In this book, Ngo offers a study
of Empire at home (the United States), as a way to critically rearticulate
urban histry and possible stories about race, gender, and sexuality in the United
States in early 20th century (Ngo 2014, 3). She suggests that without a consideration of
how empire circulated in everyday life to inform and transform national
subjects and their daily understandings, we cannot comprehend the complexities
of how race and sexuality in the US were lived in the interwar years (3). Imperial
logic manifests itself through the complex workings of referentiality, and that
the space, objects, bodies that act as signs of empire are mutable. Thus, it
is seen to circulate in the imagery and spaces of everyday life in New York
city, and understanding how it labors through a sometimes contradictory flow of
signs, can expand on the object of urban studies.
Imperialism is way to understand
pleasure, consumption, and sexuality. The mutability of imperial signs also
means that imperially derived meanings could be transferred from one type of
body to another (Ngo 2014, 5) At stake in the mobility of meaning is the
way that power structures people’s life chances, and access to subjectivity as
well as the way it valuates difference, whether it is racial, spatial,
gendered, national or sexual (5). As imperial logic is domesticated at
home through aesthetic production, it provides the justification for
continued imperial control abroad (6). Ngo focusses on jazz cultures,
specifically on the spaces of musical performance to examine the circulation of
signs, and unfolding of an imperial system of thought across distance and time.
This book thus calls attention to the continuities and discontinuities
between imperial and domestic categories of modern selfhood and subjection
through spatial narratives of movement, intimacy, and distance (17).
I find this methodology of
studying urban space and its history through these images to be extremely
useful to my project. Expanding on the spaces I am studying through the ways in
which images, intimacy, movement, and distance are narrated, configured and
shared, can help to examine mobilities and labour in new ways. Exploring what
kinds of logics circulate in particular spaces like the market of gendered labour
in a women-only compartment, to order it and connect it to other spaces through
creations of an “other” open up the boundaries of the space. I have one
question in relation to the methodology outlined in this work:
1.
What might be the archive and the methodology for writing a
study that explores circulations of an imperial logic? What might be the many
forms of such logic that shape and produce spaces and the differently
racialized and sexualized bodies associated with them?
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