Where is the Black Pacific?

On my shorter list of favorite books is Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment by Larry Wolff. In graduate school I had the chance to study with Paul Gilroy, the influential author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Both books scratched new parts of my brain as through them I meditated on space/place and race. How whole places get invented by a shared idea of who is supposed to be living in them and for what task in the unfolding of human history. Gilroy's book kneads the major idea of WEB DuBois, for whom the Pacific was also a crucial place to chart race through history. Du Bois loved the actual country Japan and even more so the idea of Japan. Most of all, he loved the idea that black people shared with Japan a local and global destiny.

According to a seminal author on the theme of blacks and Japan, Reginald Kearny, Japan's 1905 triumph over Russia was a drama worthy of barber shop newspaper readings and championship bout-like bragging. Black Americans took it personally and pridefully that a brown nation could beat up a white one, and were nearly as angry as the Japanese themselves (who rioted in Tokyo's Hibiya Park) when Teddy Roosevelt sued for a peace whose terms many in both groups thought was beneath the dignity and entitlement of a proper victor. Roosevelt understood the power of Japan even if it made him uncomfortable as he later worried that white thugs in California could provoke a war with Japan by increasingly vicious assaults on Japanese Americans and distinguished visitors from that allied country. Blacks, looking South, thereby measured the influence of a country with an army on the ability of whites to take provincial race violence in America seriously.

Etsuko Taketani, the Tsukuba University professor of literature, describes the "black Pacifc" imagined in James Weldon Johnson's 1933 autobiography Along This Way, and most interestingly, how the globe spinning in Johnson's head, was "continuous and contiguous" with the larger cartography of American internationalists.

Because, the implications of a militarized, imperialist, colonizing non-white nation in a thoroughly racist world, however gratifying, are neither radical nor subversive of order and hierarchy. Black Nationalists loved Japan because it was like the white powers, not because it was different. Perhaps even the shared "asian-ness" of Japanese and Koreans and Chinese made the second two nation's colonization more brutal, at least the same, and certainly not less, a fact which settled slowest on Du Bois whose major career mistake could be his reality-altering loyalty to the idea of a noble Japan.

But if the imagining of a Black Pacific in which colored people on all sides thought themselves as part of a different kind of co-prosperity sphere is neither radical nor subversive it is nonetheless fascinating and illuminating.