2.1 Racial Ambivalence and Critique in Hawaii’s Story

Like her brother David Kalakaua who edited a Hawaiian-language newspaper before ascending the throne, Lili’uokalani viewed her self-described “literary labors” as essential to her political work lobbying the US to reinstate the Hawaiian Kingdom and prevent annexation (350).Footnote ³⁵ The most substantial of these literary labors, Hawaii’s Story remains central to Lili’uokalani’s political legacy, adding textual heterogeneity to the formal protests, letters, and petitions that she helped spearhead and author. In 1897, upon release from house arrest after her forced abdication, Lili’uokalani journeyed to the US capitol where she dedicated herself to the “advocacy of one desired end”: namely, to “undo the wrong which had been done to the Hawaiian people” (324). During her six-months in Washington, DC, Lili’uokalani completed the manuscript for Hawaii’s Story and the first English translation of the Kumulipo, a poem and genealogical chant of the Creation (mo’oku’auhau) that served as Native Hawaiian historical record. She also published an “edition of ‘Aloha Oe’” and oversaw “two specially prepared volumes of … compositions … bound and inscribed in Washington” (351–2). One of these copies was later “placed in the new Congressional Library” (352). Lili’uokalani’s Boston relatives, Sara and William Lee (the cousins of her late Anglo-American husband, John Owen Dominis) of the publishing firm Lee and Shepard (later, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard) helped edit and rush Hawaii’s Story through publication as they had earlier with Lili’uokalani’s Kumulipo translation. Within four months of its arrival to the publisher, Hawaii’s Story appeared in print: “[r]egally bound in pale blue and gold” and retailing at $2.00 a copy.Footnote ³⁶ Reviews emphasized the “great importance” and timeliness of the book given “the annexation treaty now pending before the senate.”Footnote ³⁷

American newspaper coverage of the “Hawaiian question” came in two waves: in 1893 after a US-backed white oligarchy of Honolulu businessmen (the thirteen-person Committee of Safety) overthrew Lili’uokalani and established a new Hawaiian government and again in 1897 when President William McKinley placed a second Hawaiian annexation bill before Congress.Footnote ³⁸ Appearing at this second critical juncture, Hawaii’s Story was key to Lili’uokalani’s anti-annexation campaign at the US capitol, “with excerpts from it read out in public during her stay and distributed widely,” as Jens Temmen notes.Footnote ³⁹ She faced a difficult task, for “The general sentiment in Washington seems to be favorable to … annexation,” reports the Washington Bee.Footnote ⁴⁰ In appealing to “honest Americans,” Lili’uokalani offers Hawaii’s Story as a corrective to mainstream journalism, which annexationists have monopolized “for the purpose of deceiving the American public” (373, 352–3). The memoir’s strategically constructed appendixes, spanning thirty-four additional pages, provide a repository of previously censored information, including her letters to US presidents, an investigative report on the US involvement in the insurrection that deposed her, a copy of the 1897 annexation treaty, and detailed genealogies of Hawaiian royalty substantiating her claim to the throne.

A singular text, Hawaii’s Story deftly manages to not alienate its intended American readership in its defense of the Hawaiian Kingdom. This was no easy task given Lili’uokalani’s condemnation of US missionaries and settler occupation for undermining Native Hawaiian self-government. Her introductory chapter establishes the complex narrative strategies she uses to counter racist portrayals and argue for Hawaiian independence. Lili’uokalani attributes the “homeless condition of the Hawaiians at the present day” to the arrival of American and European “foreigners” (or haole) and their introduction of missionary schools, the privatization of land (or aina), and plantation capitalism to the archipelago (3). At the age of four, Lili’uokalani was sent to the “Royal School … founded and conducted by Amos S. Cooke” and his wife, missionaries with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) (5, 9). The Cooke’s boarding school purported to prepare royal children to become future monarchs, educating them in the English language and Christian religion. The chapter anticipates subsequent efforts to discredit Lili’uokalani’s authorship of Hawaii’s Story (allegedly because of her poor command of English), and establishes her critique of the generational wealth, power, and influence that the “missionary party” accrued from the exploitation of Native Hawaiians.Footnote ⁴¹ With biting sarcasm, Lili’uokalani thinks back to her educators, who were “especially particular to teach us the proper use of the English language; but when I recall the instances in which we were sent hungry to bed, it seems to me that they failed to remember that we were growing children” (5). Such neglect and poor treatment reveal the hypocrisy of the so-called Christian benevolent mission on the islands. The Cookes later closed the school, broke off ties with the ABCFM, and established the “firm of Castle & Cooke,” one of the “Big Five” sugar companies that controlled the Hawaiian economy (9). The Castles’ son numbered among the thirteen-person Committee of Safety that later overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom, and Lili’uokalani condemns these “sons of the missionaries, or allied to the families connected with the American Mission” as “pseudo-Hawaiians” (326). Thus, Lili’uokalani’s early treatment by American missionaries foreshadows their subsequent betrayal of “the Hawaiian people … who welcomed the devoted and pious missionaries of seventy years ago” (373).

Lili’uokalani describes the rapid erosion of Native Hawaiian civil liberties and rights after the missionary establishment coerced King Kalakaua to sign a new constitution in 1887. Never ratified by the Hawaiian people, this “Bayonet Constitution,” according to Lili’uokalani, “deprived the sovereign of all power,” emboldened the “missionary party” to take “the law into its own hands” and stripped “away the franchise from the Hawaiian race” (180–81). Under the Bayonet Constitution, race determined democratic rights for the first time in Hawaiian history by limiting the electorate to literate men “of Hawaiian, American, or European descent” who “possessed property worth at least three thousand dollars or who had an annual income of at least six hundred dollars.”Footnote ⁴² It also granted voting rights to white foreigners, including recent arrivals without requiring them to renounce their nationality or undergo naturalization to Hawaiian citizenship. These changes effectively restricted the vote to wealthy white foreigners, ensuring that the majority of Native Hawaiians and all Asian residents lost their suffrage rights.Footnote ⁴³ “Majority rule is dangerous,” declares one pro-annexation editorial, and continues: “Universal suffrage has been fairly tried at the Hawaiian Islands … [with] Asiatics being wisely left out.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Lili’uokalani draws attention to the role of former American missionaries turned sugar operators, like the Cookes and Castles, in this early effort to undermine Hawaiian sovereignty. “Although settled among us,” as Lili’uokalani notes, these Americans remained “alien to us in their customs and ideas respecting government, and desired above all things the extension of their power” (178). She distinguishes the “Hawaiian people” (or “the children of the soil”) from these “aliens,” calling “themselves Hawaiians,” who “have visited Washington at intervals during the past four years in the cause of annexation” (325, 326). “They are not and never were Hawaiian,” Lili’uokalani clarifies, for “they retained their American birthright” (325).

After succeeding her brother in 1891 as Hawaii’s first sovereign Queen, Lili’uokalani attempted to proclaim a new constitution to re-empower the Hawaiian monarchy and re-enfranchise Native Hawaiians and all others cut out by the Bayonet Constitution. In a rare interview after her overthrow, Lili’uokalani relates how she was deluged with petitions signed by “the names of those from all classes who felt that by the existing Constitution that natives were deprived of their just and inalienable rights.”Footnote ⁴⁵ She makes clear the irony of her situation. As monarch, Lili’uokalani upheld the law and sought to restore the Republican ideals that the American missionary establishment and economic interests had undermined by force. In 1893, Lili’uokalani’s efforts provided the all-white Committee of Safety with the pretext to seize control of the government. Insurrectionists like Thurston secured the assistance of the US foreign minister and navy by misrepresenting Lili’uokalani’s reforms as tyrannical overreach aimed at disenfranchising the island’s white voters. In fact, Thurston portrayed the island’s white minority as the true victims of racial bias. “While the white people have been trying to allay race feeling, the Hawaiians have been doing the opposite,” he argued, continuing: “The question is constantly cropping to the surface and destroying the harmony of the two races.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The former Hawaiian Attorney General under Kalakaua, William Nevins Armstrong offered a similarly spirited defense, claiming at once that the “native Hawaiians … do not appreciate good government” and that “the natives drove the whites to revolt.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Without the consent of the Native Hawaiians whom they purported to represent and govern, these white usurpers, which included European and American financiers, businessmen, and the descendants of ABCFM missionaries, established a one-party state in Hawaii that was largely dedicated to facilitating US annexation. Lili’uokalani wryly reports that these “Annexationists … announced the so-called Republic [of Hawaii] on the fourth day of July, 1894, and it was declared from the steps of Iolani Palace, which the vessels of war in the harbor were saluting for a totally different occasion” (258). The sharp parallels that Lili’uokalani draws are reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” which asked auditors to consider ongoing racialized oppression during a holiday celebrating freedom. For Lili’uokalani, July 4 marks the unlawful theft of nearly 1.8 million acres of Hawaiian “crown lands” and “the seizure of the public treasury” (260).Footnote ⁴⁸ In thus seizing control of the archipelago, these “conquistadores” proved “the doctrine that might makes right” (234, 261). This same unlawful government later arrested Lili’uokalani and 200 supporters for treason after nationalists led by mixed-raced Native Hawaiian solider and politician Robert Wilcox staged an unsuccessful countercoup to reinstate the Hawaiian Kingdom. Lili’uokalani writes that “[t]he only charge against me really was that of being a queen” (280). These “adversaries” sentenced Lili’uokalani to five years of hard labor and a $5,000 fine, which was later commuted to imprisonment within Iolani Palace and then to house arrest in her private residence (280).

The disenfranchisement of Native Hawaiians under the illegitimate Republic of Hawaii stands in stark contrast to the far more egalitarian constitutional monarchy that it supplanted.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the lone footnote to her memoir, Lili’uokalani provides a detailed calculus of the dramatic decline in Native Hawaiian suffrage and legal representation since the usurpation:

Lili’uokalani’s footnote uses statistical data over time to demonstrate how this white minority converted the constitution into an instrument to suppress the island’s non-white majority. The Republic went even further than the Bayonet Constitution in limiting Kanaka Maoli from participating in the new representative government. According to Noenoe Silva, the white oligarchy made liberal use of the example of “‘Mississippi laws’ that had kept African American citizens from voting in the state” by stipulating, among other restrictions, that “any voter could be challenged to explain the details of the Constitution before being allowed to vote.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Lili’uokalani’s detailed discussions of the plight of Native Hawaiians under the new Republic likely resonated with Black readers who experienced similar power grabs throughout the former Confederate South, including the 1898 white supremacist engineered coup and massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina (later fictionized in Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 Marrow of Tradition). Self-identified progressives and allies of Black Americans and American Indians like the Hawaiian-born son of ABCFM missionaries, Samuel Chapman Armstrong viewed Native Hawaiians, like other non-white populations, as in need of this sort of political restraint. Armstrong disseminated this racial ideology at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, the Black industrial school and American Indian boarding school that he founded. Hampton’s most celebrated student, Booker T. Washington attributed the success of his Tuskegee Institute to “the wisdom of the system which General Armstrong had inaugurated at Hampton” and even suggested exporting Tuskegee’s educational philosophies to America’s newest colonies.Footnote ⁵¹ Washington’s relationship with Armstrong reveals another aspect of the complex transit of peoples and ideas between the mainland and archipelago. Armstrong’s father served as the Hawaiian Minister of Public Instruction under Kamehameha III, and Armstrong modeled Hampton on ABCFM missionary David Belden Lyman’s 1836 Hilo Boarding School, which was itself based upon an even earlier school established by Betsey Stockton, the first Black female ABCFM missionary to Hawaii.Footnote ⁵² In an 1893 lecture at Hampton, Thurston blithely declared: “There is a peculiar link between Hampton and Hawaii different from that between Hawaii and any other place.”Footnote ⁵³

Extrapolating strategies of racial suppression from the continental US, the Hawaiian Republic promptly instituted a range of social and political changes that it believed would help advance US annexation. As Gary Okihiro has argued, the Hawaiian Republic’s racially repressive measures emerged from “ideas of native education and servile labor for the ostensible uplift of subject races [that] migrated between island and continent.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1896, the Hawaiian Republic decreed English as the only language to be used in the government and in all public and private schools. American Indian boarding schools like Armstrong’s Hampton had long used similar forced assimilation policies, and Hawaiian school children were likewise punished if they were caught speaking their native language.Footnote ⁵⁵ As the “linguicide that accompanies colonialism,” this measure sought to undermine Native Hawaiian cultural traditions and end the mo’oku’auhau, the orally transmitted practice of genealogical chanting.Footnote ⁵⁶ The mandate was also designed to censor and suppress Native Hawaiian protest for the Hawaiian language continued to serve as a primary conduit for political organizing. The following year, Lili’uokalani helped spearhead a bilingual anti-annexation petition with 21,269 Native Hawaiian signatures that was later introduced into the Congressional debates over the 1897 annexation treaty.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Hampton Institute’s influential Southern Workman magazine also helped disseminate the racialized settler colonial ideologies that justified the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its subsequent annexation. Shortly after a final visit to Hawaii before his death, Armstrong defended the “recent Hawaiian Revolution” in the Southern Workman, writing: “Give the African or Polynesian unlimited political power and, unless retrained, political death will follow. Hawaii has the needed restraint in her Anglo Saxon population … backed by our American ships of war.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In urging for US annexation, Armstrong represents this white minority rule as a “republican form of government” and saw no contradiction in hoping that it might continue “with determined, well armed capable Europeans and Americans to govern and hold the weak impulsive natives in check.”Footnote ⁵⁹ His brother William Nevins Armstrong who had toured Hampton with King Kalakaua in 1881, likewise, found “in the revolt of the whites against the native Hawaiians” a profound political lesson for “the colored people of America.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In celebrating his brother’s Hampton legacy, Nevins Armstrong observes: “In the rise and fall of the Hawaiians the colored people may find much that will instruct them, and there is much in it which shows what the relation of weak and strong races are.”Footnote ⁶¹

During the annexation debates, American racial anxieties also fixated on the large and growing numbers of Asians on the archipelago, a racialized population largely barred from entry into the US through the passage of various Chinese Exclusion Acts.Footnote ⁶² Kalakaua’s highly controversial 1875 Reciprocity Treaty with the US, which provided for the duty-free import of Hawaiian agricultural products into the US, accelerated both plantation capitalism and its labor demands in the archipelago. Faced with a growing labor shortage, Kalakaua turned to “the East” for a solution after an 1882 Hawaiian legislative resolution formally rejected the mass immigration of Black laborers from the US South.Footnote ⁶³ Planters and sugar interests associated with the missionary establishment fashioned themselves as racial progressives, but remained skeptical of Black labor recruitment, fearing the prospect of a “Negro Problem” on the islands. Hawaii’s liberal immigration laws with China and Japan made Asian contract labor indispensable to the American-owned sugar cane industry and accelerated Asian migration to the archipelago.

Kalakaua successfully expanded Japanese labor migration to Hawaii, but it served to enrich and further empower the American missionaries turned landowners, entrepreneurs, and politicians who later betrayed the kingdom (180). Lili’uokalani notes the “bitter” experiences of “[t]he Japanese, urged and inveigled and bought to come to Hawaii while they were needed to increase the foreigners’ gold” (361). In a gesture of lateral affiliation, Lili’uokalani likens the exploitation of Japanese labor migrants to “[t]he poor Hawaiians,” whom the missionary party has made “strangers on their native soil, excluded from their own halls of legislation” (361). Lili’uokalani’s sympathetic portrayals of Japanese labor migrants may have served as a tactical appeal to a militarizing Japanese empire, which had just claimed its first victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and annexed the strategically located Formosa (Taiwan). Perhaps anticipating the Japanese settler colonialism to come, Lili’uokalani raises the specter of the Japanese empire as a possible rival to the US in the Pacific. Her subsequent description of an ill-conceived American lantern slide lecture that accidentally positioned Hawaii with the “appearance of annexation to Japan” offers yet another pointed reference to Japan’s rising global power, the subject of Section 3 (330).

