Imperial Blues- Kopit

Fiona I. B. Ngô’s Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York examines the cultural space of Jazz age New York through an intersectional and transnational lens, positioning it as, “a contact zone struck through with desire and danger” (27). The project provides a way to richen understanding of cultural history with this new lens, arguing for the consideration of empire as a necessary and central part of the analysis of this time and space. Ngô explains, “Part of how imperial logic works, I argue, is through the belief in a model of power that presents colonizing and imperial nations as stronger or morally superior to those nations being colonized, a model that justifies colonization" (5). She continues shortly thereafter, “As imperial logic is domesticated, it helps to make sense of the continuing need for imperial and colonial practice” (6). Therefore, imperial logic makes sense of the continued imperialist venture, naturalizes it into public understandings, and allows it to progress. This has an undeniable effect on the way that imperial logic works on art.

Through Ngô’s work, I saw the relationship between art and subject-formation, as well as the way that art serves as a site of the production of power as well as a by-product of it. I am in the process of a paper that studies outsider art (which developed around this same time period), and I am working to show how imperialism and colonialism work with ableism, classism, and racism in outsider art/art brut/intuit art. At the moment where disability, sexualization, and racialization work to produce an “imperial logic” of the art, as Ngo might say, as well as play into the rhetoric of “colonial discovery,” curators use said factors to depoliticize it. Because the artists of study are untrained, disabled, criminalized, or seen as outsiders, their capacity for resistance and political charge is silenced. The very work that is shrouded in imperial logic is simultaneously stripped of its political power through the cultural production of discourse around the art.

Discussion questions:

How can this approach to spaces as “contact zones” take us to understanding other art movements with more complexity?

Does an imperial logic cause the subject and the art to continue to produce one another in a mutual feedback cycle?

More broadly, in a historical project such as Imperial Blues, how does the role of the researcher shift in terms of cultural sensitivity and contextualizing themselves through positionality?