Black Orientalism in African American Literature of the 1930s

这个项目试图建立一个新的批评参照系，我称之为“黑人东方主义”。通过将20世纪30年代的非裔美国人文学置于太平洋的地缘政治地带，它找回并追溯了非裔美国作家在珍珠港事件发生前的十年里与日本设想的跨国有色人种联盟的轨迹。通过对詹姆士·韦尔登·约翰逊和乔治·塞缪尔·舒勒作品中的日本黑人关系的分析，本研究致力于在太平洋内外的帝国主义和殖民主义话语中对非裔美国人的责任进行理论化。约翰逊沿着这条道路重新构建了现代批评家所说的“黑色太平洋”，它完全是以亚非交流为蓝本的，因此成为亚非交流的代名词(好像太平洋一直都是亚洲的，而不是多边跨文化交流的接触区)。通过仔细阅读约翰逊笔下的尼加拉瓜/日本纽带，我考察了约翰逊设想的一个更具活力的黑色电路，它改变了太平洋和黑色机构，以及在该地区相对于帝国主义和种族主义的地位。舒勒和他不久的科幻小说《黑色帝国》提供了一个镜头，通过它来审视由意大利-埃塞俄比亚战争引发的全球战争幻想的电路，以及日本在其中所扮演的角色。找回在埃塞俄比亚危机期间在东京、亚的斯亚贝巴和哈莱姆之间锻造的轴心，我展示了相互牵连的种族和帝国观念，这些观念造就了黑人国际主义。

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.