In contrast, Lili’uokalani’s treatment of the growing Chinese population in Hawaii was far more ambivalent, and it echoed some of the Sinophobia present in labor-based anti-annexation arguments from the era. She refers to Chinese migrants as “foreign … Mongolian labor” associated with the appearance of smallpox and opium in the archipelago (79, 241). Introduced by foreign arrivals, deadly epidemics had caused a precipitous decline in the Native Hawaiian population, and Lili’uokalani’s unfavorable portrayal of Chinese migrants as disease agents further amplified the Sinophobia rampant in the US.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, the Hawaiian Kingdom had begun restricting Chinese migration through regulations passed in 1884 and 1885.Footnote ⁶⁵ “With a Chinese population of over twenty-thousand persons, it is absolutely impossible to prevent smuggling, unlawful trade, bribery, corruption, and every abuse,” Lili’uokalani adds (241). Lili’uokalani was likely being tactical in these Sinophobic remarks. Her 1893 interview for the San Francisco Examiner similarly exploits American Yellow Peril to argue for Native Hawaiian civil rights. She deploys US fears of Chinese invasion as a counterfactual analogue to the foreign overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. “Suppose, in a town in California,” she explains, “the wealth of the place should lie principally with a few Chinese merchants. Would he be considered a respectable ruler who should give the preponderance of votes to the wealthy Chinese and practically disenfranchise the native-born American?”Footnote ⁶⁶ Some Americans feared that Hawaiian annexation would undo the Chinese Exclusion Acts and bring about the return of racial slavery through Asiatic servile labor. For example, American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers argued vehemently against annexation by calling attention to Hawaii’s large population of Chinese and “Japanese coolie laborers … working under conditions wholly at variance with any conception of American manhood.”Footnote ⁶⁷

In the final chapters set in the US, Lili’uokalani deploys other tactics from mainstream anti-annexation discourses that created additional racial complexities and reinforced settler logics. In an echo of Cleveland’s oft-cited 1893 speech, Lili’uokalani insisted that “the pending question of annexation involves nothing less than a departure from the established policy” of the US (370). Arguments for US expansion into the Pacific rested on the premise that continental expansion had run its course. During her six-day transcontinental journey to the “national capital,” Lili’uokalani makes the rather pointed observation that “all this vast extent of territory which we traversed belonged to the United States; and there were many other routes from the Pacific to the Atlantic with an equally boundless panorama” (309, 311). She counters Frederick Jackson Turner’s so-called frontier thesis advancing the idea that the American West was closed to further expansion. Crossing “[m]iles and miles of rich country,” she notes: “Colonies and colonies could be established here, and never interfere with each other in the least, the vast extent of unoccupied land is so enormous” (309). Lili’uokalani then juxtaposes these unsettled western lands against her small and distant archipelago to argue that Pacific expansion is unneeded:

In adopting a settler mindset, Lili’uokalani finds herself in the awkward position of embracing US exceptionalism in order to argue for an independent and sovereign Hawaii.Footnote ⁶⁸ As she reminds her American readers: “With all your goodly possessions, covering a territory so immense that there yet remain parts unexplored … do not covet the little vineyard of Naboth’s, so far from your shores” (373). Her transcontinental journey reverses the westward course of Manifest Destiny, erases ongoing Native American struggles against US settler colonialism, and reestablishes the frontier as open, empty, and unsettled.

Lili’uokalani’s strategic use of the potent anti-annexationist discourse of continentalism affirms the sovereignty of Native Hawaiians in the Pacific, but it also legitimizes the ongoing, violent Anglo-American displacement and expropriation of Indigenous peoples on the North American continent.Footnote ⁶⁹ By participating with and against settler logics, Lili’uokalani finds herself in the strange position of disavowing Native American assertions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land rights in order to make these same claims for Native Hawaiians. She thus positions Native Americans “as internal to a government that has overstepped its bounds only, in her view, by entering the Pacific,” as Jodi Byrd critiques.Footnote ⁷⁰ By thus locating Native Americans as domesticated and internal to the US, Lili’uokalani emphasizes the external location of the Hawaiian archipelago and represents Native Hawaiians as the true subjects of US empire.Footnote ⁷¹ In this fashion, her complex positioning of Native Hawaiians both challenged and reaffirmed US forms of race and racialization. She resists the identification of Native Hawaiians with Native Americans yet encourages this same association at other key moments in Hawaii’s Story. At the end of the memoir, Lili’uokalani reverses course to analogize the statelessness of Native Hawaiians under the illegally formed Hawaiian Republic to the plight of Native Americans in the US. “[T]he people of the Islands have no voice in determining their future,” Lili’uokalani asserts, “but are virtually relegated to the condition of the aborigines of the American continent” (369). As Byrd notes, popular discourse at the time often sought to “contextualize U.S. colonialization of Hawai’i through American Indian histories,” in ways that often “erase[d] the transnational distinctions of all the peoples” who fell under a manufactured colonial discourse of “Indianness.”Footnote ⁷² Lili’uokalani’s strategic affinities between Native Hawaiians and Native Americans remain highly ambivalent, unstable, and transitory.

Lili’uokalani’s memoir likewise mobilized forms of Blackness to advance Native Hawaiian freedom and independence. To Americans facing the so-called Negro Problem at home, Lili’uokalani pointedly asked: Do you seek yet “another race-problem” to “be injected into the social and political perplexities with which the United States … is already struggling” (309)? As in her ambivalent and uneven deployment of Native American identifications, Lili’uokalani attempts contradictory twofold work in her strategic positioning of Native Hawaiians in relation to Black Americans. Plying white supremacist fears of racial amalgamation and political incorporation, she marshals Black likeness and association through the threat of a Native Hawaiian “race problem,” if Hawaii be absorbed into the US. A wide range of Black editors and writers subsequently seized upon the Black likeness and association that Lili’uokalani marshalled to explore the Pacific as a site of imaginative and material possibilities, finding new forms of relationality, interracial connection, and cross-racial identifications with Native Hawaiians. The next subsection explores the reception of Lili’uokalani’s Hawaii’s Story, its account of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and Native Hawaiian efforts to stave off US annexation in the Black press.

2.2 Hawaii’s Queen in Black Print Culture

In 1907, R. Henri Herbert, founding editor of the New Jersey Sentinel (1880–2), published a scathing CAM editorial condemning US empire in the Pacific. In words that echoed Lili’uokalani’s critiques of the American missionary establishment, Herbert announced: “we completed our unholy career of conquest by robbing Queen Lilioukalini [sic] of her throne and her property” after sending “Bibles and missionaries and a flood of rum and vice into the islands.”Footnote ⁷³ Now, the US complains about “the Hawaiian problem and the Philippine problem,” Herbert denounced.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the pages of the rival Voice, well-known Black newspaperman, John E. Bruce likewise disparaged the “great American Boa Constrictor” for devouring the Pacific archipelago, lamenting: “There is neither King nor Queen in Hawaii now, it is an American colony.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The complexities of US race relations at the Nadir helped shape these anti-imperial perspectives. The Black press voiced consistent support for Lili’uokalani and Native Hawaiian independence even though the mainstream print public sphere was far more divided on the issue. The Kansas-based Parsons Weekly Blade proclaimed: “Nearly every one … is either an earnest wisher for the prompt success of the effort to restore Queen Liliuokalani, or is vainly hopeful that something may intervene to balk” US annexation.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such Black advocacy for Native Hawaiian sovereignty stood in stark contrast to the racializing commentary found in the Southern Workman and in leading anti-annexation publications such as the New York Herald and New York Times.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even after US annexation, support for Lili’uokalani and Hawaiian independence continued in Black print.

Of all the Black newspapers from the era, the long-running Washington Bee was uniquely positioned to cover Lili’uokalani’s 1897 visit to the capitol. The Bee’s local society column reported on Lili’uokalani’s extended residence with the writer (likely Cyrus F. Adams), admonishing: “If there is any humanity in the American Congress, this injured and outraged woman will be restored.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, the Bee’s support for Lili’uokalani dated as far back as 1894 when editor Chase declared: “The native Hawaiians are a colored race, pure and simple, and when the Queen was overthrown by a set of reprobate missionaries it was to destroy a colored government.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Claiming racial affinity with Hawaiians, he continued: “It is the characteristic of some white people when they see negroes in control to deprive them of all they have.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The Bee consistently portrayed Lili’uokalani as unlawfully “deposed by the treachery of a former American representative” and urged the US to reinstate her to the throne.Footnote ⁸¹

The Bee also became a platform for Lili’uokalani’s most ardent supporters. It published the correspondences of controversial Italian American Celso Caesar Moreno, a naturalized Hawaiian citizen who served briefly as the Hawaiian Minister of Foreign Affairs under Kalakaua.Footnote ⁸² A Washington, DC resident at the time, Moreno authored a pamphlet defending the Hawaiian monarchy entitled The Hawaiian Question, or, The Position of Men and Affairs in Hawaii, which he submitted to Congress in 1894.Footnote ⁸³ A friend and champion, Chase granted Moreno unusual access to the Bee (Moreno also published in other local newspapers, including the Colored American, Washington Post, and the Evening News).Footnote ⁸⁴ Styled as the “American agent of the National party in Hawaii,” Moreno was a largely self-appointed critic of the “tyranny of the missionary oligarchy” on the islands.Footnote ⁸⁵ One of his many Bee editorials reads: “The Government of Hawaii under the absolute control of the unscrupulous missionaries is the sum of all iniquities, it is in fact a moral, economical and political pestilence.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Moreno’s outspoken condemnations of the missionary establishment advanced Lili’uokalani’s shared – if more tactful – critiques in Hawaii’s Story. Such editorials defending Native Hawaiian independence were all the more significant given Lili’uokalani’s description of an American press that “seemed to favor the extinction of Hawaiian sovereignty” (370). The Bee even reported on Moreno’s meeting with Lili’uokalani during her Washington, DC sojourn.

Through its exclusive access to Moreno’s open letters and exchanges, the Bee helped publicize the political ideas of a range controversial mixed-race Native Hawaiian “patriots,” including F. J. Testa and John E. Bush, publishers and editors of Hawaiian-language newspapers and Robert Wilcox, who had staged the unsuccessful 1895 countercoup. In fact, Testa’s Independent later covered T. Thomas Fortune’s investigative visit to Hawaii discussed in Section 2. Moreno insisted that his correspondences with these men be shared “for the benefit of the numerous readers of the BEE and of the Hawaiian patriots.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Bush was the first president of the Hui Kalai’aina, a Native Hawaiian political organization opposed to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and US annexation, which Lili’uokalani described as “the voice of the people” (231). Native Hawaiian societies such as the Hui Kalai’aina and Hui Aloha Aina served as a power base for Lili’uokalani, and their sister organizations showcase the central role of Hawaiian women in anti-colonial resistance.Footnote ⁸⁸ Lili’uokalani notes that these organizations, including “the Women’s Patriotic League, are societies much dreaded by the oligarchy now ruling Hawaii” (303). Consistent with Lili’uokalani’s later account, Bush’s letter to Moreno condemns these “so-called christians who … [seek] … to pilfer the Islands from its original owners and disenfranchise them” and denounces the deeply partisan and falsified information circulated by their “Annexation Club newspaper.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Another letter reprinted in the Bee quotes Bush as stating: “If the United States senators believe in the voice of the native Hawaiians, you will not have annexation, but restoration of the monarchy.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Mainland US publications, especially those with ties to Christian organizations or the ABCFM, often maligned Native Hawaiian nationalists like Bush, if they mentioned them at all. For example, Armstrong’s Southern Workman condemned Bush as “the editor of an inflammatory daily newspaper of a low type.”Footnote ⁹¹ The Bee’s publication of Bush’s outspoken letters provided a much-needed Native Hawaiian perspective on the events unfolding in Hawaii.

The Bee’s publication of Moreno’s exchanges with the even more controversial Wilcox (whom the mainstream US press regularly styled as a notorious “half-breed”) are especially noteworthy.Footnote ⁹² They also chart the newspaper’s long-standing commitment to Native Hawaiian independence and rights that continued after Hawaii’s reorganization as a US territory. A “staunch supporter of Queen Lili’uokalani,” Wilcox praised the Bee as a “friend of Hawaii” for its publication of Moreno’s correspondences and its support of Native Hawaiian independence.Footnote ⁹³ “Your letters in the WASHINGTON BEE,” reads one letter that Wilcox addressed to Moreno, “are admired by everybody in Hawaii (except by the rascally missionaries) as being the best and true ever written on the Hawaiian affairs and politics.”Footnote ⁹⁴ It remains unknown as to how the Bee circulated to Hawaii, although Moreno may have mailed clippings and issues to his contacts on the islands. By 1909, the archipelago had a vibrant newspaper scene with about 100 publications in print in several languages.Footnote ⁹⁵ Moreno’s letters also helped establish a friendship between Wilcox and Chase. The Bee continued to follow Wilcox’s political career after Hawaiian annexation, publishing three highly admiring biographies in 1900 (February, November, and December) after Wilcox became the first Asian Pacific American elected to Congress. The 1900 Organic Act that granted Hawaii territorial status also permitted the new territorial government one nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives (unlike the Resident Commissioners from the other newly acquired territories of the Philippines and Puerto Rico). The Bee editor later reports dining with Wilcox after his arrival to Washington, DC as “the first delegate under the new constitution,” and Wilcox extended to Chase an invitation “to accompany him to Honolulu.”Footnote ⁹⁶

In joining Black Republican George Henry White (reelected in 1898 as a North Carolina Representative), Wilcox became the last non-white politician elected to serve in Congress for the next three decades. Not surprisingly, Wilcox’s presence in Congress “attracted considerable attention” despite his relatively disempowered role as a nonvoting territorial delegate.Footnote ⁹⁷ Described as a “tall, dark man,” Wilcox had also campaigned, rather controversially, on “an anti-white canvass, with promises on the part of some of his campaign workers that if he were elected Queen Liliuokalani would be replaced on the throne,” according to the Bee.Footnote ⁹⁸ Backed by the majority of Native Hawaiian voters, Wilcox’s stunning victory over the Democratic and Republican candidates shocked mainland observers, and it served as a repudiation of US annexation. A Bee editorial surmised that “[i]t is likely … that congress will be asked to establish some limitation upon the voting privilege” since the “independent native party carried the house of representatives by a large majority.”Footnote ⁹⁹ After Hawaii became a US territory, Bee coverage focused its attention on the Native Hawaiian franchise as white politicians again sought to limit it under the new territorial government through poll taxes and property requirements. In fact, the Bee celebrated Wilcox’s early success in “having the House Committee on Hawaiian affairs … make the poll tax one dollar instead of five.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Such efforts to restrict the Native Hawaiian franchise likely reminded Bee readers of similar white supremacist backlash and attacks on Black political rights in the post-Reconstruction South. “Many whites want a property qualification for voters,” the Bee reports with understated sarcasm, “[i]t is argued that in voting upon a simple color line many of the natives have shown themselves unfit for suffrage.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Other Black newspapers showed support by denouncing the racialization of Lili’uokalani and Native Hawaiians in the mainstream US press as yet another form of anti-Black racism. The Virginia-based Republican People’s Advocate expressed unusual praise for President Cleveland, a Democrat, for “his policy toward Hawaii” and his efforts to reinstate Lili’uokalani after “[a] few white Americans and foreigners last year displaced the black queen from her throne and set up a republic officered by persons who were not natives of the country.”Footnote ¹⁰² Like the Bee, this editorial also claimed Lili’uokalani as a “black queen.” Other Black publications carried detailed accounts of the “deposed island queen” and critiqued Lili’uokalani’s poor treatment on US soil “because of her color.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Challenging essentializing paradigms of race and racialization, the Cleveland Gazette continues, “[b]ut Liliuokalani in this country and Liliuokalani in Hawaii are entirely, different personages,” concluding that “[h]ere she is a woman – a colored woman; there she is a queen in name if not in deed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

As Hawaii’s Queen, Lili’uokalani was the first non-white female head of state recognized by world leaders, and the sovereign power embodied by the Hawaiian monarchs resonated powerfully for some. Bruce recalls, seeing “King Kalakaua, of Hawaii … in Washington during the administration of President Grant, seated beside ‘our’ Chief Executive, arrayed in his kingly robes, enroute to the White House.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In 1874, Kalakaua became the first sitting monarch to visit the US as he initiated negotiations for what would become the ill-fated Reciprocity Treaty. This landmark event was covered in the Black press. The Christian Recorder cited Kalakaua as an instructional example of “Hawaiian race” pride and admonished “American colored people [who would like] to see all color fade from their own cheek and from the cheeks of all the five millions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Such potent images and ideas of Native Hawaiian sovereignty offered Black writers and readers powerful counterpoints to dominant US racial logics.

