Marla ~ Imperial Blues

Ngo employs social history, ethnography, queer studies, and analysis of literary, visual and musical text in order to recast Jazz Age New York—its cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs—as sites of negotiation for discourse of empire. For Ngo, “empire must be a central analytic…because it was an everyday reality…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” (4).

While earlier works have explored the meanings of similar spaces (Alvarez’s The Power of the Zoot, Chauncey’s Gay New York, Mumford’s Interzones), it is not until Imperial Blues that we can also see the impact of “imperial logic” in the creation and policing of these sites of leisure, which Ngo analyzes as spaces that created the “complex conditions for contact,” revealing the “connections and collaborations between domestic and imperial discourses” of gender, sexuality, and race (4-5).

In Chapter One, Ngo connects the spread of U.S imperial power to domestic demographic shifts, with New York “a key site for understanding the consequences.” As a “contact zone,” the jazz scene “drew attention to the anxieties caused by the increasing breadth and breach of national borders,” so the same “imperial logic, which informed immigration legislation and national security, was also imposed on the bodies of immigrants and other city dwellers…to police and monitor sexual activity” (34-35, 37).

In Chapter Four, Ngo explores the ways “imperial logic” reinforced power relations via domestic colonialism as “signs and symbols of the Orient provided references for containing and displacing racialized populations imagined to be unruly, sexually deviant, and dangerously uncivilized” (156-158).

Ngo is articulating an imperial relationship, linking the empire to the metropole, in a way that I have wanted to in my own project. What might Ngo’s “imperial logic” look like in a later period, specifically the 1960s? How might “imperial logic” also apply to domestic migrations? What “contact zones” might exist for the children of migrants, both imperial and domestic? Might the streets and alleyways where “potentially delinquent” girls and young women gathered in Chicago be considered “contact zones,” complicating the causes of anxiety about the behaviors perceived to be happening there?