which the desired object of U.S. imperial violence was imagined to live and breed.

Like “race” more broadly, this black Pacific is a social fiction with material consequences, though none of the groups ensnared under its particular manifestations sought to appropriate it as a category of affirmative collectivity. Hence it can be described more emphatically as a historical nonentity, in that its existence, as a fantasy with real effects, was recognized only through negation and disavowal. Indeed, it was an indispensable negativity for a range of modernizing projects, the specter each needed to invoke in order to exorcize. It was the object of a white imperial desire, which sought at once to consume it and to banish it from perception, whether through overwhelming violence or benevolent tutelage. As the violent tropical zone where Negro and Filipino racialization did not merely overlap but actually converged, it was the slanderous precondition of would-be autonomous forms of Negro and Filipino uplift, which sought to disprove it through the performance of civilized gender norms. In extravagant revenge fantasies of the Negro incarnation of Japanese imperial might, it offered a teeming cache of speculative fancies to projects of Negro and Nisei self-imagining, which learned to disavow it as the price of fashioning a serious politics. Finally, it gave birth to alternative political solidarities, from world-belting social movements to inchoate aesthetic impulses, which aimed to displace it in the name of the “darker races,” the “Afro-Asian,” or the “Third World”—names that have come to evoke a nostalgia for worlds that never came to pass, a feeling that bears whatever is left in these histories that still gives itself to the chance of another world.

The black Pacific, to repeat, existed only as fantasy; it entered history to the extent that the denial of its entry into history was imagined as history’s inauguration. Its sheer unreality, moreover, allowed it to function as—to borrow Jacqueline Goldsby’s elaboration of Du Bois’s phrase—“a terrible real” (166). Lest this seem too obscure, note that its most celebrated denizen has already made an appearance on these pages, passing under the cover of familiarity. You know him as Kong.

* * *

Invented for the classic 1933 film that bears his name, King Kong’s broad appeal and wide-ranging cultural afterlife have never been significantly hampered by the widespread recognition that he serves as a metaphor for racist fantasies of violent black sexuality. Nor has that metaphor been disrupted by the largely ignored fact that Kong’s imagined origins lie not in Africa but in Southeast Asia—more specifically, the fictitious Skull Island somewhere west of Sumatra.6 A heart of darkness never penetrated by white explorers, it proves irresistible to Carl Denham, a fast-talking New York movie producer whose technological expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and cocky disregard for tradition embody U.S. modernity. His dream of capturing on film something “no white man has ever seen” expresses the ambitions of U.S. whiteness in an arena of imperial competition, and he guards the secret of their destination from his crew until just before their arrival, aware that its existence has circulated in obscure rumor. The captain, for example, admits to having heard the name Kong, which he skeptically identifies as “some native suspicion.”

These words appear to be a minor alteration from the shooting script, which refers instead to “some Malay suspicion” (22)—Malay being the dubious racial-scientific category of the period that included Filipinos and other Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders. Within days of King Kong’s March 24, 1933, premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the California Supreme Court ruled, in Roldan v. Los Angeles County, that because Filipinos were “Malays” rather than “Mongolians,” they did not fall under antimiscegenation laws targeting Chinese; less than two weeks passed before the legislature amended California law to bar Malay-white marriages (Baldoz 98–101). Threats of miscegenation reinvigorated anti-Asiatic exclusion movements, which converged with the complex politics of colonial nationalism to produce the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act of 1933 and its successor, the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, promising the Philippines formal independence within a decade while terminating Filipino labor migration. In short, a consensus had formed that colonial rule in the Philippines was more trouble than it was worth. The disappearance of the word “Malay” from the film’s dialogue parallels its broader elision of the Philippines and other U.S. colonial possessions in the Pacific. Similarly, the film never purports to represent Negro characters, but cast African American actors to portray Skull Island’s natives, in a notorious conflation of minstrel and savage stereotyping that recalls the black-skinned, bug-eyed, wide-lipped Filipino natives of U.S. political cartooning during the Philippine-American War.7

The accumulation of these elliptical references ultimately allows Kong to emerge from a dense network of racial signifiers, transubstantiating empirical knowledge and imperial histories of race. The island’s edges are littered with the wreckage of past imperial expeditions, circuited by a wall the men hesitantly compare to “Egyptian” ruins or “Angkor,” built by some “higher civilization” lost in the mists of time. While the current islanders “have slipped back,” they ritually maintain the fortifications sealing off the interior, and their language resembles that of the nearby (nonfictitious) Nias Islanders enough for the captain to engage them in crude dialogue. Their distance from the sleepy decadence of East Asian civilization is further established by contrast with the ship’s cook, Charley, a stock Chinese stereotype.