Most surprisingly, Lili’uokalani’s distinctive studio portraits from her extensively illustrated memoir had an influential afterlife in Black print culture, which likewise began using photographic illustrations as political tools in the struggle over and for representation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Lili’uokalani’s strategic use of photographs represents one of the critical if largely understudied “genres of resistance” that Silva ascribes to the book.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Her visual counter-archive includes photographs of the Hawaiian royalty, governmental buildings, and charitable institutions, including the ornate Iolani Palace, Honolulu Opera House, and the Lunalilo Home for the Poor, which supplement her narrative’s emphases on Hawaiian modernity, progress, and self-governance (see Figures 1–3). According to Max Quanchi, “Photography was employed extensively in the late-19th and early 20th century to depict Pacific Islanders … initially as native peoples of the South Seas, then as subjects under colonial rule.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In contrast, Lili’uokalani’s photographic illustrations produce a mode of seeing otherwise that challenges racist caricatures and stereotypes of Native Hawaiians as wayward, indolent, and savage and thereby in need of colonial supervision and control.

Figure 1 Her Majesty Queen Liliuokalani.

Figure 2 His Majesty King Kalakaua.

Figure 3 Her Majesty Queen Kapiolani.

Two popular series featuring work from Hawaii’s Story appeared four years apart in the CAM and Voice. A long-standing contributor to the CAM, S. E. F. C. C. Hamedoe penned an “Interesting History and Biography” (1901–4), the first and most ambitious in a number of commissioned series addressed to expanding the CAM’s international scope. During this time, Pauline Hopkins served as the magazine’s de facto literary editor, and some evidence suggests that the unknown Hamedoe may be an as yet unattributed pen name for Hopkins who also published as “Sarah Allen” and “J. Shirley Shadrach.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Regardless of Hamedoe’s identity, Hopkins’s known literary contributions and her commitments to what she once described as “the broad field of international union and uplift for the Blacks in all quarters of the Globe” drove the political direction of the early CAM.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Voice later serialized Hopkins’s five-part ethnological series, “The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century” (1905), which drew from Hamedoe’s earlier “Interesting History.” In chronicling the once independent kingdoms “of the Colored Race” that have since fallen in the western scramble for empire, Hamedoe’s series moves from Haiti, Cuba, the Lesser Antilles, Ghana, Benin, Botswana, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Thailand to the newly acquired US territories of the Philippines, Samoa, and Hawaii. The lavishly illustrated series mapped the political contours of what Du Bois later theorized as the “color-line–the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”Footnote ¹¹² Over four years and seventeen installments, the series helped introduce Black readers to “the lives of certain of the Colored Race who are but little known in America,” and King Kalakaua and Queen Lili’uokalani numbered among Hamedoe’s non-white world leaders and luminaries.Footnote ¹¹³

The twelfth installment in the series, “Six Hawaiian Kings” (1901) helped advance the emerging Black internationalist worldview often associated with Hopkins and that found full expression in the “Dark Races” series she later penned for the Voice. “Six Hawaiian Kings” is a reference to the earlier reign of the Kamehameha dynasty, yet the account cleaves closely to Lili’uokalani’s memoir, paying particular attention to the US-backed coup that dethroned the queen as a preliminary to US annexation. Among its five illustrations, the installment included reproductions of Lili’uokalani’s striking full-length studio portrait along with portraits of the late King Kalakaua and the Dowager Queen Kapiolani drawn directly from Hawaii’s Story. As in the original memoir, these photographic portraits highlight the modernity and splendor of the recently overthrown Hawaiian Kingdom and its ruling monarchs.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Like Kalakaua before her, “Queen Liliuokalani cried out, ‘Hawaii for Hawaiians’,” reads Hamedoe’s highly sympathetic account.Footnote ¹¹⁵ By the time Lili’uokalani succeeded the throne, “America’s first step toward colonization had begun” with the US securing Pearl Harbor and “Americans … controll[ing] half of the industries of the island.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Following Lili’uokalani’s account, Hamedoe portrays the US foreign minister as a conspiratorial agent in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom: “Minister Stephens read in his first proclamation, ‘The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the U.S. to pluck it’.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In echoing the support of Native Hawaiian sovereignty and independence found in earlier Black newsprint, Hamedoe’s account likewise positions US imperial endeavor as indivisible from white supremacy and the interests of American capitalists. He recounts the subsequent efforts of the “ex-Queen Liliuokalani … [in] … Washington to plead the cause of the … throne of Hawaii … but it had not pleased Congress to” “restore the kingdom.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ “Thus,” Hamedoe continues, “the stars and stripes [were] hoisted forever in the middle of the Pacific” and with it “vanished the last hope of the restoration, and another kingdom ceased to exist.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Like Hamedoe’s series, Hopkins’s “Dark Races” grappled with the “question of color” and the expansion of anti-Black racism in a world that was at once becoming more vast, heterogeneous, and integrated through US empire. In the first installment on “Oceanica,” Hopkins begins with two of the newest acquisitions to America’s Pacific empire: Hawaii and Samoa. She writes, the “annexation of the Sandwich Islands to the United States is a matter of history and brought the inhabitants prominently before the civilized world.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Like many of her contemporaries (including Lili’uokalani), Hopkins’s thinking on race and empire was in flux at the turn of the century. However, this first installment shows Hopkins’s readiness to seize upon the unintended consequences of overseas empire (in enlarging and dispersing racialized populations) to imagine new international solidarities. Writing as J. Shirley Shadrach, Hopkins called attention to “Lawyer T. McCants Stewart, late of New York, now of Hawaii, figuring conspicuously in the politics of the islands, doing all that he can to break down the growing inclination there to disfranchise the Hawaiians after the style of the South towards the Negroes of that section.”Footnote ¹²¹ Hopkins writes “Dark Races” in a similar vein. Noting that the “inhabitants of Oceanica form a large proportion of the living dark races,” Hopkins continues, “[a] melancholy interest is felt in these people because of their misfortunes” “since white men brought them the vices of civilization.”Footnote ¹²² Like Hamedoe’s “Interesting History,” Hopkins’s series sought to move readers toward a more global understanding of racial politics, but it goes further to center the “dark races” as a complex site of knowledge production. “Dark races” is synonymous with yet also exceeds Blackness as a racial formation, and “Oceanica” wrestles with the meaning of difference in a globalizing world that remains structured in inequality. In her efforts to delineate this emerging world color line, Hopkins’s “Oceanica” featured eight photographic portraits, including most notably the three royal portraits from Hawaii’s Story also printed in Hamedoe’s “Six Hawaiian Kings.” As editor and author, Hopkins experimented with using photographic documents (and their associated visual histories) to tell different stories about race and empire. Sarah Blackwood argues that “for black writers, visual culture was not only a collection of material objects; it was also a process through which individuals came to understand the world and their place in it.”Footnote ¹²³ Far from static images, these multiply reprinted royal portraits provided critical commentary on the meaning of Blackness and helped challenge what sorts of racial knowledge are produced through sight. As Lili’uokalani’s photographic portraits migrated from Hawaii’s Story to the CAM and the Voice, they helped emphasize Black self-fashioning and community formation as a heterogeneous and open-ended process.

During Hopkins’s editorial tenure, the CAM was explicit about its use of images to advance the politics of visibility and representation for people of color in the U.S. Photography, writes Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, “emerged … out of the world slavery made,” yet it also “helped advance a readjustment of racial ideas and identities” through the work of Black practitioners, writers, and artists.Footnote ¹²⁴ The rise of inexpensive photo reproduction techniques with halftone printing in the 1880s allowed illustrated magazines like the CAM and Voice to challenge the derogatory depictions of Black life and selfhood in mainstream US visual culture. As these magazines began to print more photographic images at scale, “Interesting History” and “Dark Races” helped contribute to a wide-ranging and richly heterogenous visual archive chronicling the world color line. Black readers often drew attention to the important visual work of these early illustrated magazines. The Cleveland Gazette reports that “‘[t]he Voice of the Negro’ for July contains a mass of matter and illustrations on some very valuable subjects,” noting that “Pauline E. Hopkins concludes her series of articles on ‘The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century’.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Likewise, Edward Soga’s South African periodical, Izwi Labantu, drew attention to the international scope of these photographic illustrations, describing them as “world-wide and beautiful withal, comprising men and scenes interesting to colored people everywhere.”Footnote ¹²⁶ By depicting “Blackness” through a range of individual portraits and scenes, these magazines challenged the underlying logic of racial essentialism and its representation of Blackness as a homogenized and totalizing identity. In their embrace of photographic illustrations, the CAM and Voice offered a powerful corrective to an earlier and more impoverished archive of Black visual culture (defined either by the limited range of works produced by Black Americans or the countless visual artifacts that depicted Black life, largely in relation to slavery and its afterlife).Footnote ¹²⁷ In this fashion, the CAM and Voice used photographic technologies to challenge dominant paradigms of race and racism and create new spaces for Black expression and community formation. After the CAM ended publication in 1909, Du Bois likewise made portraiture a cornerstone of the Crisis magazine.

In their complex visual constructions of Blackness, the CAM and Voice drew directly from Hawaii’s Story, and the use of Lili’uokalani’s photographic portraits helped strengthen their visual themes and emerging internationalist politics. As she wrote Hawaii’s Story, Lili’uokalani was well aware that US racialization functioned as a visual power. Her suspicions of mainstream US newsprint and reluctance to grant journalists interviews were well founded. US print culture proliferated crude analogies between Native Hawaiians and caricatured Blackness that helped justify Lili’uokalani’s overthrow and advance denigrating misrepresentations of the Kanaka Maoli that too often became accepted truths. It likely comes as no surprise to learn that the racial indeterminacy of Native Hawaiians was often at the forefront of mainstream print debates over Lili’uokalani and the “Hawaiian question.” Pro-annexationists often viewed Native Hawaiians through an anti-Black lens, disparaging Lili’uokalani as “The Coon Queen” or the “nigger monarch.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In response, Lili’uokalani’s American champions insisted that “though of dark complexion, [she] is not black, nor is she of the negro race” or simply that she was “not a negress.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The anti-Black racialization of Lili’uokalani sought to delegitimize her royal authority, yet the racial correctives marshalled in her defense advanced other forms of epistemic violence in their efforts to taxonomize and distinguish Native Hawaiian racial difference from so-called inferior Blackness.

Popular and widely circulating racial caricatures further enhanced such textual forms of racial violence. Noted American illustrator Frederick Victor Gillam’s “Lili to Grover,” an infamous cover image for the satirical weekly Judge, caricatured Queen Lili’uokalani as a monstruous Africanized sex worker enjoying a cannibalistic repast (see Figure 4). Gillam later depicted Filipino nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo as an equally grotesque minstrelized Topsy, discussed in the next section. Such widely disseminated images marshalled long-standing forms of US anti-Blackness in the service of Pacific empire, and they remind us that racial discourse in the long nineteenth century was also deeply visual.Footnote ¹³⁰ In its original form, Lili’uokalani’s curated photographic record served to contest both the highly popular anti-Black caricatures found in publications such as Judge and the visual archives of early racial science intent on fixing people of color into various inferior categories or “types.”Footnote ¹³¹ In reprinting and disseminating Lili’uokalani’s photographic portraits, the CAM and Voice further amplified this counter-representational work. They widened the international contours of Blackness to the “dark races” of Oceania as participants in a global struggle against racial injustice.

Figure 4 Frederick Victor Gillam’s “Lili to Grover.”

Lili’uokalani proved highly effective in telling a different story of the Hawaiian Kingdom through the complex interplay of narrative, appendixes, and images, even if her victory against the 1897 annexation bill proved short lived. By situating the Hawaiian Kingdom within the broader discourses of US empire in the Pacific, Lili’uokalani unmasks the annexation of her archipelago as the “‘Right of Conquest,’ under which robbers and marauders may establish themselves in possession of whatsoever they are strong enough to ravish from their fellows” (369). Through the complex repositioning of Native Hawaiians within and against US settler logics and dominant forms of race and racialization, Lili’uokalani’s Hawaii’s Story challenged the paternalistic discourses of western benevolence and civilization at the heart of the annexation campaign. Black American print culture proved especially receptive to Lili’uokalani’s defense of Native Hawaiian sovereignty and independence against white attack and control. The CAM and Voice seized upon Lili’uokalani’s memoir and its striking use of photographic portraiture to craft a visual counter-archive of the world color line that helped advance an early transpacific internationalism. However, ambivalence and uncertainty began to crosscut and complicate such expressions of transpacific affinity and identification as war and military occupation of the Philippines brought even greater numbers of Black servicemen, educators, and emigrants into the Pacific.

3.1 Noli in the US

Noli Me Tangere is likely the most consequential Filipino novel ever published. In 1956, the Philippines passed the Rizal Law, which declared the novel, among Rizal’s works, to be included in the curricula of all public and private schools.Footnote ¹³⁵ Latin for “touch me not,” Noli Me Tangere was originally published in Spanish in Berlin in 1887 while Rizal was studying in Europe. In 1891, Rizal completed a Spanish language sequel, the far more incendiary El Filibusterismo, which was published in Ghent. After the onset of the Philippine Revolution, the Spanish colonial government executed Rizal as a subversive in 1896. Subsequently, Noli experienced a long and complex afterlife in English translation that was deeply linked to US empire. When Rizal first published Noli, most Filipinos used local vernaculars and few could read Spanish, which was the language reserved for colonial authorities and the educated elites.Footnote ¹³⁶ In 1898, US occupation marked the beginning of English as the new imperial language, which quickly supplanted Spanish in the archipelago.Footnote ¹³⁷ Meg Wesling notes that “the U.S. military government in Manila” ordered the reopening of schools, “with mandated instruction in English, as the first step in establishing the sovereignty of the United States over its new territory.”Footnote ¹³⁸ It was rare for Noli to be read in the original Spanish after the institution of Filipino public schools “established on U.S. principles,” wrote a Black officer, commenting on the servicemen recruited to work as teachers and school supervisors during military occupation.Footnote ¹³⁹

In 1900, New York’s McClure, Phillips & Company published an anonymous translation of Rizal’s Noli under the title An Eagle Flight: A Filipino Novel Adapted from “Noli Me Tangere” by Dr. José Rizal. Later that same year, New York-based St. James Press published former Philippine Commission officer Frank Ernest Gannett’s Friars and Filipinos: An Abridged Translation of Dr. José Rizal’s Tagalog Novel, “Noli Me Tangere,” which was dedicated to Cornell President Jacob Gould Schurman, Chair of the First Philippine Commission (1899). Tasked with evaluating the social conditions on the archipelago, the Schurman Commission had stressed the vital importance of English education among its recommendations for the successful establishment of civil government.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Gannett served ten months in the Philippines as Schurman’s secretary and began working on the translation upon his return to the US. In May 1900, the Friends Intelligencer reported that Gannett was completing a manuscript “based on a Tagalog story of life in the islands,” “which is expected to throw new light on the religious question in the Philippines.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Lewis, Scribner, and Company of New York later reissued Gannett’s Friars and Filipinos in 1902. Ten years later, the New York-based World Book Company issued yet another English translation, American Charles Derbyshire’s The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of the Noli Me Tangere from the Spanish of José Rizal (1912), which the Manila-based Philippine Educational Company later republished, making it the most reprinted English translation of Rizal’s novel.Footnote ¹⁴² The wide circulation of Rizal’s Noli in abridged translations in the US and beyond reveals the complex politics of translation in transpacific literary culture and the role of American English as an instrument of power in the Pacific.

