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.
