the Asia/Pacific interest illustrates the fraught yet generative racial, sexual, and gendered contradictions embodied by American Negro uplift emerging within transpacific imperial competition. The ambivalent participation of black soldiers in the controversial Philippine war provided the first major nexus of this history, along with debates over their conditions of service and their relationship to other nonwhite groups. Another linked post-Emancipation debates over black education to U.S. imperialism in a complex transpacific circuit, connecting white American missionary education in Hawai‘i, via Samuel C. Armstrong, to the Tuskegee model of industrial education championed by his protégé, Booker T. Washington, which subsequently served as a model for U.S. officials in Manila. Meanwhile, African American educators found opportunities for professional advancement under the colonial regime, including a young Carter G. Woodson, who wrote approvingly of the experience in his 1933 Mis-education of the Negro.
A third nexus involved debates over colonial migration, whether by upwardly mobile individuals or en masse; the Philippines briefly served as the focus for black emigration schemes, and the U.S. government entertained proposals to import black labor to the colony. Finally, the complex global circuits of modernizing popular entertainment brought black musical culture to the colonies, returning the latter to the metropole in cultural practices, memory, and fantasy. James Weldon Johnson, with Bob Cole and his brother Rosamond Johnson, wrote a groundbreaking 1906 play, The Shoo-Fly Regiment, about soldiers in the Philippines, as part of a brief fad of similarly themed productions, including works by Black Patti’s Troubadours and the Pekin Stock Company. As late as 1927, the New York playwright Eulalie Spence could offhandedly introduce a character as “one of these here Philippine gals” (Her 139). While memories of the colonial period faded quickly after the 1946 end of direct U.S. rule, traces persisted among veterans and their families: Ralph Ellison recalled his father’s service in Cuba, the Philippines, and China in his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man (xiii), while Ann Petry helped to preserve the letters of an uncle who served in the Philippines and an aunt who taught in Hawai‘i (E. Petry 2005).
If Du Bois’s 1899 address sketches the contours of a future Asia/Pacific interest in African American culture, the methodological implications of its comparative spirit entail a contrapuntal narration of Afro-Asian history, which is why this book also takes up reciprocal, if uneven, interests in blackness in Japanese American and Filipino migrant cultures. As Vicente Rafael and Paul Kramer have shown, race-making under U.S. colonialism in the Philippines was contradictory: anti-insurgent warfare tended to conflate territories and populations into a singular racial enemy, while the exigencies of civilian colonial rule demanded the proliferation and classification of racial differences into a progressive hierarchy, whose heterogeneity was yet to coalesce into nationhood.29 Intraimperial migration further complicated matters, and Filipino intellectuals frequently deployed figurations of blackness to negotiate the conjunctures of metropolitan and colonial racial formations, in the long advent of Philippine formal independence.
Japanese Americans in this period similarly relied on figurations of blackness in navigating a trajectory amid the competing claims and disavowals of Japanese and U.S. imperialisms. At times, they contrasted Negro servility to Japanese virility and militancy—persistent stereotypes in U.S. culture prior to World War II that were even employed didactically, if in a different spirit, by black intellectuals. At other times, drawing on overlapping experiences of segregation in the West, they figured blackness to imagine communal, if not necessarily nonhierarchical, relations outside of white supremacy. Through to the present, black presences in Japanese American culture typically signify the chance of multiracialism to which all imperialisms lay claim; thus, as Japanese Americans contemplated their destiny in the shadows of transpacific imperial competition, blackness came to figure histories of racial violence whose repression could be exchanged for degrees of privilege, but whose unleashing might be the condition of an unimaginable freedom.
Comparative and global inquiry, in Du Bois’s color-line writings, was organized in terms of continents, in 1899, and of empires and transimperial movements, in 1924. They have rightly been cited as a precedent for transnational approaches to American studies and ethnic studies, as those fields seek to escape the geopolitical imagination of post–Cold War American exceptionalism. In drawing a methodology from Du Bois’s color line, I approach the histories of black and Asian racialization in terms of migrations, rather than geopolitical units defined by past or present state borders, as processes in and of motion rather than geographical fixity. By “migrations,” I refer to the large-scale and long-term resettlement of racialized labor, but also the transient movements of casual workers, military personnel, and displaced groups, as well as the individual journeys of students, educators, government officials, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. These bodily travels, furthermore, shaped and were shaped by proliferating modern telecommunications media. Thus, I conceptualize migrations as multidirectional and interrelated processes of physical movements and cultural circulation, rather than the unidirectional passage between fixed locations in classic U.S. narratives of immigration.
Through this model, you may interpret relationships between the movements of colonial Filipino workers to and along the West Coast and the deployments of African American soldiers in Asia and the Pacific, as two circuits of migrant labor within empire, articulating histories of dispersal on both sides that precede U.S. occupation by centuries. Or you might connect black urbanization in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, accelerated by the demands of wartime production in the 1940s, with the forced removal, incarceration, and resettlement of West Coast Japanese Americans through concentration camps to Chicago and points east, before their gradual westward return over the next few decades—and then relate these “internal” migrations to the “foreign” threat their convergence invoked, from the specter of imperial Japan to a U.S. front of Third World revolution by the 1960s.
Now that the century of Du Bois’s prophecy is over, the liberatory potential of a Third World front, or of previous figurations of Afro-Asian solidarity, seems thoroughly exhausted. The color line is not the problem of the twenty-first century, even if the problems associated with it remain. From this vantage, his faith in an Afro-Asian future can actually function as a constraint on the imagination of freedom—a trap you might evade by considering a contemporaneous vision that consigned an Afro-Asian century to an unrealized past before it even began. To recover this possibility, I return to the earlier suggestion that Du Bois’s 1899 address is surprisingly unoriginal within African American discourses of its moment.
Although its central conceit, that issues of race must be viewed from a global perspective, could appear as a revelation a hundred years later, as ethnic studies and American studies undertook a transnational turn, it was hardly unconventional in 1899. For example, at the previous year’s American Negro Academy meeting, Howard University professor Charles C. Cook presented “A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem.” Assessing English and Japanese histories of national emergence, Cook comments, “What it took England ten centuries to accomplish, the United States has done in two hundred, and Japan in thirty years” (3). While the latter was clearly not Cook’s area of expertise—at least half of his brief section on Japan was a long quote from William Elliot Griffis’s popular 1876 volume, The Mikado’s Empire—it shows that Du Bois’s impulse was hardly unique.
More substantive engagements with global affairs can be found across a range of black newspapers and journals of the period, including the A.M.E. Church Review.30 Indeed, the same October 1900 issue that published Du Bois’s address featured a series of aphoristic “Editorials” that tartly and succinctly capture the ambivalent perspective on imperialism theorized by Du Bois. Presumably written by editor Hightower T. Kealing, an educator, lay A.M.E. church official, and A.N.A. member, they range from a sentence to several paragraphs. One item pungently captures the common-ground position between growing antiwar black popular opinion and the concerns of some black elites that challenging Republican administration policies would deliver the election to their enemies: “Imperialism seems to mean the bringing of more colored people within contact with American contempt; while anti-imperialism is saving all this contempt for the colored people already on hand”! Other items illustrate the preoccupations of uplift ideology, bemoaning American drunkenness