McClure, Phillips & Company and St. James Press likely published competing translations of Rizal’s novel in the hopes of capitalizing on public interest in the Philippines as the war dragged on and debates over US overseas expansion became more heated. Although Gannett went on to become an influential publisher and media magnate, the anonymously authored Eagle Fight appears to be the more widely publicized and circulating of the two translations. Neither of Gannett’s editions received much promotion, whereas Eagle Flight was widely advertised and received positive reviews in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and New York Evening Post. The New York Times recommended Eagle Flight as a story “that every American should read,” for it “belongs to those unhappy islands in which our National interest is so keen.”Footnote ¹⁴³ By the time that Eagle Flight was published, books on the Philippines had already begun to saturate the US reading market. The Literary World prefaced its detailed review of Eagle Flight by saying that “[t]he public may be a little weary of books relating to the Philippines, which have been numerous since Dewey’s guns awoke the echoes in Manila Bay.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Friars and Filipinos appeared a few months after Eagle Flight, and the Chicago Tribune speculated that Gannett had changed Rizal’s title “in order to make the book sell, for now there is undoubtedly a deep interest in all that pertains to the friar and Filipino question.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The political usefulness of Noli shaped these earliest adaptations of Rizal’s novel. An advance publication notice referred to Eagle Flight as the “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Philippines.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Subsequent book reviews further amplified this literary connection. The Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman observed that the novel “has been called and with reason, the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Philippines.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This influential analogy also inspired other troubling parallelisms, including an infamous racial caricature of Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo as a minstrelized Topsy popularized in Judge (see Figure 5). As forms of rewriting, these translations sought to reshape American attitudes toward this newest addition to US empire in the Pacific. Reviews of Eagle Flight often highlighted the value of the novel’s “description of the wrongs of the Filipinos under Spanish rule” and of the “uprisings prior to the period of American occupation,” deflecting attention away from the current crisis of US colonization.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Like other reviewers, CAM contributor Hamedoe offered fulsome praise for the novel’s righteous struggle against Spanish rule. “It was by that book, full of patriotism, love of liberty, of faith in the future, of anger against tyranny, Rizal had wished to make known to the world the misery of the Philippines and the odious religion to which they were bound to bow,” reads his lavishly illustrated essay, “El Sr. Don Jose Rizal” (see Figure 6).Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Hamedoe focuses on the archipelago’s “former Masters,” and the roles of “Rizal and Aguinaldo, Generals Luna, and others” in the anti-colonial struggle “of 94–6,” before US invasion.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It too is telling that Rizal’s more radical El Filibusterismo, the sequel to Noli, was not translated into English during this period of heightened public interest in the Philippines, even though biographical accounts of Rizal often mentioned this second novel. The Southern Workman represented the martyred Rizal as “not only patriot but author … [who] … wrote two novels.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ As Benedict Anderson has argued, “widespread ‘Filipino nationalist consciousness’ in the modern sense had not yet come into existence” during Rizal’s writing and publication of Noli, yet this was no longer the case when he published the sequel.Footnote ¹⁵² In fact, Eagle Flight and Friars and Filipinos advanced a particular mythologization of Rizal as the father of Filipino nationalism that helped re-narrativize US conquest as the culmination of the Filipino liberation movement.Footnote ¹⁵³

Figure 5 Frederick Victor Gillam’s “Our New Topsy.”

Figure 6 S. E. F. C. Hamedoe’s “El Sr. Don Jose Rizal.”

Both adaptations position themselves as offering insights into the “life of the people of those islands under Spanish rule” so that Americans might be better positioned to oversee its newest colony (FF v).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Gannett’s “Preface” touts his translation as a “great value at the present time,” for it offers “the clearest exposition of the governmental problems which Spain failed to solve, and with which our own people must deal” (FF v). Such political considerations dictated the editorial decisions and abridgements of the original. Anna Melinda Testa-de Ocampo observes that Eagle Flight eliminated ten chapters, whereas Gannett’s translation goes even further by omitting sixteen of the original sixty-four chapters.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Both versions remove Rizal’s epigraph and preface while adding new biographical sketches that downplay Rizal’s championing of Philippines sovereignty and independence. Rizal, according to Gannett, “was no extremist, no believer in harsh and bloody methods, no revolutionist” (FF xvi). Similarly, Eagle Flight portrays Filipino nationalists like Rizal as having “their purpose fixed, not to free themselves from Spain, not to secede from the church they loved, but to agitate ceaselessly for reforms” (EF vi).Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Framing Rizal’s novel in terms of amelioration comported well with the ideologies that underwrote US empire in the Pacific. In fact, Eagle Flight positions Rizal as prophetic on this count, representing his writings as a harbinger of the positive good of American occupation and the US as an enlightened successor to Spain. “Did his knowledge of America’s growing feeling toward Cuba lead him to foresee – as no one else seems to have done – her appearance in the Philippines,” the translator queries (EF ix). These new paratextual materials also helped facilitate the identification of a reformist Rizal with his fictional protagonist. One review of Eagle Flight proclaims: “The hero of the book tries to carry out reforms … but is forced to fly, defeated and crushed–a prophesy of Rizal’s own fate.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Rizal’s original storyline charts Filipino protagonist Crisóstomo Ibarra’s transformation from a reformer who initially viewed Spanish colonial governance and the Catholic clergy as necessary evils into a criminalized “filibustero” (subversive) who begins to embrace the legitimacy of Filipino revolution against Spain (EF 128). By shortening or omitting chapters and excising (often, satirical) commentary by Rizal’s narrator, both translations focus on the protagonist’s doomed quest for freedom from the tyranny of the Spanish Catholic friars. The Southern Workman praised the novel for the “picture it draws of the oppression of the country by the friars and the impotence of the government, their cruelty and avarice and their scorn of the natives.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This retelling of Noli helped justify US warfare as benevolent intervention or what Vicente Rafael calls “white love.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As in the original, Eagle Flight introduces Ibarra in the second chapter, describing his face as “frank and engaging, of a rich brown, and lightly furrowed” with a “trace of Spanish blood” (EF 7). He is betrothed to the beautiful and “white, too white” María Clara, the secret daughter of Ibarra’s enemy, the corrupt priest, Father Dámaso, who is also responsible for the tragic death of Ibarra’s beloved father (EF 15).

Braiding together sentimental romance, political critique, and social satire, Noli was the first novel to imagine the Philippines as a society. The story likely resonated with American readers. María Clara’s racialized beauty and failed marriage plot shared a likeness with the all-too familiar “tragic mulatta” trope. Rizal’s highly educated Ibarra also aligns himself with western values in proclaiming that in his seven-year European sojourn he had come to admire, “[a]fter Spain, my second country, the nations that are free” (EF 10). Ibarra embarks on a well-meaning, yet doomed fool’s errand to establish a “model school, like those of Germany” in his rural hometown of San Diego (EF 96). As Ibarra publicly proclaims: “We are founding a school, and the school is the basis of society, the book wherein is written the future of each race” (EF 111). A conspiracy that pins a violent peasant uprising on Ibarra brings about his social, political, and financial ruin, also ending the school and all hope for future progress and enlightenment.

Partway through the story, Eagle Flight introduces readers to a subaltern figure in the character of Elias, “the voice of the persecuted,” who serves as a foil for the elite, European-educated Ibarra (EF 186, 183). “I am an Indian,” proclaims Elias, “and my words would always be suspected” (EF 186). Gannett’s edition removes Elias’s self-identification as an “Indio” and represents him exclaiming simply, “I am the spokesman of many unfortunate people” (FF 192). Elias and Ibarra come to represent two very different perspectives on the future of the Philippines. Ibarra initially embraces conciliation, siding with the Spanish colonial government, proclaiming, “I shall never be the one to lead the people when they try to obtain by force what the Government does not think it time to give them. If I should see the people armed, I should range myself on the side of the Government. I do not recognize my country in a mob” (EF 190). In contrast, Elias represents the anti-colonial revolutionary path. “Without struggle, no liberty; without liberty, no light,” he admonishes Ibarra, warning him that “[y]ou do not see the conflict coming, the clouds on the horizon: the struggle begun in the sphere of the mind is going to descend to the arena of blood. … History shall not be theirs!’” (EF 190–191). Ibarra soon learns that his faith in the Spanish colonial government is mislaid. In the penultimate chapters included in Eagle Flight, Ibarra, now a criminalized fugitive, is finally persuaded to embrace Elias’s radical path of armed resistance and colonial overthrow: “I see the cancer that is eating into our society; perhaps after all, it must be torn out by violence” (EF 243).

Notably, the two earliest translations also preserve the troubling Sinophobia in Rizal’s original. Noli represents the “Filipino” as the creolized product of multiple colonialisms cross-cut by ethnolinguistic and religious differences. According to Anderson, Spanish dislike or contempt for “the Chinese” and “Chinese culture” had a profound effect on colonial society in the Philippines, and traces of this Sinophobia are visible in Noli and even more readily apparent in its sequel.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In reading the Spanish-language Noli, Anderson notes that Rizal often uses the word “chino” denoting unassimilated and foreign Chinese as differentiated from the affluent Philippines-born Chinese mestizos to which Rizal belonged.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Such linguistic differences are often lost in the English translations even though they maintain Rizal’s depictions of Chinese racial difference. Unbaptized Chinese are buried in a segregated “Chinese cemetery” away from the Catholic Filipinos (EF 36; FF 49). “‘Better be drowned’,” reasons a Filipino gravedigger, “than lie with the Chinese” (EF 36). To accentuate this imagery of contamination and threat, Rizal depicts the field near this Chinese cemetery as the home of a local leper. Gannett’s translation likewise reiterates Rizal’s original in describing the “opium vice” as “deeply rooted … among the Chinese” (FF 172). Such anti-Chinese sentiments are again repeated in Eagle Flight’s translations of Father Dámaso’s sermon in which he reproached the townspeople, “with living … like the Chinese, for which condemnation be upon them!” (EF 106). The anti-Chinese attitudes and practices in San Diego are so extreme that the townspeople immediately misattribute the deadly manufactured revolt against the Spanish authorities as “an uprising of the Chinese” (EF 213; FF 230). The undifferentiated Sinophobia conveyed in these translations may have resonated with American readers familiar with Yellow Peril discourse and the passage, expansion, and extension of punitive anti-Chinese restriction and exclusion acts in the US.

3.2 The Philippines Writings of Theophilus Gould Steward and Sons

Prominent race magazines like the CAM showcased the writings and photography of Black servicemen, officials, educators, emigrants, and missionaries deployed to the Philippines. As Black Americans set sail for the archipelago, readers avidly consumed their firsthand accounts as they sought to place these seemingly far-flung peoples and places in relation to the racial politics and struggles unfolding at home. Distinguished educator, author, and clergyman, Theophilus Gould Steward and his sons, Frank and Charles Steward, based a wide range of magazine writings – correspondences, short fiction, and nonfiction sketches – on their military service during the Philippine-American War. By shifting attention “away from the centers and toward the margins” of the Black Pacific, these writings helped readers see “the working of empire not only on colonial subjects but also and reciprocally on the colonizers in return,” as Gary Okihiro argues.Footnote ¹⁶² Complicated agents of US empire, the Steward family had deep connections to both mission work and the Black press, although a more comprehensive discussion lies beyond the scope of this section. However, their Philippines writings discussed in this section limn the possibilities and limits that structured Black involvement in US empire. They also participated in an emerging transpacific literary culture that both amplified and challenged the forms of race and racialization that Du Bois foresaw as the defining problem of the twentieth century.

The Stewards were not unlike other Black servicemen who struggled with the racial implications of the largely unpopular Philippine-American War (or the Filipino Insurrection as it was often styled in the US) and faced suspicion for being sympathetic to the Filipino cause.Footnote ¹⁶³ Historian Williard Gatewood, Jr. notes that the published letters of Black servicemen remarked bitterly on the exportation of anti-Black racism in the Americanization of the archipelago. In 1899, John W. Galloway of the 24th Infantry wrote: “The whites have begun to establish their diabolical race hatred in all its home rancor in Manila, even endeavoring to propagate the phobia among the Spaniards and Filipinos so as to be sure of the foundation of their supremacy.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Such US racial norms were so marked that Filipino anti-colonial leader Aguinaldo began exploiting these racial cleavages as a military tactic. He sought to rally Black American support for Philippine independence through political propaganda that referenced anti-Black lynching violence in the US and appealed to the language of “full color sympathy,” to borrow Charles Steward’s phrase.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Steward’s father later noted in his autobiographical Fifty Years in the Gospel Ministry that “[t]he presence of a so-called colored man is the acid test of American culture.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶

From November 1901 to April 1902, the CAM serialized Theophilus Steward’s detailed three-part study of the Philippines, “Two Years in Luzon,” which was based on his experiences as a US Army chaplain with the 25th Infantry. Steward likely arranged for the delivery of his manuscripts to the CAM Boston office from the Philippines, where he was stationed until 1902.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Conversant in Spanish, Steward, who held a Doctor of Divinity from Wilberforce University, may have been one of the few Americans who read Rizal’s Noli in its original language. His extensive quotations from Rizal’s novel helped strengthen his authority in translating the Philippines for readers back home. Gretchen Murphy observes that Noli continued to influence Steward’s thinking on race and racialization even after his return to the US. In an early draft of writings that he later included in his autobiography, Steward wrote:

Noli’s sympathetic portrayal of Ibarra as an educational reformer also likely resonated with Steward, given his military appointment as superintendent of schools (a position later held by a young Carter G. Woodson under the new civilian government).Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Steward recalls that this “school-work” “was so thoroughly in accord with my feelings that I entered upon it with more than ordinary zeal.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ An enthusiastic agent of US cultural assimilation and hegemony, Steward advocated the “importance of learning the English language, emphasizing the liberal intentions of the government” at the various schools under his charge.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In taking up the “work of Americanizing the schools,” Steward portrays US occupation as a modernizing force in the Philippines, and his younger son Gustavus Adolphus would continue this work as a government school teacher in Agno, Zambales.Footnote ¹⁷²

However, by framing his account through Rizal’s Noli, Steward also undermines and decenters such US nationalism. “So wrote Rizal in 1886, and so he might write today,” Steward observes, citing Noli’s panoramic description of Manila as a chaotic and creolized locality. “Animation bustles everywhere, coaches turning hither and tither to avoid collision, carromatas and caleses,” reads Steward’s translation, “European, Chinese and natives, each one with his peculiar dress.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Unlike the earlier abridged translations, Steward does not use Noli to deflect attention away from US occupation. Rather, the references to Noli allow Steward to explore the complex forms of métissage – what Édouard Glissant terms Relation – that had begun to emerge with US colonialism.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Steward is most keen to explore the impact of the newest “element coming into Filipino society, to-wit:–the American soldier, and especially the Negro soldier.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Steward reports officiating marriages between Black Americans and Filipinos, and his first installment includes a photo of one such happy transpacific union (see Figure 7). These interracial marriages add additional complexity to extant colonial racial hierarchies and subsequent US efforts through the first Philippine census (1903–5) to racially taxonomize the population.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Figure 7 An American Soldier and His Filipino Bride.

