The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars chronicles the profound shift in geographic imaginings that occurred in African American culture as the United States evolved into a bioceanic global power. The author examines the narrative of the Òblack PacificÓ_the literary and cultural production of African American narratives in the face of AmericaÕs efforts to internationalize the Pacific and to institute a ÒPacific Community,Ó reflecting a vision of a hemispheric regional order initiated and led by the United States. The black Pacific was imagined in counterpoint to this regional order in the making, which would ultimately be challenged by the Pacific War. The principal subjects of study include such literary and cultural figures as James Weldon Johnson, George S. Schuyler, artists of the black Federal Theatre Project, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter White, all of whom afford significant points of entry to a critical understanding of the stakes of the black Pacific narrative. Adopting an approach that mixes the archival and the interpretive, the author seeks to recover the black Pacific produced by African American narratives, narratives that were significant enough in their time to warrant surveillance and suspicion, and hence are significant enough in our time to warrant scholarly attention and reappraisal. A compelling study that will appeal to a broad, international audience of students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, American literature, and imperialism and colonialism.

The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars chronicles the profound shift in geographic imaginings that occurred in African American culture as the United States evolved into a bioceanic global power. The author examines the narrative of the Òblack PacificÓ_the literary and cultural production of African American narratives in the face of AmericaÕs efforts to internationalize the Pacific and to institute a ÒPacific Community,Ó reflecting a vision of a hemispheric regional order initiated and led by the United States. The black Pacific was imagined in counterpoint to this regional order in the making, which would ultimately be challenged by the Pacific War. The principal subjects of study include such literary and cultural figures as James Weldon Johnson, George S. Schuyler, artists of the black Federal Theatre Project, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter White, all of whom afford significant points of entry to a critical understanding of the stakes of the black Pacific narrative. Adopting an approach that mixes the archival and the interpretive, the author seeks to recover the black Pacific produced by African American narratives, narratives that were significant enough in their time to warrant surveillance and suspicion, and hence are significant enough in our time to warrant scholarly attention and reappraisal. A compelling study that will appeal to a broad, international audience of students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, American literature, and imperialism and colonialism.

Set between the rise of the U.S. and Japan as Pacific imperial powers in the 1890s and the aftermath of the latter’s defeat in World War II, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific traces the interrelated migrations of African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos across U.S. domains. Offering readings in literature, blues and jazz culture, film,theatre, journalism, and private correspondence, Vince Schleitwiler considers how the collective yearnings and speculative destinies of these groups were bound together along what W.E.B. Du Bois called the world-belting color line. The links were forged by the paradoxical practices of race-making in an aspiring empire—benevolent uplift through tutelage, alongside overwhelming sexualized violence—which together comprise what Schleitwiler calls “imperialism’s racial justice.” This process could only be sustained through an ongoing training of perception in an aesthetics of racial terror, through rituals of racial and colonial violence that also provide the conditions for an elusive countertraining. With an innovative prose style, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific pursues the poetic and ethical challenge of reading, or learning how to read, the black and Asian literatures that take form and flight within the fissures of imperialism’s racial justice. Through startling reinterpretations of such canonical writers as James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Toshio Mori, and Carlos Bulosan, alongside considerations of unexpected figures such as the musician Robert Johnson and the playwright Eulalie Spence, Schleitwiler seeks to reactivate the radical potential of the Afro-Asian imagination through graceful meditations on its representations of failure, loss, and overwhelming violence.

Offers a fresh understanding of the global connectivity of struggles against colonial rule.

This book explores connections between Atlantic studies and (trans)Pacific studies, including the potential discursive, topical, and historical overlaps of the two fields. It carves out mutual concerns and theoretical affinities, but also divergent approaches and differences. While acknowledging the fundamental differences that characterize the individual fields, the essays in this volume examine how both Atlantic and (trans)Pacific studies are part of global currents of political, activist, artistic, economic, and academic exchange. This volume brings together voices from Europe, North America, and the Pacific with disciplinary backgrounds in history, culture, and literature. Directed at scholars with a background in (trans)Pacific and/or Atlantic studies, this collection is an attempt to stimulate exchange between the two fields, to intensify their impact within the current transnational focus of literary and cultural studies, to encourage the questioning of well-mapped paths of inquiry, and to outline new theoretical approaches to both fields. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Atlantic Studies.

Volume II of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean focuses on the latest era of Pacific history, examining the period from 1800 to the present day. This volume discusses advances and emerging trends in the historiography of the colonial era, before outlining the main themes of the twentieth century when the idea of a Pacific-centred century emerged. It concludes by exploring how history and the past inform preparations for the emerging challenges of the future. These essays emphasise the importance of understanding how the postcolonial period shaped the modern Pacific and its historians.

Dixon provides the first comprehensive study of African American military and social experiences during the Pacific War.