W. E. B. Du Bois is well-known for his scathing critique of the duplicity of the Cold War Americanization of racial justice, referring to it, for example, in 1954 as an attempt to “split American Negros from union or sympathy for colonial people.” He is lesser known for his earlier engagement with the rise of liberal pluralism at the intersection of the United States and Japan as terms of their inter-imperial contest for moral and material supremacy in the transpacific. Du Bois’ engagement with Imperial Japan and its pan-Asianist, liberal-pluralist strategy has been interpreted by Bill Mullen as “Afro-Orientalism.” Yuichiro Onishi has described Du Bois as “preoccupied with…the concept of race at a scale exceeding the nation-state,” rendering him delinquent in critiquing Japanese racism and imperialism.
My view is quite different. When linking Du Bois to pan-Asianists from below, like the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, and teasing apart the realist and idealist registers in his rhetoric, Du Bois’ configuration of Japan in the context of what is now referred to as racial capitalism speaks to his sense of imperfect “worlds of color”—past and future, that exceed the color line (white and nonwhite). Rather, he configured Japan and by extension, Asia-rising in his 1928 novel Dark Princess in terms of the looming of “the shadow of a color line within a color line.” What exactly does this phrase refer to? The temptation has been to read it in terms of Afro-Asian relations vis-à-vis early 20th-century global white supremacy, but I have argued that it instead refers to the structure of modern racism beyond the content of white supremacy; thereby, it speaks to the history and projected future of racial capitalism itself. My presentation will distill and extend insights from my 2022 article “Queering the Color Line within the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Transwar Transpacific.”
No comments:
Post a Comment