Hashim Ali--- Imperial Blues

Fiona Ngo’s monograph entitled “Imperial Blues” incorporates queer of color critique and empire as a methodology by adopting “imperial” and “queer” optics in understanding racial and sexual spatiality in the Jazz age New York. Ngo’s argument is multilayered: “empire both opened and resolved crisis of differentiation about the content of the modern through recourse to discourses and practices about space and “Orientalisms” have a significant effect on gender and sexual forms even in the absence of actual oriental bodies” (Ngo, 27).

In her chapter entitled “Queer Modernities” Ngo utilizes “map of the sensible” to make sense of the use of imperial tropes by black queer artists to complement queer of color critique; for example, she suggests the borrowing of European decadent forms including Oscar Wilde by the black queer artist, Nugent.

Why was it inescapable for black queer artists to engage with the hegemonic imperial discourse? Why was being an avant guarde artist an impossibility for artists in such context?

Imperial Blues - Ezra

    Imperial Blues by Fiona I. B. Ngô, is a substantial re-visitation of 1920's and 30's Jazz culture in New York, aimed at moving beyond the prevailing dichotomy of an 'authentic black culture' and its 'white interlopers', to an analysis of how imperialism structured and constrained corporeal intimacies and anxieties, dissolved and re-concretized social proximity, delineated racial boundaries through orientialist discourses, and exoticized spatial reorientations of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Ngô, describes how U.S. imperialism generated a transformation in urban demographics through its induction of immigration and industrialization, resulting in a mixture of people and ideas, imbuing meaning into notions of 'what is national' and 'what is foreign'. Ngô describes Jazz culture itself as a type of contact zone wherein discursive formations of diverse stripes collaborate and co-constitute a palimpsest discourse of race, sexuality and gender. She describes jazz as, " a site  - or an assemblage of spaces [that] draws bodies and movements together with popular and scientific discourses of racialized sexualities across genres of cultural labor, including sexological studies, newspaper reportage, vice investigations, pulp fiction, and experimental literature" (27).
     Furthermore, Ngo turns to the methodology of 'queer of color critique' to unpack analytics of race, gender and sexuality as co-imbricated and mutually sustained. In doing so, she charts out a connection between sexualized/racialized international relations and their effects on modes of surveillance and discipline in domestic populations. Her attention to these dynamics draw from previous theorizations of the biopolitical management of gender and sexuality to identify moments of danger/excitement through the violation and border crossing instantiated in Jazz.


Questions:


For my project I am attempting to relate the literary productions of a transborder anarchist imaginary to the national organization of sexuality, gender and race. However, inasmuch as this research claims to shed light on the interplay between the two, its explicative force relies on the analysis of documents of repression (arrest and deportation records). How can theorizing/amalgamating such disparate archives as part of 'a contact zone' help illuminate the dynamics at play? Is this an artifical application of the rubric? Do 'contact zones' require a pre-existing deliquesce of forms?

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?

Imperial Blues - Glass

It is my first time to read about the Jazz Age from this perspective. In her book that examines the impacts of immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific islands had on empire, nation, race, gender and sexuality as intersections, Ngo posits that “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 growing ambitions of modern US empire (Ngo 2014: 4). Through her examination of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, Ngo takes her work beyond previous investigations of US empire.

Ngo claims that there is an imperial logic is at play, and “the circulation of [this] imperial logic at home helps to justify, and even make necessary, continuing and new colonial and imperial projects in the West and overseas” (Ngo 2014: 6). Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Ngo’s work, in my opinion, is how she declares Harlem as both “the razor’s edge of illegality and degeneracy” (Ngo 2014: 162) and “as a spot of pleasure and importance (Ibid, 164) ultimately arguing that a transnational turn in studying empire shouldn’t mean only studying American influence abroad. Rather, Ngo’s work investigates how (African) American spaces have been constructed through empire.

I enjoyed Ngo’s perspective of empire and the way that black spaces are essentially a culmination of scientific discourses, novel writing combined with newspaper reporting, vice reports, and policing that draws “uneasy parameters of subjectivity and subjection, resistance and assimilation (Ngo 2014: 6). These spaces do not live in a vacuum, and Ngo’s investigation of the impact of empire on these spaces resonates with me.

I can absolutely see this playing out in my future work with politics of motherhood. The discourses around who achieves “mother” and what is seen as clean, natural, good parenting are impacted by the notions of empire and policing of bodies, sexuality, and race. In fact, in my dissertation work, I would like to examine how mothers use social media as a space to create alternative knowledge and build up what it means to be a natural mother. I want to understand the parameters that make up this space and define natural mother; who is permitted in the space undoubtedly leaves out some parents who have been deemed “other.”  These non-white, usually non-middle to upper class and sometimes even queer mothers are prevented from achieving “good mother” per these discourses an the paremeter of these spaces.

How do public health discourses work as a means of empire? What about public health discourses that are geared specifically toward trying to “fix” and “un-other” non white mothers?

Imperial Blues-Alexia Bacon

In Imperial Blues by Ngo examines the cultural happenings during the Jazz Age in New York.  The author navigates the Jazz Age using the lens of empire.  In order to look at the scope of this period Ngo makes it clear the importance of studying this past, the boarders of the United States, and to take into consideration the influence of Imperialism during this time.  Ngo uses examples of imperialism in New York that came up in space, bodies, and gender.  The Methodology that the author uses is the blurring of boundaries in order to process how imperialism forms conceptions of race, sex, and gender.

I appreciated how Ngo uses social histories, along with literary texts, and the meaning behind music lyrics in her work.  Her research led me to reflect on Chicago’s own neighborhoods.  Chicago is not only extremely segregated, but several of the neighborhoods in the city are experiencing gentrification.  This also caused me to think of the work I am doing with young people.  I work in one neighborhood school where the neighborhood is being gentrified, I can draw certain parallels from Ngo’s book that align with the stories and narratives of the young people that I work with, or thinking how their stories change and/or are effected by new cultural narratives that are influencing them.

Discussion Question

·      Much of the chapters focus on the power of personal narratives and subjectivity, with this thought I wonder how much power should be given to “stories” within research? Is this applicable to various forms of research or does this only work in specific subjects/situations?

·      How does the gentrification in Chicago effect people’s narratives of the culture of neighborhoods their families may have lived in for decades?