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In this pathbreaking study, Fiona I. B. Ngô examines how geographies of U.S. empire were perceived and enacted during the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on New York during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Ngô traces the city's multiple circuits of jazz music and culture. In considering this cosmopolitan milieu, where immigrants from the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, and China crossed paths with blacks and white "slummers" in dancehalls and speakeasies, she investigates imperialism's profound impact on racial, gendered, and sexual formations. As nightclubs overflowed with the sights and sounds of distant continents, tropical islands, and exotic bodies, tropes of empire provided both artistic possibilities and policing rationales. These renderings naturalized empire and justified expansion, while establishing transnational modes of social control within and outside the imperial city. Ultimately, Ngô argues that domestic structures of race and sex during the 1920s and 1930s cannot be understood apart from the imperial ambitions of the United States.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Desire and Danger in Jazz's Contact Zones 33
2. Queer Modernities 71
3. Orienting Subjectivities 121
4. Dreaming of Araby 155
Conclusion. Academic Indiscretions 187
Notes 193
Bibliography 231
Index 251
About the author
Fiona I. B. Ngô is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Summary
Focusing on the representations of distant lands and exotic bodies that filled the nightclubs of Jazz Age New York, Fiona I. B. Ngô shows how U.S. ambitions abroad shaped racial, gendered, and sexual formations at home.
