Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific by Schleitwiler Vince;

Author:Schleitwiler, Vince;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

Three: His Joke, Her Laughter

After the first decade of the century, the presence of the Philippines in the U.S. metropolitan media and the black popular imagination diminished, as the grander hopes excited by conquest, whether for U.S. power or black advancement, were tempered. Retrospectively, the differences in status established in the territories subjected to military conflict in the 1890s can be read as a formal experimentation with imperial structures of political and economic control. Here, the model of overseas territorial colonialism already looked outdated, and a shift toward neocolonialism was being engineered, as evidenced by the Tydings-McDuffie Act. Meanwhile, the chance migration represented was being taken up by many millions of black Southerners, not in the colony but in the rapidly expanding communities of the North, Midwest, and West. Shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality, taken as evidence of a globalizing modernity, began to fracture normalizing ideologies of Negro uplift, rendering their once-modernizing ideals decidedly behind the times.

Nonetheless, questions continued to surface in the press about the status, influence, and destiny of the Philippines and about the opportunities and obstacles faced by Filipino migrants. In black press coverage, a specifically racialized curiosity was taken for granted, whether that fueled a greater sympathy for Filipinos or the opposite. From governmental and global affairs, to civil rights, to popular entertainment and sports (especially boxing), the Philippines and Filipinos were an unremarkable presence in the black “current events” landscape through at least the 1950s, and the traces of black transpacific soldiering remained a familiar landmark in the cultural memory of African American communities.

In this section, I examine the circulation of these traces through emerging forms of black modernist popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s, attending to the dispersal of the history of black soldiering as its status shifted from that of a primary event, consequential in itself, to a secondary figure whose significance was oblique and referential. Put simply, if the Philippines had once appeared as the frontier of an advancing modernity, for U.S. imperial ambitions and ambitious African Americans, during the interwar period it seemed far more provincial. What uses might a modernist, modernizing culture have for a visit to these boondocks? Below, I turn to Robert Johnson’s famous 1936 blues recording, “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” and to Eulalie Spence’s play Her, first staged by W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa theater company in 1927—the year their production of her Fool’s Errand became the first play by an African American woman performed on Broadway. In juxtaposing the song’s conclusion in a man’s cunning joke to the play’s conclusion in a woman’s unsettling laughter, I consider how a transpacific décalage could be operated to elude, if not critique, the normative demands of uplift.

Both Johnson and Spence pursued models of upward mobility and modern sophistication through the commercial entertainment industry in tension with older pathways to social status, associated with uplift ideology’s emphasis on educational attainment and performances of altruistic duty. Ironically, Johnson’s premature death in 1938 facilitated his recuperation, decades

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.