Vince Schleitwiler, "The Violence and the Music, April–December 1899," in “Forward,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 8.1 (2017). Excerpt from Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism's Racial Justice and Its Fugitives (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
This excerpt from the book Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific, selected for the "Forward" section of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, discusses the history of African American interest in the Philippines and Japan, as well as corresponding black presences in Filipino and Japanese American culture. In particular, it analyzes W.E.B. Du Bois's theorizations of transimperial racialization (the "color line") and of the sexualized racial violence linking metropolitan lynching to colonial violence, situating them within the rise of US and Japanese imperial power on the threshold of the 20th century.