Steward’s son Frank, a former Captain of the 49th Infantry who later served as a provost judge in the Laguna province, fictionalized such sexually charged scenarios in a number of short fictions for the CAM, including “Pepe’s Anting-Anting” (1902), “Starlik” (1903), and “The Men Who Prey” (1903). His Laguna tales anticipated later Black fictions and fantasies about the archipelago, including James McGirt’s “In Love as in War” (1907), F. Grant Gilmore’s The “Problem”: A Military Novel (1915), and Cole and Johnson Brothers’s touring musical production, The Shoo-Fly Regiment (1906–8).Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Like his father, Frank Steward was familiar with Rizal’s Noli. “Starlik” hinges on the revelation that its tragic heroine, an English-educated Filipina named Enriqueta, like Rizal’s María Clara, is the illegitimate daughter of a “hated friar” (or “Esta pickanniny de frailes” in the creolized language of Flora, the narrator’s washerwoman).Footnote ¹⁷⁸ However, unlike María Clara who breaks her engagement to enter a convent, Enriqueta takes up sex work once the discovery of her mixed-race parentage turns the local Filipinos against her. The narrator of “Starlik” cites the “cause … of the gifted author of Noline Tangere [sic]” and likewise holds these friars and their role in Spanish colonization responsible for continued Filipino discontent.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ “It was the ill-starred presence of these holy orders which first kindled the Filipino revolt against the Spanish crown,” Steward relates in a lengthy digression.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The CAM publications of 25th infantryman Rienzi B. Lemus drew similar attention to Rizal, “a prominent young Filipino author and poet” whose novel “was widely read throughout Europe, occasioned considerable comment in Spain, and brought down upon its author the enmity of the people he had shown up to the world.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Such direct references to Noli often highlight Rizal’s criticisms of the friars or what Lemus styled as “the religious corporations” who “used their holy calling as a means to an end, and sacrificed everything for mercenary purposes and the furtherance of vice.”Footnote ¹⁸²

However, these writings also connect Noli’s critiques of Spanish colonialism to the current state of US occupation, offering critical commentary on America’s Pacific empire in the process. As Murphy notes, Steward’s editorializing remarks often break from the narrative past tense to directly address the reader, bringing Rizal’s novel to bear upon the present: “Now, stark and bare before us lies the real question of the Philippines.”Footnote ¹⁸³ Steward’s narrator even urges Governor General Taft to demand the “complete withdrawal of the holy orders from the unhappy isles” in his ongoing negotiations with the Vatican.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Moreover, Enriqueta’s acquisition of English (which she learned from an American war prisoner during the Philippine-American War) has only made her more effective as a sex worker for the US military. Steward’s narrator accidentally comes across Enriqueta leaning out of a brothel “engaged in a bantering conversation with a half-drunken soldier” as he travels through “the district called Sampaloc, where the many lights, the thronging vehicles, crowded sidewalks and shouting cocheros betokened the domain of the half-world.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ During US occupation, the earliest formalized red-light district in Manila was located in Sampaloc. It catered primarily to American troops stationed in the Philippines. In resisting the impulse to usurp Noli for the project of US empire, these Black writers offer telling commentary on the sexualized dimensions of imperial war and occupation. The CAM publications such as “Starlik” also helped to further circulate iterations of Rizal’s Noli throughout the Black American reading public. The Washington, DC-based Colored American newspaper recommended “Starlik” to its subscribers, praising Steward’s tale as “a gem and like the stories of Sir Walter Scott, is historical and gives a true picture of the new city’s history and the Friars in the Philippines.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶

His father Theophilus Steward continued to emphasize this critical reframing of US imperialism through Rizal after his return to the US. In 1900, Steward drafted an essay on “The Color Problem World Wide” while in the Philippines, which he included in his 1921 autobiography. “We are accustomed to think the color question an American question, and to regard the Negro race as the only race affected disadvantageously by it,” he wrote, continuing, “but a residence of nearly a year in the Orient has taught me that it is a world-wide question, and establishes the most important cleavage among men.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Steward reports that he had first become aware of the global dimensions of US anti-Blackness and white supremacy while in Honolulu awaiting his military transport to Manila. Steward lodged with Brooklyn transplant and lawyer T. McCants Stewart and learned that the “color line [was] drawn hard and fast; much as one might find it in Charleston or Savannah” in the thirty hours that he spent on the islands. It was in Honolulu that Steward “first heard other than American Negroes denouncing the assault made by white men on persons of other color.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ His subsequent experiences in the Philippines further deepened his understanding of the manifold operations of a color line that followed the course of US empire. Steward soon learned that “color” served as a basis for identification and affinity among the Filipinos whom he encountered, recalling: “I saw many times Filipinos place their hands along side the hands of colored soldiers and say ‘igual,’ equivalent to ‘All the same’.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ And, unlike Steward’s tense relations with white American servicemen, he reports experiencing with the Filipinos “the same frankness and ease that obtains among colored people of the United States.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ In studying “their literature,” Steward likewise “found the same color question which prevails in the United States, and the same earnest, manly protest against it,” acknowledging that Rizal “recognized and fought the color prejudice” in his novel.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Such readings emerge from Steward’s complex and ambivalent positioning in the Philippines. He recontextualizes Rizal’s critiques against Spanish colonialism as critical commentary on the current state of US rule. “If the Filippinos [sic] had this complaint to make in 1893 what are they likely to have in 1903?” he queries, noting that, “[c]olor prejudice is unquestionably stronger among Americans than among Spaniards.”Footnote ¹⁹²

Steward’s earlier writings for the CAM reveal the speed by which US racial ideologies had begun to transform the archipelago after invasion. On a visit to a boys’ school in Botolen township, Steward reports being regaled by eight-year-old students “who could sing American.”Footnote ¹⁹³ “[T]he leader, putting out his foot, began to clap his hands and sing: ‘Hello’ Ma Honey’ Hello ma Baby’/Hello my Rag Time Gal,’ while the other little shirttailsters struck up a minstrel dance to ‘beat the band’,” recalls Steward with chagrin.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Unaware of the offense given, the teacher and students assumed that the performance was representative of the “idea of American music and song!”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ One of the most popular “coon songs” from the era, this hit by the songwriting team of Joseph Howard and Ida Emerson (recorded by Arthur Collins in 1899) was a staple of American blackface minstrelsy and racial caricature. This minstrel hit was not what Steward expected to hear. He admits that “[t]he surprise was complete,” especially since “teaching about the United States” had been limited to “about … one hundred words” under Spanish rule.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Such shock also registers Steward’s disjunctive realization that white supremacist racial norms both enable and undercut his colonial authority in this peripheralized place. And, this was not an isolated experience. Steward later recalls seeing in Manila “a well-educated Spanish lady march and sing ‘A Hot Time, etc.,’ believing it to be our national air.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Steward’s encounter with Filipino minstrelsy shows the far-reaching influence of American racial vernaculars and their transpacific circulation. Such powerful scenes of cultural mistranslation force Steward to view his “America” as through a distorted lens, revealing the multiple and competing forms of race and racialization at work in the Black Pacific.

However, Steward offsets such uncanny transpacific interracial encounters with other scenes that showcase the powerful draw of racial affinity and rapport in the archipelago. In another illustrated local color piece entitled “Holy Week in Manila,” Steward shares his experience of a mass-based ritual fusing Catholicism with local secular beliefs and practices that might have come from the pages of Rizal’s Noli. Still practiced today, the annual feast of the Black Nazarene commemorates the transfer of the image from its original home inside a church located in what is now known as Rizal Park (or Luneta Park) to Quiapo Church in Manila. Steward recalls that “nothing equaled in glory the black Savior,” which was the “great feature of the procession.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Known for its healing powers, the sixteenth-century statue of the Black Nazarene depicts a life-sized image of a darkened, kneeling Jesus carrying the cross on his way to crucifixion. The “wonderful black image of Jesus Carrying His Cross” “borne aloft on a float carried by perhaps one hundred men” captures Steward’s imagination, despite its historical ties to the Catholic Church and the friars as hallmarks of the Spanish colonialism that other US publications generally denounced.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Steward witnesses the “image of the black Savior” venerated as the emblem of religious authority and adoration, and the powerful racial significance of the procession was not lost on him.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Caught up in the ritual, Steward momentarily falls under the identificatory sway of “full color sympathy” even as he recognizes that the Blackness on display is a distinctly Pacific racial formation. In the concluding installment to his Philippines series, Steward also takes pains to differentiate the archipelago’s non-Christian Indigenous minorities, the much-maligned “Igorrotes and Negritos” from the “Filipino people.”Footnote ²⁰¹ By distinguishing the “Negritos or the Blacks” from Catholic Filipinos who worship the “black Savior,” Steward acknowledges the complex heterogeneity of Pacific forms of blackness in ways that challenge US race, racialization, and the Black–white color line.Footnote ²⁰²

3.3 T. Thomas Fortune and Black Emigration

Efforts to promote Black emigration to the recently annexed Philippines further amplified the push and pull of such forms of racial affiliation and disaffiliation in the evolving context of US empire in the Pacific. Black emigration or colonization proposals have a long and controversial history. White-sponsored colonization schemes such as the American Colonization Society’s Liberia project differed significantly from Black-sponsored proposals, including most famously the “Back to Africa” efforts of bishop Henry McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey. As the US expanded into the Pacific, new proposals emerged calling for the migration of Black Americans to the newly annexed territories as either plantation laborers in Hawaii or as civilizing agents of uplift and assimilation in the Philippines. The controversial and well-known New York Age editor T. Thomas Fortune, a longtime associate of Booker T. Washington, stood at the center of the ensuing debates over Black emigration to the Philippines. An ex-slave and Florida native who migrated to New York in 1881, Fortune remained deeply concerned over the plight of Black Americans in the US South, where the rise of white supremacy, Jim Crow, and anti-Black violence steadily eroded the gains of Reconstruction.Footnote ²⁰³ Unilaterally opposed to white-run colonization schemes, as voiced in his economic treatise Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (1884), Fortune also remained skeptical of Black calls for mass migration to Africa (although he later became the editor of Garvey’s Negro World weekly).Footnote ²⁰⁴ By June 1900, a frustrated Fortune no longer thought that the rehabilitation of the South was possible and began to publicly endorse Black emigration, seeing new possibilities in US overseas expansion. “I propose to start a crusade,” Fortune announced in the New York Times, “to have negroes of the South leave that section and to come north or go elsewhere.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ The elsewhere that Fortune had in mind was the recently annexed Philippines.

Fortune’s views on Black emigration and US imperialism were unsettled and complex, particularly considering his intimate ties to Washington. Scholars including Angela Zimmerman and Ira Dworkin have explored Washington and the Tuskegee Institute’s various colonial collaborations in Africa, including efforts to help develop the German cotton industry in Togo.Footnote ²⁰⁶ As Brian Shott argues, Fortune and Washington attempted to “position themselves as brokers for African American labor and coordinators of Tuskegee-style native uplift in the territories” even as they hoped that “American empire might destabilize a white racial order and present new opportunities for black advancement at home and abroad.”Footnote ²⁰⁷ The Philippines under US sovereignty and control and becoming, in the words of the Insular Cases, “foreign in a domestic sense” probably appealed to Fortune and others in a way that Liberia, Haiti, and other lands did not. Charles Steward had likewise embraced the idea of selective Black emigration to the Philippines. Fortune likely read Steward’s earlier CAM writings, which touted the social, economic, and political opportunities for “Colored Americans” in the “New Philippines” with Steward noting that “many discharged American soldiers have preferred to cast their lots in with the Filipinos rather than return to the United States.”Footnote ²⁰⁸

Fortune’s emigration proposal met with mixed reception in the Black press, especially as white-sponsored schemes to rid the US of its Black population had begun to gain momentum once again. A former Confederate general, six-term Alabama Senator John T. Morgan justified US involvement in the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and insisted that the deportation of Black Americans beyond the US – whether to Hawaii or the Congo in earlier schemes – offered the only viable answer to the “Negro problem.”Footnote ²⁰⁹ Morgan later refocused his sights on the newly acquired Philippines, representing it as a “vastly superior country for the negro,” for the “land is richer, the climate better suited to them, and they would still be under the American flag.”Footnote ²¹⁰ Morgan’s Philippines solution made headline news, and the scheme gained the interest of Secretary of War Elihu Root and William Howard Taft, the first civilian governor-general of the Philippines. President Theodore Roosevelt’s subsequent decision to send Fortune as a temporary Special Immigrant Agent of the Treasury Department to study race, labor, and economic conditions in Hawaii and the Philippines dismayed some Black political commentators who viewed it as legitimizing Morgan’s deportation scheme. Trotter’s Guardian publicly denounced Fortune’s investigation as “political chicanery.”Footnote ²¹¹ He accused Fortune of being a dupe of Morgan whose Philippines scheme was “a vivid reminder of slavery days and the discredited colonization society.”Footnote ²¹² Other newspapers likewise linked the outspoken race man with the segregationist senator, even though there was no evidence of any coordination.Footnote ²¹³

Roosevelt tasked Fortune with supplementing and enlarging upon the earlier investigations of another Washington associate, John C. Leftwich, who had been sent to Hawaii and the Philippines in 1901. Unable to gain an exemption from Chinese exclusion and secure so-called cheap “coolie” labor, Hawaiian planters once again debated the controversial issue of recruiting white field managers and Black laborers from the US South when Leftwich arrived under auspices of the US Department of the Interior’s Land Management Office.Footnote ²¹⁴ Nearly two years later in January 1903, T. McCants Stewart welcomed Fortune – as he had Steward – to the Hawaiian Islands and a plantation economy that was still struggling with severe labor shortages. Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s siblings and other members of the white missionary establishment also extended Fortune a cordial reception.Footnote ²¹⁵ Fortune inspected plantations on several of the islands, and then departed for Manila by way of Japan.Footnote ²¹⁶ On this outbound journey, Fortune took the opportunity to visit Yokohama and Hong Kong, and he again stopped in Japan on his return to the US.Footnote ²¹⁷ Fortune wrote favorably about the missionary establishment in the Hawaiian Islands, although he spent the majority of his six-month appointment, from February to May 1903, in the Philippines.Footnote ²¹⁸ Unlike his Hawaiian welcome, Fortune’s reception by American settlers in the Philippines was a study in contrasts as he later recounted in the Independent: “wherever I went, among Americans … I was confronted with coldness of manner, hauteur and curtness of speech and nervous impatience.”Footnote ²¹⁹ Despite efforts to learn Spanish, Fortune was also unable to communicate easily with Filipinos. According to Shott, Fortune attempted to poll Filipinos on their opinion of Black emigration by publishing a questionnaire in the Spanish-language Filipino newspaper La Democracia.Footnote ²²⁰ Fortune eventually engaged the services of a fellow Black American, Captain Robert Gordon Woods, as guide and translator. According to Fortune, Woods was “late of the Forty-ninth United States Volunteers, who after being discharged from the army, at San Francisco, went back to Manila with the determination to ‘grow up with the country’” (“Filipino I” 96).Footnote ²²¹ An ideal Black emigrant, Woods came to embrace the Philippines as his adopted home, living there for the remainder of his life. In 1945, the Chicago Afro-American profiled Woods, who had survived imprisonment during the Japanese occupation of the archipelago.Footnote ²²²

It remains unknown if Fortune ever submitted a report to the US government given unresolved disputes over his compensation, but an account of his investigative travels appeared in the recently established Voice. Fortune chose to publish in the Voice rather than in his own New York Age or the rival CAM, which he helped edit after Washington’s acquisition.Footnote ²²³ His three-part series “The Filipino: A Social Study in Three Parts” ran in the March, May, and June 1904 issues. The series reads like a conventional travel narrative, yet it also resists the distanced ethnographic – and indeed, colonizing – stance that characterized the genre. From the outset, Fortune distinguishes himself from “the white man” and other “Americans in the Orient,” yet he also frames his journey as a fantasy of escape to the mysterious East (“Filipino I” 94). Marshaling an early iteration of the “ugly American” trope, Fortune recoils from the “rudeness and vulgarity” that he encounters abroad, observing that “few people on their travels are more rude and vulgar than the average white American, who seems to be thanking God all the time that he is not as other men” (“Filipino II” 200).Footnote ²²⁴ He takes particular umbrage at their stereotypical views on “the laziness of the Filipino” and the “distaste of the common Filipino to work,” in light of similar racist critiques of Black laborers in the US (“Filipino I” 94). It also did not take long for Fortune to witness such forms of American disdain levied against the “some four hundred Afro-Americans in the Philippines, many of them in the civil service, many in private service, and many in independent business of their own” (“Filipino I” 97). Fortune saw no contradiction in his twofold role as an agent of US empire building and advocate for Black Americans and colonized Filipinos.

