Delbello - Imperial Blues

This week’s book is Fiona Ngô’s Imperial Blues. This is a study of the notion of “empire” and “imperialism” which she innovatively and originally connects to the examining of the Jazz age in New York, between the 1920s and the 1930s. In her analysis she finds that the racialization and the gendered enforcement of bodies were particularly high in that era and connects this argument to the “colonial zones.” In her work, Jazz music was used a sort of vehicle to explore different modalities, in terms of sexualities and social encounters. Ngô reflects that this environment gave birth to an “imperial logic” that enforced more strict moral codes of keeping boundaries within each identity. In this sense, Ngô uses very diverse methodologies, from gender theory to literary analysis.

What I found really interesting about her study is how the identities that were formed in this environment, produced to create a critique of imperialism, were themselves embedded in an imperialist framework. What I really find interesting about Imperial Blues is how the orientalist images of “sexual alterity” and Arab symbols and signifiers reinforced US foreign policy in subtle ways, recreating spaces of critique that were only augmenting the role of empire “at home” and abroad.

The fact that she uses musical lyrics, analysis of literary texts, visual sociology as a methodology to theorize about empire and oppressions is something unique that I find very valuable. I think this could be a way to avoid “western” biases and epistemologies and to really find and uncover forms of oppressions. I found it to be very dialectical, the way in which identities that are supposed to resist oppressions end up recreating them, and reinforcing them involuntarily or voluntarily. How can we use similar methodologies even for other sociological projects without being labeled as too “broad” or “unscientific?”