This distinction develops through a complex staging of racial and gendered dynamics involving the frustrated romance between Ann Darrow, the beautiful unknown cast by Denham as his film’s lead, and Jack Driscoll, the macho first mate, a committed sailor hesitant around modern women. In an extended sequence after the crew’s initial encounter with the islanders, whose chief had offered six native women to purchase Ann for the still-unidentified Kong, the shooting script shows Ann speculating about Kong’s identity with Charley, who exits suddenly in pursuit of a playful monkey named Ignatz (King Kong shooting script 38–39). On a ship full of men, only the reassuringly asexual cook and the comical simian mascot allow her to relax. The film elides this introduction, getting straight to the dramatic action: a chance encounter on the moonlit deck, where Ann tells Jack the islanders’ drumming has kept her awake. Jack confesses to fearing for her safety, then to fearing her, and finally, to being in love. When she retorts, “You hate women,” he awkwardly replies, “I know, but you aren’t women,” and they kiss. Then, after the captain calls him away, two islanders suddenly appear to kidnap her. Jack returns, finds only Charley, and heads off to her cabin, but then Charley discovers a cowrie bracelet on the deck and sounds the alarm, declaring: “Crazy black man been here!”

The modifier black, in the Chinese cook’s broken English, does not identify the absent kidnapper as African or Negro. Rather, it signifies his racialized capacity to violently assert masculine heterosexual prerogative—unlike Jack or Charley, who are not man enough to act upon their natural desires to possess the white woman. This racialized capacity is merely transferred to the kidnappers as the agents of Kong, to whom the white woman will be offered; at a further remove, it transfers from the islanders to Ann and Jack via the drumming that aurally conditions their previously blocked embrace. While Charley’s own interest in Ann is laughable—in a comic bit of business, he tries to join the search party, waving his meat cleaver and babbling, “Me likey go too. Me likey catch Missy,” before the white men, armed with guns and explosives, wave him away—he provides a cautionary tale for Jack’s white manhood. Just as the decline of Asiatic civilization resulted in emasculated, servile “Chinamen,” Western modernity risked falling into decadence through its supposed disruption of traditional gender roles. The figure of a beautiful young woman, driven by ambition to venture, without husband or father, first to New York City and then to a savage ocean on a boat of rough men, is terrifying enough to send the valiant, virile Jack scampering to the company of other sailors. What might forestall this collapse into decadence is a tonic infusion of primal, violent sexuality, the essence of a blackness embodied by Kong—“neither beast nor man,” Denham puts it, but “monstrous, all-powerful.”

Kong’s blackness thus emerges through careful differentiation from all existing racial categories to embody the ideal blackness posited by U.S. imperial desire. His dominion is the fabled blank spot on the map that eluded all previous empires, an untouched state of nature, abstracted from all the ongoing “race problems” left over from historical iterations of the civilizing mission—genocidal conquest, enslavement and Reconstruction, colonial rule in the Philippines. By implicit contrast to such historical complications, Kong’s blackness appears as a fictive distillate of the longed-for real: the primal essence that might rejuvenate a U.S. whiteness imperiled by the perversions of overcivilization.

This essence must therefore be captured and carried to the metropolitan center, its violent mastery enacted before an excited public. When his film is ruined and his crew ravaged, Denham redoubles his ambitions, capturing and exhibiting not the image but the creature himself. Back in New York, before a packed theater, he displays Kong in chains: “He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity.” This performance is heightened, for the cinematic audience, when Kong escapes, seizes Ann, and runs amok in the city.8 Finally, he climbs the Empire State Building, symbol of modern U.S. ascendancy, and briefly fights off a squadron of planes before falling to his death below.

By the rules of the narrative, Kong’s death had already been assured, if not by his status as a figure of terror, then by the notorious scene on Skull Island where he partially undresses his blonde captive. In staging a fantasy of white womanhood imperiled by black sexual violence, which calls forth an overwhelming retributive violence to destroy the black threat in public spectacle, the film unmistakably repeats the logic—or the training in an aesthetics of rationality—that structures ritualized lynching. This structure manifests as a narrative trajectory from prehistoric to modern, vertiginously captured in the iconic image of the great ape battling airplanes from the top of the skyscraper, and mediated by the white woman’s body, as Dunham famously concludes: “It wasn’t the aviators. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” The sacrifice and consumption of a primal essence redeems a white nation threatened by overcivilization, restoring its organic capacity for growth and regeneration: civilization’s sublimation of the savage is a life-giving act of sexual violence. Kong’s capture and killing make Jack more of a man, Ann more of a woman, and their resulting heterosexual union more normatively white. This ritualized narrative, what you might call the lynching form, miraculously births whiteness through the violent incorporation of blackness, a ceremony of communion whose celebration constitutes a white—that is, imperial—nation.9

The resemblance between spectacle lynching and other communion rites has long been noted, an analogy highlighting both the desire invested in the sacrificial object and the endless repetition of ritual. Because the reproduction of whiteness is the effect of a ceremonial performance constituted by the screening of the film, it is not actually represented within the narrative: the conjugal union of Jack and Ann takes place only after the story ends. If audiences tend to forget Jack, who is largely superfluous to the climactic sequence in Manhattan and never achieves normative masculinity on screen; if their desires tend to fix on Kong and his captive, a primitivized figure of female sexual vulnerability not yet restored to a properly gendered norm; if the film reads as a tragedy whose hero’s death is rescinded in the afterlife of innumerable remakes and new adventures across genres and media—all this may be a consequence of the lynching form’s ritual temporality: it is cyclical, mortal, always insufficient, requiring repetition, again and again and again.

