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Distributed for Dartmouth College Press

The Black Pacific Narrative

Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

Distributed for Dartmouth College Press

The Black Pacific Narrative

Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

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 “black Pacific”?the literary and cultural production of African American narratives in the face of America’s efforts to internationalize the Pacific and to institute a “Pacific Community,” 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.

272 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2014

African Studies


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments • Introduction • The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way • Colored Empires in the 1930s: Black Internationalism, the US Black Press, and George S. Schuyler • The Swing and the Sword in the Black Mikados: An Afro-Japanese Nexus in the US (White) Pacific Imagination • “Spies and Spiders”: Langston Hughes and the Transpacific Intelligence Dragnet • The Manchurian Philosopher: W. E. B. Du Bois in the Eurasian Pacific • Epilogue • Notes • Bibliography • Index

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