Min - Imperial Blues

Imperial Blues tracks transnational and domestic organization of race and sexuality through the history of Harlem during the Golden Age of jazz and blues. NGO places the imperial logic as an analytical lens for her work, rather than context for understanding Jazz Age. She suggests that the imperial logic reveals peripatetic and more complicated formation of "the conception and organization of space and subjectivity” (p. 3). The book departs from the most discourse of race in Jazz Age framed with black and white dichotomies, but examines the complicated and unstable borders and intersections where signs of empire move around and transfer from one type of body, space, or object to another.

The imperial logic is related to both "resistance and regulation” of imperial and colonial practices: It highlights not only "a discourse of internal colonialism" but "a language for sexual and racial experimentation" (p. 7 - 8). She focuses on intimacies and distance between bodies and spaces within artifacts of Jazz cultures to investigate how people had brought together across borders and forms of desire and anxiety circulated were regulated. The author views jazz cultures as a contact zone that create draw distance boundaries between bodies and objects through crisis of differentiation. She argues the concept of contact zone shows how "the nation is continuously created through racialized and sexualized contract with purported strangers” (p. 126).

I enjoyed the reading, and appreciated the concept of contact zone and imperial logic. I have examined internet memes as cultural contents that show many axes of difference, and the way she approaches her topic made me to think about the porousness and fluidity of their recurring features that constitute their singular essence and how cultural meanings of resistance and regulation are negotiated.

Q: How can the imperial logic be applied to the current immigration issues?