Just as Filipinos and African Americans do not actually appear in the film, as signifiers rendered “nonfictional” by troublesome histories of racialization, the fictional Kong appears extraneous to historical analyses of U.S. imperialism and its production of racial categories. But Kong, you might say, is the fabled “missing link” that makes the logic of U.S. imperial racism coherent: because the black Pacific did not exist, he had to be invented. His story portrays the logic, or aesthetic, of the bond between discrepant racial subjects forged by the violence of the U.S. civilizing mission, held together by the abstract ideal of a primal essence posited by imperial desire. In seeking the embodiment of its sexual fantasy, this violence functioned to conflate Negro and Filipino racialization, and yet all its ritual recurrences, whether in cinematic and literary representations or in grisly live reenactments, could never conjure the fantasy into existence.

Indeed, for those African Americans who journeyed across the ocean, on ships or in the pages of print or the shadows of the cinema, and for Filipinos across empire, writing at the seam of metropolitan and colonial racial formations, it was the discrepancy between racial forms, the disjunctive doubling of savage stereotype in the superimposition of Negro and Filipino, that provided motive and mobility. Drawing on Brent Edwards’s theorization of décalage as the discrepancy or gap in articulations of diaspora enabling movement, understood as the absence of some artificial “prop or wedge” (“Uses” 65–66), you might say that it was the removal of the black Pacific “missing link” that allowed articulations of Negro-Filipino relations to be set in motion. If the identity posited by the fusion of these racial forms could only be a trap, the incitement of violence, the difference between them might serve as a pivot in another direction. How this difference was operated, in what manner and toward what ends, I will take up throughout this book.

freedom from love

To state that King Kong is a celebratory reenactment of lynching is merely to express an open secret, one consistent with lynching’s own logic: as Jacqueline Goldsby has shown, the simultaneity of spectacle and secrecy is crucial to understanding this violence. In the film and its remakes, audiences are called upon to simultaneously see and not see lynching’s manifestation, the same training of perception that made the perpetrators of spectacle lynching disappear before the sight of the law. Yet this history of violence seems incompatible with the curious love adhering to the character, in all his unlikely vagabondage through global popular culture. Where audiences’ love for the renegade ape largely serves to dissociate their narrative investment in lynching’s reenactment, it is the perceptual foregrounding of lynching, the insistent calling of attention to the visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic evidence left in its wake, that banishes explicit recognition of the erotic dynamics suffusing Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.” To love Kong, viewers of the film must all but forget they are enjoying a lynching; to attend to lynching, listeners to the song must all but forget that its performance gathers in a space consecrated to love.

As a reader of such reenactments, learn not to forget there is danger here.

The danger inheres, first of all, in the condition of being overwhelmed, which any attempt to speak the violence struggles to restrain but cannot fully deny. When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick, Holiday writes.10 It takes all the strength out of me (95). Earnestness or anger, a politics of righteousness, may disavow its insufficiency only by substituting the work of exorcism for the appeal to justice. For the dead have not been saved, and justice has not come. It reminds me of how Pop died. To say otherwise, to proclaim justice’s establishment in a haunted land, on behalf of those living who would claim the name of the dead—as a nation, race, or species; as rightful heirs—is to willfully misperceive your privilege as freedom. To be open to the radical force of the appeal to justice demands the vulnerability of understanding the violence as ongoing. But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South (95). In short, to speak of lynching is to render your own ethical failure, whether you admit it or not—not only to acknowledge justice’s failure to redress a harm but to bear forward the work of the violence out into the world.

Coming after the first is a second danger, weaving leisurely in its course, but swiftly registered by a certain attentive presence within Holiday’s audience. For example, the civil rights journalist and community leader Evelyn Cunningham recalled: “Many times in nightclubs when I heard her sing the song it was not a sadness I sensed as much as there was something else; it’s got to do with sexuality. Men and women would hold hands, they would look at each other, and they would pretend there was love going on, or something sexual. They would get closer together and yet there was a veneer—and just a veneer—of anger and concern” (qtd. in Margolick 81). The hesitance in Cunningham’s guarded testimony pauses over what seems to be an actual confusion, another presence in the crowd, something else that is not but has got to do with sexuality. Righteousness, a thin skin of affect as the badge of a politics, fails to conceal what is nonetheless only pretense: as if “there was love going on, or something sexual.” Looking at the stage and at each other, holding hands, the men and women perform for Cunningham’s gaze, in the dark, as if they do not know they are being watched, as if they do not know what possesses them.

In her characteristically blunt memoirs, Holiday remarks on this strange presence:

Over the years I’ve had a lot of weird experiences as a result of that song. It has a way of separating the straight people from the squares and cripples. One night in Los Angeles a bitch stood right up in the club where I was singing and said, “Billie, why don’t you sing that sexy song you’re so famous for? You know, the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees.”

