Black Transpacific Culture and the Migratory Imagination

Abstract

For African Americans, for their country, and for the world, W. E. B. Du Bois announced, the twentieth century would begin in Asia. It was late December , the end of a year of great ambition and personal tragedy for the young Atlanta University professor. His two-year-old son, Burghardt, had died in May, in a city where white physicians would not treat Black patients, and Black physicians were in short supply. A month earlier, his near encounter with a gruesome trophy of the freshly lynched body of Sam Hose had struck his faith in the enlightening power of social science to its core. And his nation was at war. Unlike the relatively popular Spanish-American War that preceded it, the PhilippineAmerican War was vigorously debated by the Black press and intelligentsia, and even threatened to fracture historic loyalties to the party of Lincoln in the upcoming presidential election. As the year drew to a close, Du Bois traveled to Washington, DC, to deliver his presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Negro Academy. Largely neglected until recent years, this speech was the source of his famous proclamation that “the world problem of the th century is the Problem of the Color line” (). Shorn of the contextually redundant word “world,” Du Bois would repeat this formulation on several occasions over the next few years –most famously in his  breakthrough, The Souls of Black Folk – but only the  address presents it as a thesis to be demonstrated. He does so by considering race “in its larger world aspect in time and space” (), via a whirlwind survey of geopolitical conflicts on five continents, and a century-by-century review of  years of world history. In this argument, the color line is not merely a metaphor for segregation, a bar to be crossed or lifted, but a means of understanding racialization as a dynamic, modern, and modernizing force: a traveling analytical concept for examining the uneven, unpredictable ways race is made and remade across a global field of imperial competition, which would become a space of transimperial contestation for movements from below.