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
