Jozi Chaet - Imperial Blues

Relevance to the Text Generally

Fiona I. B. Ngô’s investigation concerning jazz, race, imperialism, and the American nation-state over the course of Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York is one that examines the way in which urban history can be mapped onto larger discussion regarding race, gender, and sexuality throughout the history of the United States (Ngô 2013). In particular, Ngô explores the way in which/the extent to which the Jazz Age was characterized by complex borders and complicated border crossings, and thus complicates the discourse concerning the Jazz Age in a way that acknowledges the transnational nature of the period. While the following post cannot successfully engage with the specificities that contribute to the analysis Ngô presents, this post attempts to think through the primary intentions guiding Ngô’s work over the course of Imperial Blues, and the impact of that work in the context of this class. In turn, the following post focuses on Ngô’s general argument concerning the Jazz Age and the methodologies Ngô employs in an attempt to effectively construct that analysis, and endeavors to address the ways in which Ngô’s application of particular methodologies potentially relates to my own emerging research.

Over the course of her discussion, Ngô attempts to broadly explore the imperial reach of the United States through an investigation of the complexities of the American Jazz Age, an historical period that is often painted as one that, positioned between two world wars, was relatively innocuous and free. Specifically, Ngô argues that “the domestic or national organization of race and sex during the Jazz Age, and in New York as an exemplar of [the] period’s sensibilities, cannot be understood except in the context of the growing ambitions of [the] modern [American] empire” (Ngô 2013, N.p.). In doing so, Ngô attempts to extend the discussion of the Jazz Age beyond its traditional place in the history of the metropolis, and interrogate the intersection between that period and the imperial logic of the United States in the early twentieth century. by extending the understanding of the Jazz Age in that way, then, Ngô is able to establish an analytic framework that is useful to reproduce here in its entirety; for Ngô,

“empire must be a central analytic rather than simply a context for understanding Jazz Age New York because it was an everyday reality of changing urban demographics, and it played a large part in the creative imagination that guided the design of interiors, the making of music, and even the naming of spaces within the Empire City…although imperialism brought people and ideas into a complicated mixture in the city, imperial logic forms the concepts of distance and intimacy…at stake in the mobilization of imperial logic are a breadth of concerns that pertain to the conception and organization of space and subjectivity, especially wrought through unstable categories of race, gender, and sexuality” (Ngô 2013, N.p.).

  In order to establish that framework, Ngô organizes the book in a way that permits the analysis of historical spaces of musical performance that serve as a lens through which it is possible to understand “the modes of racialization, sexual expression, regulatory regimes, and the imperial imagination” (Ngô 2013, N.p.) that defined the United States in the 1920s. As a result, each chapter reflects an attempt to “bring together texts and theories that may at first appear unconnected but whose discursive formations and regimes of representation…show how empire informed the material and symbolic borders of the [New York]” (Ngô 2013, N.p.), and thus the country as a whole. Consequently, Ngô examines the logic of empire on “New York as an imperial metropole and its jazz cultures…and [on] productions of knowledge about the racialized borders of neighborhoods through colonial discourses of invasion and occupation…and [on] practices of local surveillance that drew on the government of empire” (Ngô 2013, N.p.). In turn, Ngô builds upon extant literature in a number of distinct academic fields, including queer studies, women’s/feminist studies, critical race theory, theories of imperialism and the empire, history, sociology, and political science. Thus, Ngô makes use of intersectional methodologies, as well as those presented by Shohat and Nagar (methodologies of empire and imperialism), Harvery (methodologies of space and the creation of urban landscapes), Said (methodologies of the ‘other’), Cotera and Smith (women of color methodologies, material texts as representations of culture), and Puar, Eng, and Ferguson (queer of color methodologies, assemblages).

Applications to Real or Imagined Projects

The work Ngô outlines over th course of Imperial Blues aligns quite well with a project that I completed last year concerning the existence of black-and-tan cabarets in Chicago in the early twentieth century, and the way in which the operation of those urban spaces was facilitated through the establishment and development of public transportation lines throughout the city. Specifically, that project focused on the way in which the black-and-tan cabarets on the city’s South Side provided White residents living outside of Chicago’s Black Belt with a space in which it was possible to navigate the city in a way that was both escapist and voyeuristic. Throughout the process of completing that project, I struggled with some of the questions that Ngô addresses throughout Imperial Blues, and reading it now brings into focus a lot of the things that I was trying to get at with that historically-motivated project a year ago.

With reference to my current anthropological work, however, while my nascent work (I will avoid repeating the details several weeks in a row) deals with questions that are slightly different than the ones addressed by Ngô, insofar as I am interested in asking questions about the state, activism broadly, and women’s movements in the Middle East more specifically, the work presented by Ngô is a clear representation of the way to apply the methodologies that we have discussed over the course the semester. Ngô weaves together a narrative of the Jazz Age in a way that flawlessly acknowledges questions of feminism, interscetionality, representation, perception, and empire. Thus, while the way in which Ngô applies those methodologies (and the questions that Ngô is answering) are not necessarily the way in which I have been thinking about those same methodologies in relation to my own work, the way in which Ngô integrates her methodologies into her text provides a useful example with which to conceptualize the use of particular methodologies in a long-term, sustained project.

Discussion Question(s)

Ngô, like Nash, undertakes a very historically-motivated project that is largely based on archival and textual evidence; as a result, I have some of the same questions that I had for Nash - When undertaking textual projects/materially-based projects of this sort, is the same level of self-reflexivity/self-awareness not needed? In what ways does this impact her work? Is it necessary for historians to place themselves, or acknowledge their potential connection to the work they do (does it matter)?