Needless to say, I didn’t. (95)

It is tempting to imagine the woman as merely unknowing, deficient in awareness or ability, what Holiday refers to as a square or cripple or both. But her request, as Holiday reports it, suggests a more deliberate cruelty.11 Unlike the cautious Cunningham or the unwitting couples she observes, the figure called bitch bears knowledge but lacks care, setting loose a force she cannot really control. Meeting her affront with greater knowledge and equal fearlessness, Holiday’s account enacts a curt dismissal whose brevity contains volumes—outstripping speech not because there is nothing to say but because there is too much, an excess of meaning. Yet it is needless to say because Holiday works the song to elude the domain of what is said. How so?

Consider, for contrast, James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” in which a white deputy sheriff’s childhood memory of a lynching bee remedies an episode of impotence, summoning figures of racist fantasy to mediate intercourse with his wife. Or consider Kara Walker’s shameless exhumations of the imaginative domains of power, violence, and sexual desire bequeathed by the history of slavery, loosed demons fluttering free from the profound moralism of Baldwin’s redemptive vision. You might take such work as extrapolations of the knowledge implicit in Holiday’s performance, in her auditory and kinesthetic shaping of the words and again in the way she inhabited the iconicity the song helped define for her. These extrapolations extend the knowledge’s reach by diminishing its ineffable force. Where Baldwin names white interracial desire as the motive force formalized in lynching, exposing the racializing and sexualizing violence on which white reproduction depends, Holiday’s performance refrains from such naming, as it refrains from putting its most powerful message into words, even as it enacts the exposure of the history of sexuality that the song and all it reenacts has got to do with.

In the words of the song, lynching’s bitter crop disrupts the pastoral scene of trees and flowers and birds and weather, its reversion to nature leaving a perverse remainder: these bodies are not persons, but fruit, and what makes them strange is what makes them black. There must have been persons here, once, in the bodies dehumanized in their blackening, and as the agents of that blackening—absented, monstrous, horrific, one feels obliged to say, inhuman. Although there must have been persons here once, the song cannot imagine them in words. Blackness as death is what the words can picture as presence; blackness as life-giving essence has been absconded with by whiteness. In this way the words of the song enact the same perceptual protocols that render the perpetrators of lynching invisible before the eyes of the law, passing unmarked into the community of whiteness after enacting its social reproduction, with the same effortless slide of a movie camera away from the conjugal act.

The words were written by the leftist writer, lyricist, and composer Abel Meeropol, published as a poem under his given name, and later set to music under his professional name, Lewis Allan.12 By his own account, they were written in response to a lynching photograph (N. Baker 45), commonly taken to be the notorious image of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, which prominently features a festive crowd of onlookers. Meeropol’s Jewishness surely modulates the lyrics’ critical restaging of the lynching rite’s aesthetic training—elsewhere, he put it quite succinctly: “I am a Jew, / How may I tell? / The Negro lynched / Reminds me well / I am a Jew” (qtd. in N. Baker 45). Yet even if this ethnoracial shading passes unremarked, at least two varieties of whiteness already appear in the space evacuated by the lyrics, each constituted against the other. One gathers to celebrate the violence, its communal rejuvenation in defiant defense against the threat of decadence manifested in the other, which is constituted by the horrified desire to read the participants in the lynching bee out of history. That the latter form of whiteness has become hegemonic may be registered by the quicksand fascination experienced by present-day viewers of lynching photographs for their figures of white onlookers.13 In the aftermath of the civil rights era, that latter form still shares in the national commemoration of lynching’s death through the ritual consumption of the sacrificed black body, but the presence of the former as an audience within the photographs exposes, for better or for worse, lynching’s function to reproduce whiteness.

As written, the words respond to the photograph, to the experience of its observation at a remove, within an alternate gathering of racial community, completing the process of the perpetrators’ disappearance. As sung, Kevin Young proposes, the words constitute “a symbolic lynching photograph” that, “confronted with the crime of looking, … resorts … to the abandoning of a self altogether” (219). That is, Young’s reading attributes to Holiday’s voice the agency of a withholding of both “I” and “you,”14 whose result he glosses precisely in an ambiguous riffing quotation, “Look away, Dixieland” (220). “Lady Day embodies a strategy of silence,” he argues, that in the performance of the words “talk[s] back to the silence of lynching, which you can almost see in a lynching photograph” (220). Her performance, he concludes, “shelters and smuggles meaning beyond the borders of what is acceptable—or even seen” (224). Because the violence itself establishes these enabling borders, perceptual before epistemological or ideological or moral, its agency lies outside what can be seen or shown or said. Holiday’s performance moves outside to confront it.