Fortune’s Voice series embraced the idea that Black participation in US empire would facilitate the end of the Black–white color line either through the exportation of Tuskegee’s program of enterprising self-help or through the forging of transpacific alliances that would destabilize Jim Crow back home. Fortune gave full expression to this animating contradiction, or what Vince Schleitwiler has usefully termed, “imperialism’s racial justice.”Footnote ²²⁵ Fortune saw the drawing of the color line in the Philippines as an opportunity to advance both interracial affinity and the interests of Black Americans and colonized Filipinos, writing,

The Filipino may loathe the white colonizer, but he may yet come to love the Black American, given their shared experience of racialization and white supremacy under US rule. In observing the many former Black servicemen like Captain Woods now settled in the Philippines, Fortune notes that “the white Americans do not want them there, because the natives get along all right with them” (“Filipino I” 96). And, this Filipino racial rapport with Black Americans, reasons Fortune, might be utilized to further “develop the resources of the country” and “hold up … the civil and military establishments” as long as “the American Flag remains in the Philippines” (“Filipino I” 97). Published correspondences from Black educators numbering among the “Thomasites” (named after the ship Thomas that transported the first group of American educators) recruited to help establish a US-style educational system in the Philippines corroborated Fortune’s argument. In particular, the successes of Black teachers, such as Yale graduate Frederick D. Bonner whom Trotter’s Guardian profiled in 1902, was often attributed to the effects of a shared “complexion” for “the Filipinos are all dark” and are “distant to white men.”Footnote ²²⁶ By styling Black Americans as the racial allies and champions of the Filipinos, Fortune sought to carve out a leading role for Black Americans in the volatile and shifting order of US empire, offering additional justifications for Black emigration to the Philippines. In this manner, Fortune employed and critiqued the civilizational discourses of race that underwrote the twinned projects of US empire and national assimilation.Footnote ²²⁷

To address detractors, Fortune’s second installment begins with an incident of Black and Asian interracial discord – rather than of affinity and correspondence – from the recent St. Louis World’s Fair that was covered in some detail in the Black press. T. Higaki, a Japanese official, had publicly rebuffed the social invitations of the St. Louis Black elite who had sought to make the political point that “Malays and Mongolians draw no color line at Ethiopians,” according to Trotter’s Guardian.Footnote ²²⁸ The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s original reporting distorted this effort at Black internationalism and cultural diplomacy as “Negresses Want Filipino Beaux.” “Dark-skinned daughters of St. Louis,” reads the Post-Dispatch’s derisive account, “demand the privilege of inviting to their homes and to the balls and parties given by the educated colored residents of St. Louis the Filipinos, the Japanese, and the Chinese … who may happen to be the city’s guests.”Footnote ²²⁹ The newspaper’s dismissive and salacious tone likely prompted Higaki’s open letter.Footnote ²³⁰ Unflattering versions of the incident recirculated in other mainstream US newspapers, as the American fascination with Japan grew after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the subject of Section 3. In Fortune’s gloss of the incident, Higaki declared:, “High class Japanese and Chinese desire to associate exclusively with white people,” demanding that “the colored people” “let us alone” (“Filipino II” 199). Fortune attributes the Japanese official’s remarks to the operations of racialization in a white supremacist society, which creates the conditions for “the darker races to war among themselves and to desire to curry favor with those who, for the time being, are dominant in a given environment” (“Filipino II” 199). Such forms of interracial antagonism and competition help maintain the dominant white social order by discouraging transpacific interracial identification and coordination:

As Fortune explains, the normalization of anti-Blackness and segregation along the color line incentivizes other racialized non-white populations to repudiate and disidentify with Blackness in the US, and increasingly along the globalized routes of US commerce, trade, and empire. However, Fortune draws upon his recent travels to offer a counterexample, noting: “I found no such sentiment in Japan and China” (“Filipino II” 200). His more in-depth experiences in the Philippines yielded the same conclusion: “the Filipino … is not afflicted with this prejudice against the black man, as far as I could judge by close study of conditions in Manila and the provinces of northern and southern Luzon” (“Filipino II” 200).

According to Fortune’s argument, such transpacific interracial accord and affinity positions Black Americans as the ideal colonizing agents in the Philippines. Moreover, the exportation of US racial ideologies under military occupation had prepared Filipinos to receive Black Americans as potential allies and advocates. In his various encounters, Fortune was impressed with the idea that the Filipinos did not understand the “elements of American race prejudice against the black people,” yet “they all argued, and correctly, that the same prejudice would be extended to them” (“Filipino II” 201). For Fortune, this knowledge of a shared racial destiny along the color line might very well provide a solution to their linked, albeit different so-called problems:

Fortune reasons that US-based white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia fuel these ongoing struggles over race, nation, and empire. Such white racial animosity and fear continue to hinder US efforts to fully pacify the archipelago. “The Americans have no inclination or intention of absorbing the Filipino, and the Filipino will always resent as aliens and conquerors a people so minded,” he writes, claiming that the American settlers already established in the Philippines were largely “[s]outhern white men, who remained in the islands after the volunteer regiments were disbanded.”Footnote ²³² Black Americans, free from the damaging fantasy of white racial superiority, are thus uniquely positioned to facilitate the assimilation and Americanization of the Filipino. Not surprisingly, white American settlers actively pushed back against Fortune’s investigation, fearing the threat of mass Black emigration to the archipelago.Footnote ²³³

Fortune likely also read the earlier CAM writings of Theophilus and Frank Steward as his series reinforced the idea of Black and Filipino racial sympathy and affinity through intermarriage. In visiting Manila and the various provinces of Luzon, Fortune observed that “there seemed to be a thorough understanding between the black and brown man, in so far that they married and gave in marriage and enjoyed a social intimacy which was far from being true between the whites and the Filipinos” (“Filipino II” 200). He characterizes these interracial marriages as forms of reciprocal exchange within a shared patriarchal order, and they stand in stark contrast to the forms of colonial concubinage practiced by white Americans, who draw “the social line as rigidly against the Filipino as … the American Negro” (“Filipino II” 201).Footnote ²³⁴ White Americans who enter into sexual liaisons with Filipino women later return to the US “without regard to their Filipino obligations to women and children” (“Filipino II” 200). Fortune’s example of “a white man from Texas who had for a wife an Egorrote woman” rehearses key elements from Frank Steward’s “The Men Who Prey” (“Filipino III” 244). Steward’s title likely played upon the homophone pairing of prey/pray in a subtle reference to the subplot of sexual exploitation by Catholic friars featured in Rizal’s Noli and repeated in “Starlik.” “Men Who Prey” illustrates the callous disregard of a US officer Duncan Lane, the sandy-haired scion of a time-honored Texan family, who misleads and abandons his pregnant Filipina concubine Jacinta once his tour of duty in the Philippines ends.Footnote ²³⁵ Steward’s decision to construct a narrative that refuses to delve into Lane’s interiority emphasizes the normalization of such forms of sexual exploitation. Readers are not made privy to Lane’s self-justifications or excuses, and Steward heightens the dramatic tension and social critique by including two heartfelt letters from Lane’s adoring wife Fanny, the mother of his two white (and hence legitimate) children. Fortune expands on Steward’s critique by juxtaposing the actions of such white Americans who “have no abiding affection and makes no sort of provisions for his children resulting from common law relations with Negroes, Indians or Malays” against the many Black Americans he met who sought to formalize these same obligations and ties through marriage (“Filipino II” 200).

As Fortune moves farther away from Manila and the US controlled regions of the archipelago, doubts begin to creep into his series, marking the limits of Black American and Filipino racial affinity. Fortune’s six-week expedition “across the Island of Luzon” in the company of Captain Woods and “five Filipino servants” was an ambitious and arduous undertaking. As Fortune writes, “no one among the Americans” had previously attempted such a crossing (“Filipino III” 241). His final installment is the lengthiest of the three essays and marks a significant shift in tone. It resorts to representations of Filipino primitivism and the ethnocentric conventions of the travel narrative genre that Fortune had otherwise resisted at the outset of the series. The quintessential ugly American abroad, Fortune finds himself beleaguered by unobliging “dead stupid” local officials and avaricious peddlers who thought “Americans are gold mines” (“Filipino III” 242). Worse yet, Fortune comes across, “a large number of Negroes who had been engaged on Government works but were out of employment, and fearful of the future” (“Filipino III” 242). Surprisingly, Fortune offers little commentary on the plight of these Black American emigrants and abruptly shifts the discussion to Filipino agriculture. As they pass farther into unpacified lands, Fortune notes with dismay that “a body of insurrectors had raided” the town of Rosales a few nights before their arrival (“Filipino III” 243). In these regions, the American presence elicits anger and resentment from local Filipinos who view Fortune and Captain Woods as representatives of an invading force rather than as allies likewise subjected to US racial rule. In remote Carranglan nestled in the Caraballe mountains, Fortune and Woods come across “people … without spirit or intelligence” who were “sullen, unobliging, and menacing in disposition” (“Filipino III” 243). Fortune’s dismissive tone expresses uncertainty and ambivalence that had been otherwise absent or suppressed. His final installment – the least argumentative of the series – offers little in the way of shared racial sympathy, as Fortune relegates these hostile Filipinos to those unwilling to “make the best of their American subjugation and rule” (“Filipino III” 244).

The photo illustrations included in the series also highlight the paradoxes of transpacific interracial identification and Fortune’s ambivalent positioning within the project of US empire. Unlike Hopkins’s use of Hawaiian royal portraits discussed in Section 1, Fortune’s illustrations tend to visually stage the contrast between Filipino primitivism and Black American manhood, as Schleitwiler argues.Footnote ²³⁶ Offsetting Fortune’s discourse of racial affinity and rapport, these images often reinforce both degrading stereotypes of Filipino backwardness and the racialized difference between Black and Filipino. Both Shott and Schleitwiler have drawn useful attention to the striking full-length portrait of Fortune taken shortly after his arrival to the Philippines as particularly illustrative of this visual strategy (see Figure 8). Included in the first installment, the portrait shows the bespectacled and otherwise bookish Fortune arrayed in the trappings of US empire. Unlike the other illustrations included in the series, which carry rather generic ethnographic captions, such as “The Filipino and His Rooster,” “A Typical Filipino Cart,” and “A Filipino Native Home” (possibly reproduced from preprinted photos or stock images), Fortune’s portrait provides us with additional information: “Photo taken in Northern Luzon by a Filipino in March, 1903” (“Filipino I” 97). This detail emphasizes the Filipino photographer as the unseen agent of visual authority in how Black Americans like Fortune were perceived in the Philippines. This same Filipino photographer likely took the group portrait of Fortune, Captain Woods, and Captain Wormsley featured in the third installment (see Figure 9). In its subtle reversal of the ethnocentric American gaze, the photo credit draws critical attention to the construction of Black American masculinity in the context of empire, revealing the complex relations of power and race that structure Fortune’s yearning for interracial affinity and transpacific alliance.

Figure 8 Photograph of T. Thomas Fortune.

Figure 9 Photograph of Captain Woods, Mr. Fortune, Captain Wormsley.

For a time after his return to the US, Fortune remained a vocal proponent of Black emigration to the Philippines rather than to Hawaii, which he often represented in speeches as “fit only for rich men to dream in …, dominated by the millionaire sons and daughters of two or three generations back,” according to an unflattering account published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser.Footnote ²³⁷ As the “opposite of Hawaii,” the Philippines might prove the more suitable refuge and asylum for enterprising and industrious Black American emigrants.Footnote ²³⁸ He remained convinced that “African Americans could help Filipino society develop; and that Tuskegee, or Fortune himself, might help furnish the right black population” to emigrate to the archipelago, according to Shott.Footnote ²³⁹ In lectures and interviews, Fortune continued to promote the Philippines as “the ideal place for the negro,” and looked forward to “the time when the Afro-American may go to the Philippines and live there as he should and would.”Footnote ²⁴⁰ He went so far as to suggest that Roosevelt appoint a Black American as the next civilian governor of the archipelago to promote Black migration and Filipino assimilation.Footnote ²⁴¹ Fortune himself had become so thoroughly associated with the project of Black emigration to the Philippines that the Indianapolis Freeman, the first Black illustrated newspaper in the US, proclaimed that it would like to see “T. Thomas Fortune governor of the Philippines.”Footnote ²⁴²

US imperialism in the Pacific transformed the politics of race and nation, raising questions and complexities that also influenced the tenor and direction of Black American politics and culture at home. Three months after the serialization of Fortune’s “Filipino” series, the Voice published Henry Pace’s detailed rebuttal. Pace had studied with Du Bois at Atlanta University, and he, like other Black American commentators, based his discussion of “The Philippine Islands and the American Negro” on a reading of Rizal’s famous novel, albeit in American translation. Pace cites Rizal, “the Filipino novelist and martyr” who “tells in his novel, ‘The Eagle Flight’ (McClure Phillips Co.,) of how the native Filipino children were twitted with their inferiority by the Spanish children and by the children of other foreigners even before the insurrection of 1893,” concluding that the Philippines was “not free from color prejudice” even prior to US rule.Footnote ²⁴³ US military occupation, according to Pace, exploited and further augmented these racial cleavages and “color discrimination” by teaching the Filipinos “to feel that they are inferior to the white men because they are black or brown.”Footnote ²⁴⁴ Pace reads Eagle’s Flight against its ideological grain, drawing out similarities between Rizal’s depiction of Spanish rule and US occupation to argue against Black participation in US empire. Unlike Fortune, Pace also remains attentive to forms of difference and differentiation by emphasizing that “Filipinos are not of the same race as the American Negro” even though they may share similar experiences of racialization along the US color line.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Black emigration would create even greater impoverishment and labor competition in the Philippines and “double the population of a downtrodden race” in an as yet white-dominated colonial society.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Pace rejected Fortune’s argument that Black emigration and alliance with the colonized Filipino might offer a viable solution to the race crisis at hand, insisting bluntly that “[i]f we must ally ourselves as a race, with another people … let that people bring some advantage.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ It is likely that Pace had begun to entertain the idea of a Black alliance with the Japanese. By the time Pace penned the rebuttal, a rising imperial Japan had begun to represent a more advantageous prospect for transpacific alliance in the struggle against the world color line.

4.1 Voice Coverage of the Russo-Japanese War

The launch of the Voice coincided with the Russo-Japanese War, and war coverage became a regularized feature of the new magazine. Austin N. Jenkins of the publishing firm J. L. Nichols and Company (later Hertel, Jenkins & Company) financed the Voice, although the magazine was largely controlled by its two Black editors, John W. E. Bowen, Sr. and J. Max Barber.Footnote ²⁵⁹ The Voice went into direct competition with the financially struggling CAM, which Washington soon acquired. Barber became affiliated with Du Bois and the Niagara Movement, to the dismay of Washington, who had sought to influence the Voice. An early Black civil rights organization that served as the precursor to the NAACP, the Niagara Movement defined itself against Washington’s conciliatory politics. Among its founding tenets, the Niagara Movement demanded “an unfettered and unsubsidized press” – an explicit critique of Washington’s controlling interest at other Black periodicals, including Fortune’s New York Age.Footnote ²⁶⁰ Despite attacks by Fortune and other Washington associates, Barber turned the Voice into a platform for the Niagara Movement and offered discounted “clubbing rates” for bundling a subscription with Trotter’s Guardian or Du Bois’s Moon Illustrated. As one Voice reader acknowledged: “I was first apprised of your wonderful magazine by the editor of the Boston Guardian,” adding “I have read with pleasure many of its well discussed articles.”Footnote ²⁶¹ Indeed, these allied “race papers” helped transform “what had become a conservative Black press into a vehicle for radical transnational Black community protest,” as Kerri Greenidge argues.Footnote ²⁶²

An editorialized digest of world news and events, Barber’s “Our Monthly Review” quickly became one of the Voice’s most distinctive and popular features. Historian Louis Harlan notes that Bowen gave the younger editor independence in developing this news section, and the “Monthly Review” stood out from peer publications like Trotter’s Guardian, which focused primarily on local and regional news and carried only the occasional interest piece on the Russo-Japanese War.Footnote ²⁶³ In fact, Jinx Broussard argues that the Voice “was the first black publication to methodically engage in foreign news gathering.”Footnote ²⁶⁴ At the time, the Black press lacked the resources to post correspondents abroad even as white-owned wire services and newspapers began extending their coverage to Asia (the San Francisco Examiner sent Jack London to Manchuria as its war correspondent in 1904).Footnote ²⁶⁵ In contrast, Barber often found himself researching up to “the time we went to press,” gleaning the most current information about the war from other outlets and services.Footnote ²⁶⁶

The first installments of the Voice’s “Monthly Review” drew attention to the “war clouds … in the far East” and expressed concern over the impact of the conflict on a globalizing US with newly acquired imperial interests in the Asia-Pacific.Footnote ²⁶⁷ “So closely knit together is every social, political, industrial and commercial fabric of the globe that the whole civilized world trembles at the prospect of a clash between the Jap and Muscovite,” reads Barber’s darkly sardonic commentary.Footnote ²⁶⁸ Barber’s feature invited readers to perceive world news and events through a racialized lens, emphasizing white supremacy and imperialism as linked global issues. Such editorialized reportage, to borrow from Onishi, “interpreted the problem of the existing world system in racial terms and globalized the race question to challenge the international politics promoting white supremacy.”Footnote ²⁶⁹ Limning the contours of early Black internationalist thought, Barber’s May 1904 issue depicts a disturbing new world order defined by imperial war, racial violence, and western colonial expropriation:

Barber asked readers to view seemingly disparate racial geopolitics as articulated expressions of a color line that operated locally and globally, both within and outside the expanding borders of US empire. In this fashion, Barber’s “Monthly Review” helped cultivate a global consciousness that centered race and racialization in determining the course of empire and modernity.

