Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific - Vince Schleitwiler страница 21
What I call reading as learning how to read, invoking the radical theorizations of literacy characteristic of black literary traditions, submits to this improvised aesthetic training beyond the historical constraints of racialized perception. Pursuing this reading along the color line, this method seeks to activate the imaginative longings within literary resoundings of the red ray, which open up a field of political engagement even as they are effaced in the historical record of social action. Persisting in their texts as a muffled call, they await a collective response enacting as-yet unknown forms of belonging across difference, while training reading as learning the conditions of collective responsibility.
In Du Bois’s anecdote, the red ray emerges from a comparative moment within the heterogeneity of the category “Negro,” but extending comparison’s range across racial categories and formations can open up the unequal relations and unpredictable possibilities subsumed within a single term. His color-line concept expresses how racial forms produced at any one location always allude to others, whose exotic distance might function in excess of their capacity to signify in a local racial order. This allusive excess, found at the intersections of black and Asian migrations, signals a fugitive trajectory. Following lessons from Du Bois, the remainder of this book examines encounters between tokens of uplift and violence along the color line. If the violence of imperial racialization at times imposed a fictive identity conflating blacks and Asians, the resounding of the red ray emitted by these encounters served to operate an articulation of and through difference. The texts I consider, emerging from within the history of imperialism, did not triumph over its violence, and largely reproduced its civilizationist grammar and lexicon; yet by attending to their translations, striving to hear their quality of light, you might learn to read for what is excluded by, or eludes, imperialism’s racial justice.
a fugitive end
In conclusion, I take up two further translations of the red ray, as it recedes into the dimming recollections of guerrilla warfare across the Pacific. The first appears in the aforementioned Sam Hose propaganda generated by the Filipino nationalist resistance. Here is one version of the full text:
TO THE COLOURED AMERICAN SOLDIERS.
It is without honour nor profit that you shed your costly blood.
Your masters have thrown you to the most inicuous (sic) fight with double purposes.
In orders (sic) to be you the instrument of their ambition.
And also your hard work will make soon the extinction of your race.
Your friends the Philipinos (sic) give you this good warning.
You must consider your situation and your history.
And take charge that the blood of your brothers Sam Heose (sic) and Gray proclaim vengeance.33
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.