Simply put, it does so through a contrast between the words of the song and the conditions of its performance—the milieu from which it emanates and the genius of its embodied voice—that improvises an aesthetic countertraining within the very observation of ritualized racial terror. “I wondered then whether it made sense to sing a song in such a milieu,” comments a listener quoted by David Margolick. “I thought it belonged instead in a concert setting, without beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke” (52). Presumably meant as a compliment—for jazz music, it was prophecy—the attitude has many precedents. Before his encounter with lynching, James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man, for one, hoped to uplift the music from nightclub to concert hall. But it is the music’s association with less respectable environments, of good times and ill repute, that gives the performance its force. The association of racial transgression, political radicalism, and the nightlife that defined Café Society, the Greenwich Village nightclub where Holiday made the song famous, was a recipe that set Harlem in vogue over a decade earlier. To ask whether the amplification of sexual desire served transgressive politics or political sentiment merely licensed sexual transgression is only to attempt to impose narrative order on what was, for good or ill, an undeniably transformative historical dynamic.

For its part, jazz, like other forms of popular music and dance, has historically flourished in spaces organized to profit on its aphrodisiac qualities, often involving fixation on the singer. The nightclub, rather than the concert hall, is the privileged setting for Holiday’s music, and if this space sanctions alternative arrangements of social life experienced, in all their ephemerality, as liberatory, it is only because the space itself is dedicated to celebrating, conjuring, evoking, and enhancing erotic feeling. While the music cannot be reduced to its aphrodisiac qualities or their instrumentalization in courting or seduction, these qualities are irreducible from its conditions of production and reception, even in the devotions of a solitary fan.15

More than other singers, Holiday attracted such devotion, whose most disturbing product is the condescending, often bizarre equation of her artistry with the most salacious and tragic details of her biography—physical and sexual abuse, child prostitution, drug addiction. It places her in the front rank of a long tradition of singing black women, icons shaped between the violently hypersexualizing attention of white desire and the impossible resources of a longer tradition of black women’s vocality.16 The racialized, gendered, sexualized dimensions of this attention are structural, preceding the intentions or identifications of any listener, but Holiday’s genius, as a prerequisite to its expression, involves the reflection, redirection, and reappropriation of this attention, working and reworking it for other purposes, turning and transforming its force.

It is here that the impact of her performance becomes unavoidable. The song’s lyrics observe the lynching form, evoking the racist fantasies of black male sexual violence toward white women accompanying and justifying it, against which any respectable antilynching politics, white or black, needed to reaffirm the boundaries of racial and sexual propriety. Yet the song’s performance—the embodied voice issuing from the nightlife milieu—exposes another history of sexual violence and interracial desire, culminating in the fetish of a hypersexualized black girl whose gift of singing beautifully is equated with her vulnerability to sexual exploitation and sexual violence. By setting these two contradictory histories in unbearable proximity, Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” renders each radically unstable. On the one hand, she bends the most violently sexist and racist desires conditioning her consumption as a performer into a profound affective identification with opposition to lynching. On the other, she wrenches open a politics of respectability that stifled and suppressed poor black women in the name of uplift, schooling the ideology that would deny her the moral standing and personal dignity to bear witness against lynching’s violence. In both cases, the work of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” turns on an insight left unspoken, that refrains from entering speech or sight: the violent, sexualizing, and racializing desire that drives the formalization of lynching is the same mysterious presence structuring the audience’s relation to the singer, incarnating her as a singing body laid open to violence.

What works this presence, turning on an insight that may remain unavailable to the audience, is a genius extending back, insistently previous, before the incarnation of the singing body. The figure of the hypersexualized, broken, helpless girl is revealed as a mere veil, flung like a net over the Lady. In claiming her title, Lady Day did not wait on recognition; she did not seek inclusion or acceptance within respectability so much as she rebuked it, put it to shame. Neither does the work of her song depend on the audience’s conscious recognition of what’s happening, the effect of the words dissociating from the dynamics of the performance, even as both at once demand the audience’s engagement. That space where the lynchers are, the same perceptual nowhere inhabited by persons unknown, is where the work of Holiday’s song takes place, even as sight and speech remain trained on the lynched body, that bitter crop.

* * *

For twenty years she carried it with her, a gift and a curse, filial duty and liberating burden, this song that helped make her a star and a target for the law. She died young with a wrecked voice, everyone says, and if you listen to recordings of the song over the course of her career it’s easy to imagine you can feel the weight of it, borne across that time, all those miles, all that way from poverty and scorn to international fame. This is, of course, only an element of her artistry, to evoke a feeling that, sad or happy, joyful or melancholy, is so full of longing it seems like intimacy, like the most ecstatic identification. Rather than art.

Perhaps this is why so many of Lady’s ardent devotees want to believe that the music killed her—made her suffer, rode her down, burned her up, ruined her, leaving her a defiant shell of herself, far older than the forty-four years given to her. To believe the music killed her is to imagine she died for love, for a love she shared with you. But she was just poor, and black, and a woman, which is explanation sufficient to a life of struggle and an early death, and there ought to be tragedy enough in that statement if you would just leave the music out of it. For if there is any freedom beyond mystery in her art, it is freedom from this love: the music itself as her freedom from the engulfing love it conjured up in her audience.