Barber was an outspoken advocate for Japan and projected Japanese victory as a strike against white supremacy and colonial oppression. His race-conscious coverage of the war emphasized the idea of Black solidarity and alliance with the Japanese, and the “Monthly Review” helped popularize this “race first” approach to international news.Footnote ²⁷¹ The contest between Russia and Japan provided a powerful illustration of the race struggles taking place in the US and throughout the colonized world. Barber’s editorials seized upon the Russo-Japanese War to counter the “superiority of the present civilized Anglo-Saxon,” which justified colonization in terms of the so-called white man’s burden and uplift of the inferior “darker races.”Footnote ²⁷² In the example of the “inferior” Japanese, Barber wryly notes that “they surpassed their supposed superiors in the deft and accurate handling of this machinery” “of advanced thought” “to the chagrin and humiliation of the boastful Russ.”Footnote ²⁷³ A frequent Voice contributor, journalist John E. Bruce, also known as “Bruce Grit,” amplified Barber’s commentary, writing that “England in Africa, Russia in the Orient, Belgium in West Africa, and our own country in the islands of the sea” have all claimed the right of “stronger races” to “obtrude their civilizations, their religion and their armies and navies upon peoples who are quietly and unobtrusively working out their own destiny.”Footnote ²⁷⁴ Bruce’s later journalism continued to insist upon the shared “destiny” of the “black and colored races,” emphasizing non-white unity in overcoming racism and empire.Footnote ²⁷⁵

Barber’s representation of the Russo-Japanese War also drew from and challenged the Yellow Peril propaganda of the likes of Jack London and Homer Lea, who viewed Japanese militarism as a US threat. It also helped set the tone of the war’s representational form in the Black press.Footnote ²⁷⁶ From the outset, Barber minced few words about his partisan coverage, insisting: “[W]e are right in our position of siding with Japan … for Russia regards the dark hued peoples of the earth as inferiors.”Footnote ²⁷⁷ Barber’s editorial commentary reached beyond what Helen Jun terms “black Orientalism” and “Asian uplift” in its use of comparison and comparative logics to forge connections and affinities between Black Americans and the Japanese along a world color line.Footnote ²⁷⁸ Barber portrayed Japanese soldiers as “superior men” and extended them his unwavering support.Footnote ²⁷⁹ He exulted when Japan routed the Russian army at the decisive Battle of Mukden (considered the largest land battle fought before WWI), for it taught an “arrogant Europe … a lesson about the ‘inferior races.’”Footnote ²⁸⁰ Like other Black writers, Barber depicted Russia as an imperial aggressor who provoked Japan into defensive action. “Russia has one policy and that is to get as much of the earth as possible,” he announced.Footnote ²⁸¹ Considering such characterizations, it was not a far leap to imagine Japan as a natural ally of Black Americans in the global struggle for racial justice. Marc Gallicchio argues that this idea formed an important theme in the early ideology of Black internationalism.Footnote ²⁸²

As the war progressed, Barber transformed the eastern conflict into one possible horizon for the course of racial strife and struggle in the US, amplifying elements that also appeared in the writings of Du Bois and other transpacific internationalists. It was not uncommon for white foreign correspondents like George Kennan, who wrote for the Outlook, to depict the war “in terms of an allegorical confrontation between autocratic and democratic forms of government,” as Colleen Lye writes.Footnote ²⁸³ However, Barber channeled this allegorical impulse into a critique of the US as a racialized empire-state, likening it to a tyrannous, yet increasingly outmatched Russian empire. Barber depicted the Russians as “the Southern white men of Europe,” further elaborating:

Anglo-American discourses had long represented Russia and Slavic peoples through an Orientalist lens as culturally ambiguous and not fully “white,” yet Barber projects a legible “whiteness” onto Russian difference to forge a stronger comparison with the US.Footnote ²⁸⁵ Barber minces few words when he concludes that a “Russian triumph would be a triumph for color prejudice,” emphasizing that “[i]n this respect the Russians are not unlike our southern neighbors.”Footnote ²⁸⁶ Barber also consistently racializes the Japanese as “brave … little brown men,” aligning the Japanese counteroffensive with the Black American struggle for racial equality and justice.Footnote ²⁸⁷ In speculating on the far-reaching racial implications of a Japanese victory, Barber writes: “If Japan conquers, she will at once become the dominating influence in Asiatic politics. The yellow and brown races will look to her as a guiding star and seek to emulate her.”Footnote ²⁸⁸ He imagines the overthrow of US racial injustice through Japan as the harbinger of an alternative future, hoping that “civilization will be advanced by teaching the strong that the small and weak have rights to be respected by them.”Footnote ²⁸⁹

Barber’s “Monthly Review” also grappled with the representational paradoxes that characterized mainstream US representations of Japan or what Lye has called, “America’s Asia.”Footnote ²⁹⁰ Yellow Peril discourse had long assumed a binary opposition between “East” and “West.” Barber’s war coverage often marshalled this unstable opposition in ways that reinforced certain cultural assumptions while also challenging them. In one instance, Barber reversed the stereotypical designations of East versus West by portraying Russia as an “oriental” “oppressor of the people” and Japan as the “Yankee Kingdom of the Pacific waters.”Footnote ²⁹¹ In another example, Barber portrays Japan as a US proxy in Asia and the conflict as a “battle to the death between Eastern Occidentalism and Western Orientalism.”Footnote ²⁹² The language of racial classification used to describe Japanese difference also remained fluid and unstable across Black print. For example, Du Bois refers to “the brown and armed dignity of Japan” in The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, which he launched in 1907, although he more frequently depicted Japanese racial difference as the “yellow nation” and “yellow races” in other writings.Footnote ²⁹³ Described variously as “yellow,” “brown,” “dark,” and “colored” in the Black press, Japanese difference eluded fixed categorization and challenged the racial homogenization of Yellow Peril discourse.

Barber’s war coverage influenced the tone and rhetorical strategies of other Voice publications, even those contributions focused on seemingly unrelated topics, including Black mutual aid, community formation, and uplift. Bruce contributed another essay advocating for the development of Black business leagues as a means to “organize for mutual benefit and self protection.”Footnote ²⁹⁴ As the essay draws to a close, Bruce turns to the war and asserts that “[t]he black man and the yellow man and the brown man, the world over are stripping the fruit from the tree of Western civilization.”Footnote ²⁹⁵ He continues in an even more sardonic register: “The war in the East will give Europeans and Americans a very good idea of Japan’s knowledge of the business of war,” noting further that “[t]his business league in Japan appears to be thoroughly and effectively organized and it gives promise of succeeding in teaching the white man his limits.”Footnote ²⁹⁶ Like Barber’s “Monthly Review” columns, Bruce analogizes the Russo-Japanese War to Black–white US race relations to highlight the global contours of the race struggle at hand. He stretched the analogy to its limits by playfully suggesting that Black entrepreneurs organize themselves along the model of the Japanese military. Such use of the war to encourage Black capability and promise was not uncommon. Washington too highlighted Japan’s rapid modernization and adaptation of Western industrial technology as a useful illustration for his philosophy of Black industry and uplift. In a series of lectures, Washington instructed Tuskegee students: “The Japanese race is a convincing example of the respect which the world gives to a race that can put brains and commercial activity into the development of the resources of a country.”Footnote ²⁹⁷ Japanese militarism was thus put to rhetorical service to advance a range of Black political philosophies.

The celebrated Wilberforce University professor, Williams Sanders Scarborough numbered among the many Voice contributors who seized upon the anti-Asian discourse of racialized “peril” to imagine the transpacific coalition of the newly awakened “darker races.” Like Pauline Hopkins in the “Dark Races of the Twentieth Century,” Scarborough sardonically manipulated the idea of “Yellow Peril” to great effect:

Scarborough asks readers to consider the white supremacist threat of “Yellow Peril” from a Black perspective and welcomes this racialized menace as an ally in a shared struggle against racial oppression and violence. Scarborough thus reconfigures American Yellow Peril into the more enabling idea of a transpacific alliance of “the yellow [and] the black races.” Indeed, such an interracial affinity might stand together in opposition to the globalizing discourses and exclusionary practices of US white supremacy, or what Hopkins observed as “the banding together of all white races as against the darker races, and in the Geary law which excludes Chinese from the United States.”Footnote ²⁹⁹ As Hopkins noted at the outset of “Dark Races,” “we have in opening the twentieth century ‘perils’ yellow and black born alone on an unreasoning insanity on the question of color.”Footnote ³⁰⁰ Her barbed manipulation of the threat of “racial perils” enhances the subversive subtext and destabilizing reversals that characterize the tone of her popular series. In her third installment on “The Yellow Race,” Hopkins also insists on viewing Yellow Peril from a Black perspective. She praises Japan as a “warlike … nation as they have proved in their present war with Russia, surprising the entire world by their endurance and prowess” and avers that the true danger to “civilization” is not Japan (or the “yellow” peril), but the “white barbarians” whom the “dark races” consider as “the ‘white’ peril.”Footnote ³⁰¹ Her series pushed the speculative threat of racial peril to its limit to counter white supremacist ideologies and racist hierarchies of power. Hopkins and Scarborough amplify and transform Yellow Peril into a meditation on transpacific internationalism, seizing upon the salutary effects of a globally ascendant Asia.

Barber’s editorialized war coverage struck a chord with some readers, but others disagreed with his efforts to transform the Russo-Japanese War into an allegorical “race war” with bearing on the so-called Negro problem at home. One Voice reader disapproved of the magazine’s ambitious global coverage, asking: “What solace is there in reading Russian affairs? They are not bothering themselves about our race. The Japanese are thinking of their own race.”Footnote ³⁰² Granville Martin, a well-known associate of Trotter’s, also disagreed “with the attitude of the Voice as regards the war in the far East.”Footnote ³⁰³ He lauded Barber’s efforts to “take up these foreign public questions,” but chided him for not sufficiently viewing global issues “through Negro instead of white man’s glasses”:

Martin faults Barber for his uncritical embrace of Japan, which had formally allied with England in 1902. Not surprisingly, Barber relished the public debate and insisted on Japan’s significance in the broader struggle of the “darker races” against anti-Blackness and white supremacist ideology, the world over. “If Japan conquers in this war,” Barber avers, “she will at once become the dominant nation in Asiatic politics,” continuing that “[t]he yellow and the brown races will look to her as a guiding star and seek to emulate her in all those things which tend to make a great people.”Footnote ³⁰⁵ He remained unwavering in his support. “We firmly believe that we are right in our position of siding with Japan,” Barber insisted, restating his conviction that a “Russian triumph would be the triumph of color prejudice.”Footnote ³⁰⁶

Most Voice readers and contributors welcomed Barber’s editorialized war coverage and took inspiration from his racial outlook on global affairs. It even became the stuff of imaginative fodder in the Voice’s November 1905 “Fiction Number.”Footnote ³⁰⁷ The second of two espionage tales by “H.,” “Within the Ring” is set “three months before the opening of the Russo-Japanese conflict” and follows William Orr, a racially unmarked American double agent, on a secret mission to thwart Russia’s political gambit to become the major western power in the Far East (785).Footnote ³⁰⁸ Orr attends a “conference with the Foreign Secretary and the Japanese ambassador,” and they task him with gaining intelligence on a secret Russian plot to embed Manchuria with Russian troops in order to seize Port Arthur (the “coveted ice free port” in China’s Liaodong Province) (785, 787). As in Barber’s “Monthly Review,” the tale represents Russia as an imperial aggressor in the East. However, Orr is a dubious hero at best for he functions as the twofold agent of British and American imperial interests. Echoing elements of Martin’s earlier critique, the tale makes clear that England’s alliance with Japan is motivated by “commercial and colonial interest, [which] demand an open door to China” (786). “[U]nder no circumstances can England allow Japan to be crushed,” the British Foreign Secretary insists, for Russia’s imperial “designs upon the eastern portion of the Asiatic continent” would disrupt the “present Asiatic policy,” securing the equal exploitation of China among the western powers (786). Since the late nineteenth century, the US had played a role in helping to pry open the markets and resources of China.Footnote ³⁰⁹ Unlike the direct territorial occupation that otherwise characterized US empire in the Pacific, the US sought proxy or neocolonial political relations with China and Japan.Footnote ³¹⁰ Although the plot does not align with the explicit race war theme stressed in Barber’s writings, the tale’s international espionage elements anticipate the shape of later Black internationalist novels, including Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) and Floyd Gibbons’s Red Napoleon (1929).

“Within the Ring” also aligned with Barber’s stated “ambition … to make” the Voice into “a periodical of contemporary literature … edited from a Negro’s viewpoint” even as the Washington-subsidized CAM decisively shifted away from such “writings of dreamers or theorists.”Footnote ³¹¹ Fictionalizing the complex geopolitics of the Russo-Japanese War, the tale takes readers from Washington, DC to London, Paris, Moscow, Irkutsk (near the Russian border with Mongolia), Vladivosotok (a Russian port city near the border with present-day North Korea), and Manchuria. We follow the disguised Orr – who is simply referred to as “the American” – as he gathers intelligence on Russian military operations (786). Indeed, Orr’s international spycraft utilizes elements of the racial passing narrative that Voice readers would have recognized. In Moscow, Orr notes that “[p]ublic feeling ran high against the United States and Great Britain,” and he takes the precaution of traveling onto “Irkutsk in the dress of a Russian” (788). He witnesses ample evidence of Russia “preparing for war” despite its public negotiations with Japan to deescalate the situation (788). On February 4, Orr conveys this information directly to the Emperor of Japan, who takes immediate action: “The following day the Japanese minister at St. Petersburg notified that power that Russia must immediately withdraw her troops from Manchuria or contest the validity of her claim to occupy Chinese soil” (789). Again, Voice readers would have likely recognized the significance of these dates, given Barber’s detailed coverage. Japan severed diplomatic relations with Russia on February 6 and launched a surprise attack upon Port Arthur two days later, initiating the Russo-Japanese War.Footnote ³¹² Most significantly, the story fictionalizes a central role for the US in the geopolitics of the Russo-Japanese War in the fantastical figure of Orr as a possibly, white-passing Black American secret agent for the British Empire. Far from a neutral observer, the US is positioned through Orr as a key operative in curtailing the Russian military advantage and assisting Japan to its subsequent victory. “Within the Ring” shows the manifold fantasies projected onto the war, and the war’s role in the staging of the US as a global power.Footnote ³¹³

4.2 The Colored American Magazine’s “Way of the World”

Barber’s uncompromising politics made him a target of Washington’s ire, yet this did not deter Washington and his associates from appropriating Barber’s editorial techniques after they took over the CAM. The CAM changed its layout and added a new opening section entitled “The Way of the World,” which closely resembled Barber’s “Our Monthly Review.” In July 1904, the CAM inaugurated this new regular feature with a news story sensationally entitled “‘The Yellow Peril’,” which discussed the progress of the Russo-Japanese War.Footnote ³¹⁴ By June 1906, the feature’s resemblance to Barber’s Voice became even more pronounced when the CAM renamed it, “The Month.” The feature was likely the work of T. Thomas Fortune – at least initially.Footnote ³¹⁵ Biographer Emma Lou Thornbrough relates that Fortune assisted with editorial work on the CAM after its move to New York.Footnote ³¹⁶ A July 1904 advertisement identified Fortune as the author of “The Way of the World,” promoting it as “A stirring and powerful review of the current events of each month in Mr. Fortune’s most trenchant style.”Footnote ³¹⁷ However, only the October 1904 table of contents credited Fortune, despite his other attributed writings and poems for the CAM and Voice.

