Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism's Racial Justice and Its Fugitives

Vince Schleitwiler's bold, revisionary study initiates readers into recognizable but uncharted transpacific terrain in African American and Asian American literatures. Schleitwiler's “transpacific” does not allude to an oceanic space or time frame, but rather to an “orientation”—“a kind of tilting of space and time” (p. 3). Sometimes, this spreads out from Georgia to Luzon via Hong Kong, and at other times, it is compressed between two towns in the Mississippi Delta. The “black Pacific” moniker is reserved for “a specific lure” within the terrain that gravitates toward seemingly incompatible forces represented by two black icons from the Asia-Pacific region, Barack Obama and King Kong; one represents hope for racial justice and multiculturalism, while the other represents sexualized violence and lynching, which appear as the...