But the dead have not been saved, her song continues to tell you. To marshal all of her artistry to sustain this perception, this condition of being overwhelmed and unbearable longing for response, must have been a perilous act. Dwelling in peril, in preparation and performance, in her long commitment to the song, brought her fame and criticism, celebration and condescension, often in the same breath. The song was too serious, or not serious enough; it was ponderous or pandering; it was beneath her, bad art, or it ruined her for the lighter and faster material to which she was better suited. What frightens critics of the song most of all, it seems, is its relation to that ambivalent yet terrifyingly intense love it engendered, and perhaps this has as much to do as racism and sexism and snobbery in explaining the bizarrely persistent notion that the song’s full meaning was somehow beyond her ken.17

The controversial white promoter John Hammond famously dismissed the song. “The beginning of the end for Billie was ‘Strange Fruit,’ when she had become the darling of the left-wing intellectuals,” he asserted, leading her to begin “taking herself very seriously, and thinking of herself as very important.” Opposing her to his icon of primitive authenticity, Bessie Smith, he bemoaned her contamination by this love, by her “success with white people,” and, worst of all, by “homosexuals,” who “just fell for Billie” (qtd. in Margolick 78–79). By contrast, Cunningham, whose courageous reporting for the Pittsburgh Courier won her the ironic title “lynching editor,” earned the right not to listen: “There comes a time in a black person’s life where you’re up to your damned ears in lynching and discrimination, when sometimes you were just so sick of it, but it was heresy to express it. She was a great artist and she did great things with that song, but you would not admit you did not want to hear it.” Yet Cunningham calls the song “an attention grabber,” “a marketing device,” suggesting that Holiday never “really understood or anticipated the serious attention” it brought. Against the evidence of her own comments about the presence of something to do with sexuality in the interracial audience, she insists, “The song did not disturb me because I never had the feeling that this was something she was very, very serious about” (qtd. in Margolick 81).

Earnest and self-flattering yet prurient and titillating, condescending in its benevolence and insatiable in its desire for violence—such contradictions only feed the intensity of this love. What boggles me is that would-be sympathetic auditors of Holiday so regularly turn away, in fear, to presume her ignorance—as if her performance, night after night and year after year, never prepared for such responses, as if there was no sophistication to Lady’s rigorous education in and of this love. But her artistry does not rely on the audience’s capacity to cognize its response, being concerned, instead, with training their perception and responsibility. The agency of her artistry may not be abated even as the audience falls short of what it asks of them, or reports to have closed their ears. And if sometimes Holiday refused to perform “Strange Fruit,” whether out of frustration with the crowd or mere exhaustion, at other times you might imagine her response to the desires of both critics and fans in the phrases of a love song just as difficult to hear: hush now, don’t explain.

Is this what is meant when it is said that her voice sounds wise? Even those convinced she didn’t understand the words she sang speak of her singing in this fashion, but what does it mean to attribute wisdom to the quality of her sound? (Lazy, they also call it, which may be easier to understand, if you can recognize preparation and skill in achieving the effect. “Lazy” sounds scornful, and often is, because laziness names the confrontation between fantasies of imperial privilege and everyday resistance, revolted and envious desire gazing down on a dream of freedom catching like a tune in the back of your head.) What kind of wisdom is this?

Formally speaking, schools would not teach it, though it might be learned there; what education Holiday received, in any case, is a matter of lore. Schools were part of a complex of uplifting institutions given to violent intervention in Holiday’s transient family life; eluding one’s embrace only brought on the attentions of another. Not yet ten, as Eleanora Gough, “cutting school on … a spectacular scale” got her hauled to juvenile court and sentenced to a year at Baltimore’s House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, where, “for protection and confidentiality,” she was known as “Madge” (Nicholson 23). After nine months, she was returned to her mother, Sadie. The following year, on Christmas Eve, Sadie interrupted a neighbor in the act of raping her, and called the police, who arrested the rapist but took his victim back to the reformatory (25). It would take until February for Sadie to secure her daughter’s release, after borrowing money for a lawyer (27).

In Lady Sings the Blues, the stays at the House of the Good Shepherd are conflated, and the institution, run by Catholic nuns, is a place of nightmares. A girl, forced to wear a tattered red dress, is warned by the Mother Superior that God will punish her, before flying from a swing and breaking her neck. Later, Holiday is made to wear the same dress, locked overnight in a room with a dead girl, and beats her hands against the door until they bleed (17–18). In Stuart Nicholson’s biography, however, the reformatory is a positive influence, “a disciplined environment” offering “the guidance and security that were missing in her life”; the truancy bringing her there is a “cry for help” resulting from a lack of maternal attention (23). Her departure from the institution is reported with melancholy impassivity—“The House of [the] Good Shepherd marked her file, ‘Did not return to us’ ” (27)—as the poor girl follows her neglectful mother into an underworld of nightlife and prostitution. Alternately reported as benevolent and cruel, the reformatory, an explicitly gendered and racialized institution of education and incarceration, embodies all the contradictions of uplift from Baltimore to the Philippines.