Although not as comprehensive and consistent as Barber’s war coverage, Fortune’s “Way of the World” likewise projected the US race struggle onto the Russo-Japanese War, aligning a racially oppressive US with a despotic Russia. In critiquing the twinned projects of western imperialism and white supremacy, Fortune likens Asia to Africa, for being “long trod upon by Europe,” explaining that “[t]he Asiatics have been regarded as people worthy only of contempt, to be robbed at will at the point of the sword, their lands divided at the pleasure of the Powers in interest, their people despoiled of their labor without redress.”Footnote ³¹⁸ Like Barber, Fortune underscored that Japanese victory in the war proved the lie of white supremacist assumptions and reignited, in the process, “widespread discussions of ‘The Yellow Peril’.”Footnote ³¹⁹ Building on his Philippines series, Fortune expressed his yearning for transpacific interracial alliance, hopeful that Japanese militarism might also pave the way for Africa: “And with Japan come China and all Asia, which shall surely prepare a way for Africa to assert her rights so long deferred, or rather stifled.”Footnote ³²⁰ As a possible harbinger of the rising darker races, Japan “has started Asia, Europe, Africa, and America to thinking on original lines as to the future” after having “exploded” “[t]he fiction that the white race in contact with an off-color race must always dominate,” Fortune exulted.Footnote ³²¹

Fortune was an otherwise outspoken critic of Barber, Du Bois, and other Niagara Movement spokespeople, especially in defense of Washington, yet he shared their transpacific imaginings of Japan’s relevance to Black American politics. With little doubt, Fortune read Barber’s “Monthly Review” and likely viewed Barber and other Voice contributors as key interlocutors, especially as he had published his earlier “Filipino” series in the Voice. In the CAM, Fortune exulted over Admiral Togo’s naval victory and proclaimed that “Togo not only crushed Russia, but he forever destroyed the claims to supremacy of the haughty spirit of the white man … throughout the world.”Footnote ³²² Fortune seized upon Japan’s militarism as prelude to a “new era” marking the end of white supremacy. As news coverage turned to President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to help broker a peace treaty between Japan and Russia, Fortune’s “Way of the World” again stressed Japan as setting “the metes and bounds of the over-strides of the white man, who has always regarded Asia as a part of his scheme of world mastery.”Footnote ³²³ Both Fortune and Barber were critical of the American reception of the Russian envoys sent to negotiate a ceasefire and settlement. Fortune writes rather sharply: “That Russia is the great white Nation of the East none can deny,” citing the fawning welcome that American officials and notables extended to the Russians (unlike their Japanese counterparts), who in turn addressed the US as “the Great White Nation of the West.”Footnote ³²⁴ In this manner, the negotiations over Roosevelt’s Portsmouth Treaty brought home to US soil the racialized implications of the far distant war in Manchuria.

Fortune and Barber were not alone in deriving much-needed emotional sustenance and political encouragement from Japan’s victory. Like the Voice, the CAM also published a range of other writings that explored the profound racial significance of the Russo-Japanese War. In words that mimicked the millennialism of the past century, Joseph G. Bryant extolled Japan’s success: “Japan has become a world power, and with it dies the absolute domination of the world by the Aryan people.”Footnote ³²⁵ Bryant went so far as to insist that “Western people” had reached their apogee and a new “Asiatic” era was on the global horizon: “I think it can be safely predicted, that within a few centuries, the Asiatics will lead the world in civilization and moral ideas.”Footnote ³²⁶ On the cusp of the so-called American Century, Bryant anticipated what twenty-first-century political commentators have begun calling the “Pacific Century,” as US influence wanes with the rise of Asia in economics and culture. He imagined the manifold advantages of such a transition of global power from west to east: “Let us hope that the distinctive feature of Mongolian civilization, will be the extinction of racial arrogance and oppression.”Footnote ³²⁷ Fortune also viewed Japan’s triumph as a portent of a new era in which the “Anglo-Saxon” might “be supplanted by a newer and more brilliant light, which shall find its dynamic force in the blending of the different bloods of the earth into a grand and benevolent civilization.”Footnote ³²⁸ This Pacific Century augured a radically egalitarian new world order that would bring about the end of racial hierarchies and “warfare between races.”Footnote ³²⁹

In response to the popularity of Hopkins’s “Dark Races” series, the CAM also issued its own ethnological study linking the “origins of the Japanese race” to the “Oceanic Negro family.” James Marmaduke Boddy’s “Ethnology of the Japanese Race” appeared three months after Hopkins concluded her five-part series for the rival Voice.Footnote ³³⁰ Hopkins’s emerging internationalist worldview likely drew her to the globally oriented discourse of ethnology.Footnote ³³¹ A science of racial difference, ethnology considered human development and relations on a global scale. It came into popularity in the 1840s and 1850s as part of the search for more scientific methods of human classification. Among other things, Hopkins’s series expanded the complexities of the Black Pacific by including, among other populations, the Filipino Negritos within the Black diaspora, identifying them as “descendants of African tribes.”Footnote ³³² “[W]e must conclude that the Negritos of the Philippines and the other dark races of Australasia are of the family of Ham,” she writes, plying the disruptive potential of Black multiplicity.Footnote ³³³ Rather than flattening or homogenizing Blackness into a fixed or stable category, Hopkins celebrated the “infinite variety of mixture in” “the dark races actually living today upon the globe.”Footnote ³³⁴ She was well aware that anti-Blackness operated dynamically through the creation and suppression of difference. By centering the “darker races” as a complex site of knowledge production, Hopkins’s ethnological series helped formulate an understanding of Blackness that resisted exceptionalism and remained open to transformation and contestation.

Like Hopkins, Boddy also repurposed the racial science of the so-called American school of ethnology to claim the Japanese as historically descended from “Black immigrants from Africa” who had been carried eastward along the “‘Black Tide’ … a sort of a gulf stream – which begins off the coast of Africa, and then … bends … toward the east until it touches Formosa and Japan.”Footnote ³³⁵ Boddy also cites the evidence of slate gray nevi or dermal melanocytosis, a flat blue or blue-gray type of birthmark (once referred to as Mongolian blue spots) commonly found on East Asian infants as an epidermalization of historical African origins or a “survival of a racial character of a Negro origin.”Footnote ³³⁶ Therefore, Boddy reasons, the “brilliant” and “unprecedented achievements” of the Japanese military in the recent Russo-Japanese War may “henceforth justly be regarded as the achievements of the Negro race.”Footnote ³³⁷ Published in rival magazines, Boddy’s “Ethnology” and Hopkins’s “Dark Races” again index the significance of Japan’s triumph to Black American readers at the Nadir, and the radical rethinking of race and racialization that it inspired. Unlike the construction of whiteness under Jim Crow, Blackness was not defined by the fiction of purity, and these writings embraced the complex heterogeneity of Blackness in ways that both exploited and challenged the racial pseudo-science of the era. By accentuating racial kinship, Boddy and Hopkins transform Blackness into a site for hosting difference, and their speculative ethnologies represent some of the most experimental forms of early Black Pacific thought.

Soon after the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, Barber’s allegorical language of global race war would become tragically literalized in Atlanta. In September 1906, anti-Black riots in Atlanta forced the outspoken Barber to hastily remove his publishing operations to Chicago under threat of retaliation and arrest.Footnote ³³⁸ Barber seized upon the relocation to remake the Voice of the Negro into the Voice and formed the Voice Publishing Company to secure Black ownership of the magazine through its purchase from Hertel, Jenkins & Company (which had withdrawn financing).Footnote ³³⁹ Among other key changes, the new Voice listed Barber as the sole editor and featured a new layout for the Table of Contents with a renamed opening news feature “The World’s Highway” (see Figure 10). Artist William Edouard Scott provided an elaborate masthead illustration depicting a Black man intently exploring a globe, which Barber introduced writing:

Beginning with the Russo-Japanese War, Barber’s pioneering “Monthly Review” established a raced perspective on the course of world events and global affairs that became a much-copied hallmark of transpacific internationalism within Black magazine culture. “The World’s Highway” promised to expand the original feature that made the Voice stand out from its peers.

Figure 10 William Edouard Scott’s masthead image of “The World’s Highway.”

In October 1907, Fortune broke from Washington and used the proceeds from the forced sale of the New York Age to Fred R. Moore (who had also acquired the CAM for Washington) to buy a controlling stake in the financially struggling Voice.Footnote ³⁴¹ Sadly, Fortune and Barber’s partnership remained brief as the two were unable to raise enough additional capital to continue publishing the Voice. By the time they halted publication, Du Bois had launched the Horizon, and the monthly took over from the defunct Voice as the platform for the Niagara Movement. Like its predecessor, the Horizon opened with a signature editorial feature, the “Over-Look,” which contained national and world news along with a monthly bibliography of recently published articles and books “relating to ‘us’,” as Du Bois put it.Footnote ³⁴² Barber’s monthly assemblages of national and world news may have even anticipated what Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum describe as Du Bois’s “politics of juxtaposition,” which he used to great effect in his “internationalist anti-imperialist politics.”Footnote ³⁴³ Like Barber’s ambitious “World’s Highway,” Du Bois hoped to enlarge the “Over-Look” into “a careful digest of news concerning the darker races the world over,” but was unable to realize this aim until the Crisis, with its signature opening editorial news feature, “Along the Color Line.”Footnote ³⁴⁴ The Crisis also marked Barber’s return to print. Barber served as contributing editor during the first three and a half years of its publication. Du Bois later referred to the Voice as “the greatest magazine which the colored people had had” and positioned the Crisis as its successor.Footnote ³⁴⁵

4.3 Japanese Empire along the Color Line

The raced lens brought to bear on the Russo-Japanese War made Japan deeply relevant to Black American politics at the Nadir, and Japan would remain the most vital source for Black transpacific imaginings over the next decades. However, this celebratory investment also tended to overlook the contradiction of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific. As Omri Reis argues, early Black internationalists often ignored Japanese settler colonialism in Formosa (Taiwan), Manchuria, and Korea, treating it as benign protection of fellow Asian nation-states.Footnote ³⁴⁶ Such portrayals tended to either efface or apologize for Japan’s imperial ambitions despite otherwise clear-sighted critiques of US empire in Hawaii and the Philippines. The CAM and Voice frequently represented Japan as valiantly defending itself against Russian imperial encroachment with little reference to the history of Japanese imperialism that predated the war. Such omissions allowed writers like Bryant to proclaim that “Japan is fighting for the right to live and expand, while Russia is moved by the lust of dominion.”Footnote ³⁴⁷ War coverage in the Black press tended to deemphasize the conflicts between Japan, China, and Korea in order to portray Japan as defending sister nations from the “white bear” of Russia.Footnote ³⁴⁸ Fortune declared Japan the “absolute master of the East” at the conclusion of the war, insisting that “China, battered and persecuted, has as her ally and friend, and if needs be, defender” in neighboring Japan.Footnote ³⁴⁹ As tensions between Japan and China increased later in the century, Black internationalists often assumed that racial affinity, as Gallicchio writes, “would eventually overcome artificial Japanese and Chinese differences.”Footnote ³⁵⁰

Before losing the Voice, Barber began to grapple with the complexities of Japanese empire, but his thoughts had not yet sharpened into critique. For example, Barber seized upon Roosevelt’s brokering of the Portsmouth Treaty as an opportunity for the US to exit its misguided imperial venture in the Pacific. He suggested that the US transfer control over the Philippines to Japan. “Japan ought to control those islands,” he urged, especially in light of “the vast outlay of blood and money required of the United States to preserve the semblance of American democracy” when “[a]t present, our rule in those far-off isles is one of land-grabbing and exploitation.”Footnote ³⁵¹ He continued, insisting that it would be “shrewd diplomacy” for “our nation to dispose of these Islands at the proper time to Japan for a fair financial consideration,” to follow the “political dictum” of “‘Asia for Asiatics’,” the oft-repeated anti-colonial slogan at the time.Footnote ³⁵² Barber’s suggestion limns the contradiction structuring early Black internationalist imaginations of Japan, which excused or openly supported Japanese imperialism while excoriating the US as a racialized empire state. Bruce went so far as to fantasize the end of US white supremacy in Japanese empire in the Pacific. In an unfinished speculative fiction, Bruce cast the US and Japan in a “death grapple for the mastery of the Pacific,” in which “the Orient won.” However, Bruce left unresolved the problem of Japanese imperialism. In his tale, the Pacific territories do not regain their independence and sovereignty but continue under a new master: “The Philippines and Hawaii were lost to America and the flag of Japan waved prominently from the fortifications lately occupied by American troops.”Footnote ³⁵³

Fittingly in the final October 1907 Voice issue, Barber’s “World’s Highway” began to cast doubt on the possibilities of transpacific coordination with an imperial Japan along the color line. “Tragedy in Korea” marks a radical shift in tone from Barber’s earlier pro-Japanese stance. He minces few words in condemning Japanese efforts to annex Korea, seeing in Japan the same grasping imperial ambitions that he had earlier associated with Russia, the US, and other western nations. He begins to outline a more cautionary view of Japan, finding little to celebrate or admire in its invasion of Korea:

Three years before Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, Barber began to question Japanese empire in the Asia-Pacific, shifting away from the commonplace of “Asia for Asiatics.” Discussed at the beginning of this Element, Brawley’s “New Wars” had imagined this bellicose era of imperial expansion stretching beyond the US and its emerging Pacific empire: “But greater is the strife than here would seem, / And wider realms embracing than the East.”Footnote ³⁵⁵ For Barber, the Japanese are no longer the race champions of the Russo-Japanese War, but an imperial state – comparable to other western empires – that had “watched and waited with savage guile for the ripe moment” to firmly establish itself in Korea.Footnote ³⁵⁶ Marking the limits of racial affinity, Barber’s rhetoric registers a significant shift in tone, particularly in his use of the phrase, “Japan’s tide of supremacy,” which calls to the mind the white supremacy that he had long fought on US soil. Just as the Voice came to the end of its publishing life, Barber began to amend his views of Japan. His final installment to the recently inaugurated “World’s Highway” anticipated the fissures within Black transpacific internationalism to come, which would find its fullest expression in Theodore Bassett, Abner W. Berry, Cyril Briggs, James W. Ford, and Harry Haywood’s 1938 pamphlet, Is Japan the Champion of the Colored Race?: The Negro’s Stake in Democracy.Footnote ³⁵⁷

Du Bois figures prominently in the development of Black internationalism, yet the foregoing discussion of the Voice and CAM shows that Du Bois’s emphasis on the transpacific contours of race and racialization was not unique but widely shared among a politically heterogeneous range of writers. Africa and Pan-Africanism remained at the center of this Black internationalism, yet it also embraced the freedom struggles of Native Hawaiians and Filipinos and an enduring idea of Japan as a racial ally and leader of the non-white world.Footnote ³⁵⁸ In particular, this shared vision of Japan became a useful rhetorical tool for Black striving during a time when activists struggled with the overarching question of Black collective identity and the direction of its politics. Du Bois returned repeatedly to the example of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in his thinking on the color line and the globality of race. Amplifying the celebratory rhetoric of the Voice and CAM, Du Bois asserted: “Whatever its end may be the Russo-Japanese war is [sic] epoch-making,” continuing further that “[t]he foolish modern magic of the word ‘white’ is already broken and the color line has been crossed.”Footnote ³⁵⁹ Japan loomed large in the politics of transpacific alliance and interracial coalition that animated Du Bois’s thinking and call to global action.Footnote ³⁶⁰ His writings for the Crisis and other publications honed the idea that Japan stood at the vanguard of a global uprising of racialized peoples against the yoke of imperialism and white hegemony.

Du Bois rejected the idea that empire could benefit peoples of color; yet he, like many of his contemporaries, struggled with the contradiction of Japanese empire. As Kearney and Onishi have discussed, Du Bois remained a staunch supporter of Japan despite growing criticism of Japanese imperialism. An otherwise deft critic of empire, Du Bois continued to overlook the Japanese imperial state even after his 1936 journey to Manchuria, China, and Japan.Footnote ³⁶¹ Du Bois’s vision of a global alliance of oppressed darker races, which Barber shared, emerged in response to pervasive white supremacist ideologies and racial pseudo-science that justified the subjugation of non-white peoples and the appropriation of their lands. Unlike Barber, Du Bois held onto the idealization of Japan well into the twentieth century. In Dusk of Dawn (1940), Du Bois still viewed Japan as a “champion of the darker races,” writing further that “[i]t was evident … that the defeat of Russia by Japan had given rise to a fear of colored revolt against white exploitation.”Footnote ³⁶² Such forms of identification and affinity with Japan influenced the political discourses, racial imaginaries, and utopian longings of early Black internationalism. For this generation of writers and readers who embraced the promise and peril of the Black Pacific, the Russo-Japanese War helped crystallize the relation between the struggle for racial justice in the US and the worldwide struggle of the “darker races” for liberation, autonomy, and self-determination in Hawaii, the Philippines, and other “islands in the sea.”Footnote ³⁶³ Du Bois was not alone in these transpacific strivings or in his failure to account for the Japanese imperialist state. Such shared ambivalence in early Black magazine culture illustrates the complexities that structured these efforts to imagine new forms of political affiliation and alliance across the Pacific in opposition to anti-Blackness, empire, and capitalist modernity at the Nadir. These writings form an archive of the Black Pacific that both registers the complexities of Blackness and shows that the project of anti-racism must be coordinated with and take place alongside the movements to dismantle empire and colonialisms.