Chapter 13 - Black Transpacific Culture and the Migratory Imagination

Summary

In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois identified the rise of imperial Japan and the US colonization of the Philippines as world-historical events heralding a century defined by “the problem of the color line.” This chapter takes stock of his prophecy’s first decade, mapping the scope of a Black transpacific culture that restructured the collective imagination of African Americans’ dynamic position in a modernizing world. Japan and the Philippines exemplify two aspects of this Black transpacific culture: one that looked upward, envisioning a potential “champion of the darker races” emerging from Asia to challenge white supremacy, while the other looked downward, at the colonial territories and benighted wards of US expansion, whose benevolent uplift might provide new opportunities for African American imperial citizenship. Surveying material and speculative domains of geopolitics, military service, education, popular entertainment, and migration, the chapter shows how Black transpacific culture reoriented the imagination of Black belonging, worldliness, and destiny, recasting the horizons of the array of Black political and cultural modernisms that would set an Afro-Asian century in motion.