In Julia Blackburn’s With Billie, the school is simply “an awful place, very bleak and grim” (23); one of Holiday’s contemporaries recalls the Mother Superior’s harsh discipline and systematic physical and sexual abuse by the older inmates (24–25). Another interviewee recalls Holiday’s visit to the institution a quarter-century later, seeking documentation for a passport. In this anecdote, the singer agrees to an impromptu performance for the girls, choosing “My Man,” a song now notorious for lyrics professing devotion to an abusive lover (28).18 Could this be true, and if so, what lesson passes from an alumna to a group of girls eager to identify with her escape? In the words of the song, love forecloses freedom.

Returning to Nicholson, you will find that the path from the reformatory leads to a different education, set in a brothel but conducted by Victrola: Holiday runs errands for the local madam so she can listen to her recording of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” (27). Nicholson notes that Holiday herself particularly favored this anecdote, recounting it in her autobiography and multiple interviews, and though the juxtaposition with the reformatory is his own, it seems clear she meant it as a fable or origin myth of her own education. Its central elements include the setting, extravagant beauty defying disreputable poverty, the aesthetic experience of wonder, and a lesson in technique: Armstrong’s scat singing outstrips the impoverished meaning-making capacity of words.19

So if there is a model, a place of identification, a way out, it appears where the music outruns words. This is what there might be, for those who love the music, for poor black girls caught in uplift’s cruel embrace, for everyone not yet free, if you are willing to risk reading too much into stories made of other stories, old lies, cultivated memories, and half-forgotten desires. It should be a relief to know, as Farah Griffin admits in her book on Holiday, that you cannot “escape positing [your] own version of Lady Day,” and you should not “want to escape doing so” (6), because it is Holiday herself who escapes from behind all the tales. For myself, I prefer to recall the girl who demanded her mother get her out of that prison they called a school, and the struggling young woman who found a way to do so. Sadie died young, too, six years older than her daughter would, according to Nicholson’s careful accounting, or the same age, according to the sly voice of the autobiography: “Mom got to be thirty-eight when I was twenty-five. She would never have more than four candles on her birthday cake. So she was only thirty-eight when she died. I’m going to do the same thing. She never cared what calendars said, and neither do I” (125).20

no-way out

If the love of wayward mothers and daughters is to elude reformation, it must be prepared to face an accounting with violence, for the love of uplift is jealous and claims the violence as its prerogative. Even so, uplift’s love finds firmer ground when it attempts to intercede between dark fathers and their sons.

As with Kong, whose continuing fame, as well as proof of cultural relevance, relies on a series of remakes, following an underlying logic: he is reincarnated, every few decades, when new cinematic technologies succumb to vertiginous fantasies of a lost, primal embodiment. More forgettable are all the films, cartoons, texts, and products that follow the mercenary logic of the sequel—derivative efforts to extract diminishing revenue from the canon of the original and its remakes. The first in this line was hustled out in months by the original producers: “I don’t care what you make,” Merian Cooper recalled telling his partner, Ernest Schoedsack; “anything made called Son of Kong will make money” (qtd. in Vaz 249).

What they made, it happens, was a comedy, cobbled around the flimsy premise of a racist joke: Kong’s son is white. Though still a monstrous ape, he is drastically diminished in size, entirely white in color, and selflessly devoted to the service of Carl Denham, who has fled New York in the aftermath of the first film. Having dragged his father in chains to his doom, Denham discovers mild feelings of obligation to “little Kong,” who returns the sentiment in spades, giving his life to save his master in Skull Island’s climactic destruction. The film reads as imperialism’s affectionate self-parody: white love’s chuckling acknowledgment of its comical, loyal offspring.

Though Kong’s son deserves a thorough consideration of his own, as a footnote to his father’s story, Son of Kong merely confirms his entrapment, securing one dubious line of escape: the benevolence of uplift and the spectacle of conquest turn out to require the same sacrifice. That is, despite his long afterlife as a fictional celebrity, bigger than any vehicle paying his way, Kong remains trapped between the logic of the remake, which continually reenacts his lynching under a gauzy veil of color-blindness, and the logic of the sequel, which reimagines him as a pet—two manifestations of the same violence. Is there no way out for Kong?

Well, why should anyone care? Isn’t Kong a figure for everything antiracism seeks to abolish? Isn’t the task to get beyond Kong and the white supremacist regime that gave him birth?

In a gesture both damning and profoundly generous, the eponymous cycle of poems in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination responds to the case of Susan Smith, a white South Carolina woman who drowned her two young sons in 1994, by recovering a voice for the imaginary black male kidnapper Smith invented to take the blame. Like the infamous speakers who observe him in several intervening poems, including “Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Ben,” this “black man pour[ed] from a / White woman’s head” (27) is granted an autonomous consciousness without agency in the material world. The opening poem, “How I Got Born,” establishes that autonomy as a kind of limbo existence from which Smith summons him—“an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion,” to recite the Nathaniel Mackey epigraph to Fred Moten’s In the Break. This fabricated black man is confined to Smith’s body, though he shares neither her face nor her skin, making him both “a black man” and “a mother” (16), a fantasy with real effects, materialized by her fear and desire: “Everything she says about me is true” (6).

