Collier- Imperial Blues

In Imperial Blues, Ngo investigates Jazz Age New York and the ways race, sexuality, and empire were produced and mobilized these spaces.  She explains, “the domestic or national organization of race and sex during the Jazz Age, and in New York City as an exemplar of this period’s sensibilities, cannot be understood except in the context of the growing ambitions of modern U.S. empire”(4).  Through an analysis of empire’s workings within the city, Ngo traces the imperial logics that organized these “modern” spaces and shaped identity formation.  Her approach highlights the “contact zones” of jazz cultures that link the domestic and foreign.  Drawing from cultural studies and transnational feminist interventions, Ngo illustrates how imperial logic informs meaning making and the boundaries of seemingly distinct social categories.  Imperial logics work through the “spatial reorientation” of different global and orientalized symbols that are mobilized and consumed in the service of both transgression and regulation.  Ngo explains, “not only were the markers of imperial logic peripatetic- attaching themselves to various spaces, objects, and bodies and then detaching themselves again- but the meanings created through their circulation rendered them unstable”(5).  She analyzes how cosmopolitanism, as well as resulting moral panics, were constructed in relation to these imperial logics, and that the mobility of these symbols still reflect asymmetrical power relations. 

            Space is an important theme in the book that is inseparable from the construction of race, sexuality, and nation.  Ngo examines the loaded meanings of different Jazz Age figures and spaces, like the “fallen woman” of Vivian Gordon.  She argues, “race and racialization thereby occur through modes of comparison and contact that are also spatial in nature- such as distance, contamination, analogy, intimacy, proximity, juxtaposition, and directionality”(27).  By looking at both empire and space in jazz cultures, Ngo enables an intersectional and transnational analysis of the production of racial, gendered, and sexual meanings.  She also illustrates how Jazz Age transgression frequently relied upon imperial logics and the dangers of such spatial crossing were simultaneously policed and regulated. Ngo’s analysis is useful for thinking about the way empire informs racial and sexual hierarchies and categorization within the US, and how orientalism might apply not just to Asian bodies, but can be mobilized in different ways. I also thought it was important that Ngo offers a brief examination of how imperial logics relate to settler colonialism, and appropriation of indigenous cultures. 

Ngo’s discussion of mobility and tourism is particularly timely with the current anxieties about national borders and globalization, and policies like the border wall and Muslim ban.  Her analysis raises important questions about who can be mobile and how racial and sexual meanings map on to these current border crossings or exclusions.  How can an analysis of space be useful in these debates?  Can we see any spatial reorientations at work in these current national and imperial logics?