Black Orientalism in African American Literature of the 1930s

这个项目试图建立一个新的批判性参考框架，我称之为“黑人东方主义”。通过将20世纪30年代的非裔美国文学置于太平洋的地缘政治地形中，它检索并追溯了非裔美国作家在珍珠港事件发生前的十年中与日本建立跨国有色人种联盟的轨迹。通过对詹姆斯·威尔登·约翰逊和乔治·塞缪尔·斯凯勒作品中日本黑人关系的分析，本研究致力于将非裔美国人在太平洋及其他地区的帝国主义和殖民主义话语中的责任理论化。约翰逊的《沿着这条路》重新构建了现代评论家所称的“黑人太平洋”，这是专门模仿的，因此已经成为亚非交流的代名词（好像太平洋一直都是亚洲的，而不是多边文化交流的接触区）。通过仔细阅读约翰逊的《沿着这条路》中尼加拉瓜/日本关系的运作，我研究了约翰逊设想一个更有活力的黑人回路的方式，这个回路改变了太平洋地区和黑人在该地区面对帝国主义和种族主义的代理和地位。斯凯勒和他的近未来科幻小说《黑色帝国》提供了一个镜头，通过这个镜头，我们可以审视由意大利-埃塞俄比亚战争引发的全球战争幻想的循环，以及日本在其中扮演的角色。我恢复了在埃塞俄比亚危机期间东京、亚的斯亚贝巴和哈莱姆之间形成的轴心，展示了相互牵连的种族和帝国观念，这些观念影响了黑人国际主义。

This project is an attempt to stake out a new critical frame of reference that I have termed "black Orientalism. "By situating African American literature of the 1930s in the geopolitical terrain of the Pacific, it retrieves and retraces the trajectory of the transnational alliance of color that African American writers envisioned with Japan in the decade leading to Pearl Harbor. Through analyses of the Japanese-black nexus in the works of James Weldon Johnson and George Samuel Schuyler, this study undertakes to theorize African American accountability in the discourse of imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific and beyond.Johnson's Along This Way reframes what modern critics call the "black Pacific, "which has been exclusively modeled on, and hence has come to be synonymous with, the Afro-Asian exchange (as if the Pacific is always already Asian, rather than a contact zone of multilateral intercultural exchange). By closely reading the Nicaragua/Japan nexus operating in Johnson's Along This Way, I have examined the way in which Johnson envisioned a more dynamic black circuit that changed both the Pacific and black agency and positionality vis-a-vis imperialism and racism in that region.Schuyler - and his near-future science fiction Black Empire-offers a lens through which to examine the circuit of a global war fantasy set off by the Italo-Ethiopian War and the role that Japan played in it. Recovering the axis forged between Tokyo, Addis Ababa, and Harlem during the Ethiopian crisis, I have demonstrated the mutually implicated perceptions of race and empire that informed black internationalism.