Imperial Blues - Ezra

    Imperial Blues by Fiona I. B. Ngô, is a substantial re-visitation of 1920's and 30's Jazz culture in New York, aimed at moving beyond the prevailing dichotomy of an 'authentic black culture' and its 'white interlopers', to an analysis of how imperialism structured and constrained corporeal intimacies and anxieties, dissolved and re-concretized social proximity, delineated racial boundaries through orientialist discourses, and exoticized spatial reorientations of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Ngô, describes how U.S. imperialism generated a transformation in urban demographics through its induction of immigration and industrialization, resulting in a mixture of people and ideas, imbuing meaning into notions of 'what is national' and 'what is foreign'. Ngô describes Jazz culture itself as a type of contact zone wherein discursive formations of diverse stripes collaborate and co-constitute a palimpsest discourse of race, sexuality and gender. She describes jazz as, " a site  - or an assemblage of spaces [that] draws bodies and movements together with popular and scientific discourses of racialized sexualities across genres of cultural labor, including sexological studies, newspaper reportage, vice investigations, pulp fiction, and experimental literature" (27).
     Furthermore, Ngo turns to the methodology of 'queer of color critique' to unpack analytics of race, gender and sexuality as co-imbricated and mutually sustained. In doing so, she charts out a connection between sexualized/racialized international relations and their effects on modes of surveillance and discipline in domestic populations. Her attention to these dynamics draw from previous theorizations of the biopolitical management of gender and sexuality to identify moments of danger/excitement through the violation and border crossing instantiated in Jazz.


Questions:


For my project I am attempting to relate the literary productions of a transborder anarchist imaginary to the national organization of sexuality, gender and race. However, inasmuch as this research claims to shed light on the interplay between the two, its explicative force relies on the analysis of documents of repression (arrest and deportation records). How can theorizing/amalgamating such disparate archives as part of 'a contact zone' help illuminate the dynamics at play? Is this an artifical application of the rubric? Do 'contact zones' require a pre-existing deliquesce of forms?