The empirical fixity of this truth does not protect Smith as her story unravels, so the cycle tracks his inexorable reabsorption into the body of her character, as it is inscribed in law and public scandal. The final poem, “Birthing,” intersperses his voice among fragments of her actual confession, concluding with his incarnation into their body in the moment she reenters the world after watching the car bearing her children disappear into the lake. In an astonishing act of witness, Eady’s poem keeps faith with all of Smith’s victims—the drowned children, the African American community onto which she mustered the full force of the police power—even as he finds the only possible way to empathize with the murderer herself. For the black man she has invented to take the blame, who is no one if not Smith herself, is the only one who can stand with her as she stares out from the shore.

What the poem is proposing may be as simple as this: it is the task given to a certain line of poetry to stand on the shore, to be the only one standing with this woman, even as she murders her children, even as she surrenders herself to the movement of an overwhelming violence that bursts from her solitary act out into the long-remembered floodways of the civilized world. The poem neither redeems nor excuses; it does not ask if Smith was herself a victim, nor comment on the intimate violence and sexual abuse known to have marked her upbringing. Whatever it is in Smith that has been formed by the violence, in this poem, is that which she surrenders to the violence to place herself on its lee side, the side of mastery, and with it she surrenders her status as a mother and her agency and responsibility as the murderer of her children. It is this surrendered self that her imagination identifies as black. And so what the poem is also proposing is as simple as this: here too is a way blackness is birthed into the world.

To imagine you can properly segregate the blackness that poured from Smith’s head from that of the people who bore the violence she unleashed—justice’s extension across the darkness, the long arm of the law—is to disavow the everyday lived experience of blackness. But if the truth did come out, for once, why concern yourself with this white woman’s racist fantasies? Can’t you draw a line between this criminal and the community she so recklessly slandered and endangered? You may, the poem replies, but what would that line say if he could speak?

The truth came out, and the criminal was identified as a white woman named Susan Smith, but the poem also witnesses the moment when antiracism is once again seized by the ongoing hatred of blackness. Under a post–civil rights racial order, hegemonic antiracism requires figures such as Smith, who justify the reproduction of whiteness, and lesser forms of racial privilege, by embodying everything the enlightened and civilized love to hate: that bred-in, inbred intellectual and moral deficiency, pitiable but requiring correction unto death, that agency of violence calling an overwhelming violence onto itself as justice. We know it when we see it, goes the protocol. We don’t call its name in polite company. We just call the police. What the poem allows you to see is that the blackness that poured from Smith’s head—in the act of explanation, subsequent to the murder, as the only possible figure to bear the blame—is still entering the world, and the desire to pretend you can reverse this birth and lock it back up from whence it came, in the name of racial justice, is what secrets and secures the ongoing hatred of blackness beyond the realm of perception.

So the exercise of Eady’s imagination, recovering a voice for the fabricated black man, is less about producing a speaking subject than about the task of listening to what is constituted as inaudible, reading as learning how to read, asking how to perceive freedom from his perspective. Eady’s unyielding generosity, and the line in which it follows—say, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison; Toshio Mori and Hisaye Yamamoto; Gwendolyn Brooks and Edward P. Jones—serve as the horizon of my clumsy efforts, in this overture, to listen and learn from Kong.

Is there no way out for him? You may look to the book of Billie Holiday, the wisdom of her sound as textualized by black women auditors. Griffin’s title, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, cites Rita Dove’s poem “Canary,” which observes that “women under siege” learn “to sharpen love in the service of myth.” Because a question as to anyone’s freedom pertains to all, this truth may be gendered but is not only for women.21 The point is that Holiday could not be free because the world was not. Her “burned voice” (Dove) is lure and lament, alarm and alternative.

What alternative? Freedom is fugitive in an unfree world; it must be denied to her because it is denied anywhere and everywhere short of unfreedom’s general abolition, but Holiday did what she could in a world not yet free, like your own, taking her freedom when and where she could, could not. The way out of no way, as Fred Moten riffs in a recent poem, may also be “a way into no way” (“test” 96), or, as he puts it in an interview: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that” (Harney and Moten 118). This is the love sounded in Holiday’s music as a freedom from love, slipping from one embrace to a larger one that cannot be seen because it is everywhere all around, a love that does not turn away from the world it shows to be broken but sounds and resounds it.

So Kong, the old trouper, may be released here. Rewind the film to the moment he slips from the skyscraper’s pinnacle, and switch it off as he begins to fall.

(Let him take the “black Pacific” with him! Please remember that the term functions, in this book, only in absence, as a prop removed, which never actually existed except as a fantasy of violence. This book holds no brief for a “black Pacific studies,” and whatever histories may emerge from this space will refuse this name,22 eluding its claim of paternity to reach back to a previousness beyond its imagining. In the pages to come, whatever partial recuperations this book offers will concern only what has moved in and through its absence.)

Leave him in the air. Let him surrender to it, as Toni Morrison suggests in Song of Solomon, in it all the way to the end of it and to what is there, slipping imperialism’s embrace to give himself over to everything you cannot imagine when you say justice. For to long for justice without mercy is to surrender the world to a love for empire.