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
