speech, it becomes clear that, while the format of its global survey runs predictably from Africa through Asia and South and North America to Europe, ascending a hierarchy of race or “civilization,” the logic of its geopolitical analysis identifies Asia as the stage upon which the most strategically consequential imperial conflicts are taking place. There, two great events define the historic occasion, that dawning century, that modern black striving must seize. In short, the color line concept was articulated as a direct response to the transpacific rise of U.S. and Japanese global power amid the shifting dynamics of imperial competition in Asia.
If this association was merely incidental to the 1899 address, rightly jettisoned as the color-line thesis became a catchphrase, it might hold little interest. Yet subsequent history suggests it was prophetic, as the changing conditions of African American social and political life in the coming century would prove deeply interconnected with events in the region. Corresponding to Du Bois’s logic, two major aspects of an Asia/Pacific interest in African American culture may be identified. The first turned toward Asia in a kind of messianic anticipation, entertaining fantasies—usually casual and speculative, though here and there surprisingly devout—of the arrival of a champion of the darker races against white world supremacy. Though occasionally associated with other countries, this racially alien figure was most often identified with imperial Japan. The second aspect traversed the Pacific along U.S. imperial pathways, pursuing opportunities for racial uplift, particularly in the Philippines and Hawai‘i.
Through the first half of the century, an intermittent but abiding interest in Japan was present across all the locations of a vibrant African American intellectual life, from the academy to the press, the church to the literary salon, the juke joint to the street corner, and the offices of respectable civil rights organizations to the meetings of ragtag radical groups. Rather than attempting to determine any singular coherence to this interest, it is best approached as a series of debates. For every editorial, lecture, or sermon promoting the modernizing and uplifting lessons Japan could teach, another might reject such claims. Similarly, intellectuals argued for and against the prospect of Japanese leadership of the darker races, and popular and elite sentiment oscillated between identifying with Japanese and Japanese American struggles against white racism and dismissing them for setting themselves above black people.20
Primarily shaped by geopolitics, this interest peaked around major events—the Russo-Japanese War; the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where President Woodrow Wilson defeated the Japanese delegation’s proposal of a racial equality clause for the League of Nations Charter; and the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in which widespread hopes of Japanese intervention were ultimately disappointed. The latter largely confirmed the attitudes of a younger cohort of intellectuals, whose leftward turn in the 1930s led to critiques of Japanese imperialism, sometimes recasting China or India in familiar pro-Japanese tropes. Yet the earlier influence of Marcus Garvey, who promoted “Asia for the Asiatics” and upheld Japan as a model of racial pride and self-determination, was not entirely dislodged. To a lesser extent, African Americans also monitored the anti-Japanese movement and Japanese American civil rights campaigns against school and housing segregation, restrictions on immigration and land ownership, as well as the Supreme Court 1922 case Ozawa v. United States, in which a challenge to racial restrictions on naturalized citizenship, on the grounds that Japanese should be considered white, was denied. These currents crested during World War II, as African Americans contemplated both the mass incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans and the demands and opportunities of national loyalty in wartime.
Yet the larger historical significance of this interest may lie in its more shadowy and imaginative manifestations. It was given freer rein, for example, in speculative fiction by prominent intellectuals. John Edward Bruce’s uncompleted 1912 short story, “The Call of a Nation,” and James D. Corrothers’s “A Man They Didn’t Know,” published in The Crisis in December 1913 and January 1914, both imagine a race war, in which Japan’s initial triumphs in the Philippines and Hawai‘i lead to an invasion that the United States can defeat only by abandoning white supremacy to ensure the support of black soldiers. Fifteen years later, Du Bois himself contributed to the genre with Dark Princess, whose protagonist, a talented African American in Berlin, stumbles into a secret international council of the darker races plotting the overthrow of the white nations.21 The greatest influence of this interest may have been in the pro-Japanese activities of a range of religious, nationalist, and emigrationist groups uncovered by Ernest Allen, including the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the Allah Temple of Islam (a predecessor to the Nation of Islam led by Elijah Muhammad).22 It almost certainly conditioned Noble Drew Ali’s influential theory of “Asiatic” blackness, as well as Muhammad’s vision of a Japanese-built UFO or “Mother Plane.” Broadly understood, you may recognize its significance in the ways this interest offered imaginative realms for conceptualizing racial difference beyond white supremacy—a necessary condition for recovering an affirmative notion of blackness irreducible to its constitution by white racism. Thus, one of its more surprising variants provided a lexicon for alternative stylizations of female and queer nonwhite sexualities, in the appropriated Orientalisms of writers such as Marita Bonner, Nella Larsen, and Richard Bruce Nugent.
The final collision between U.S. and Japanese imperialisms in World War II, and the subsequent reshaping of the world order, drastically revised the terms of this interest, both dispersing and intensifying it. Sympathies for Japan were largely forgotten, helped by active efforts of suppression during the war, by government officials—over eighty members of black organizations, including Muhammad, were arrested on charges of sedition or draft evasion in September 1942—as well as black intellectuals.23 Meanwhile, a continuing series of wars brought more black soldiers to Asia, binding many closer to U.S. imperial interests while baptizing others in forms of radical internationalism.24 One strain of the interest turned toward Third Worldist politics, particularly Maoism,25 while another manifested in pop-cultural obsessions with kung fu and in Afrofuturist explorations of outer space by musicians like Sun Ra.
But Du Bois’s early transpacific analyses are not merely useful for a taxonomy of black cultural formations. More broadly, they anticipate how the subsequent course of black history may be approached through an Afro-Asian interpretation of the twentieth century, which identifies the social and political advances of black and Asian peoples as the era’s defining event, and the jaggedly articulated strivings of metropolitan minorities and colonized or imperially subjugated populations of color as its indispensable condition. In the most straightforward way, this is the prophecy of the color-line thesis. Yet the cold pragmatism of Du Bois’s geopolitical analyses can seem disconcerting to the liberatory spirit driving recent recuperations of black internationalism and Afro-Asian sympathies. The epochal break he saw in 1905 would be generally recognized after World War II, and while he has been rightly accused of insufficiently critiquing Japanese imperialism,26 his larger theme, shared by Corrothers and Bruce, was actually vindicated by the war: in contesting U.S. imperialism’s monopolization of the terms of racial justice, Japanese imperialism helped create unprecedented openings that were seized by black freedom movements, even if its own dubious claims proved disastrous for populations under its sway.
Put differently, what feels insufficient in the otherwise reasonable revisionist identification of an “Afro-Asian century”27 is the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the extravagant visions of freedom it prophesied and the bitter realities it left behind, culminating in the impoverished conditions of formal national independence and formal racial equality. Moreover, the geopolitical conditions that enabled those visions no longer obtain. The color line is not the problem of the twenty-first century, in Du Bois’s sense; even as racism persists and expands, questions of racialization no longer provide the dynamic link through the social conflicts driving global change. To understand this trajectory of the prophecy, and to understand why its radical potential is not yet exhausted, I turn to the second aspect of the Asia/Pacific interest in African American culture.
This aspect traversed the pathways of U.S. imperialism, which offered fragile opportunities for black performances of colonial privilege, most extensively in the Philippines and Hawai‘i.28
