Imperial Blues

Imperial Blues
G e o g r a p h i e s o f R ac e a n d S e x

i n J a z z Ag e N e w Yo r k

Fiona I. B. Ngô

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2014
 © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Ngô, Fiona I. B.
Imperial blues : geographies of race and sex in
jazz age New York / Fiona I. B. Ngô.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5524-­3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5539-­7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Arts and society—New York (State)—New York—
History—20th century.
2. Immigrants—New York (State)—New York—
Intellectual life—20th century.
3. Minorities—New York (State)—New York—
Intellectual life—20th century.
4. Imperialism. I. Title.
f128.9.a1n46 2013
305.8009747—dc23 2013025466

Excerpts from Richard Bruce Nugent’s unpublished manuscript

“The Geisha Man” (1928) in chapter 2 © Thomas H. Wirth 2002, 2013.
“Araby” by Irving Berlin (lyrics in chapter 4) © 1915 Irving Berlin.
Copyright renewed. International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Irving Berlin © 1928, 1929 by Irving Berlin.
Copyright renewed. International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
 Contents

Acknowledgments | vii

Introduction | 1

Chapter One | 33
Desire and Danger in Jazz’s Contact Zones

Chapter Two | 71
Queer Modernities

Chapter Three | 121
Orienting Subjectivities

Chapter Four | 155
Dreaming of Araby

Conclusion | 187
Academic Indiscretions

Notes | 193
Bibliography | 231
Index | 251
 Acknowledgments

First, I’d like to thank the folks at Duke University Press for all
their help in getting this project into shape, especially Ken Wis-
soker, Jade Brooks, Danielle Szulczewski, and Heather Hensley.
Jeanne Ferris is a great copyeditor, and this book reads better
for her hard work. I also wish to thank the Crisis Publishing
Co., the publisher of the magazine of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (now known as the
naacp), for the use of the material first published in the Sep-
tember 1928 issue of Crisis Magazine. Sean Metzger, Gina Mas-
quesmay, and the folks at Lexington Books published an early
version of my first chapter in Embodying Asian/American Sexu-
alities. Thomas Wirth generously provided access to Richard
Bruce Nugent’s manuscripts and art and introduced me to the
Negroni, Nugent’s drink of choice. I would also like to thank
all the archivists and librarians at the Lesbian Herstory Archive,
Columbia University Oral History Archives, New York City De-
partment of Records and Information Services, New York Public
Library (nypl) Center for Humanities, nypl Performing Arts
Library, nypl Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University,
Bancroft Library at the University of California (uc), Berkeley,
and the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign.
I would also like to thank the students, staff, postdocs, and
faculty of the programs and departments that have housed me
during this long process: UC Irvine’s History Department, Loy-
ola Marymount’s American Cultures Program, the University of Ore-
gon’s Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Department of Gender and
Women’s Studies and Department of Asian American Studies at the Uni-
versity of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign. All the help—from answering my
inane questions about where supplies have been moved to and making
sure that my documents arrived on time to encouraging my intellectual
development—has been indispensable. My dissertation committee, whose
members may not even recognize this project at this point, consisted of
Alice Fahs, who has been a wonderful model for me in navigating my job;
Jon Wiener, who keeps the political import of the academy alive; and Bob
Moeller, who taught me how to be a patient researcher and how to teach.
I would also like to thank all the incredible students I have had over the
years, including Ma Vang, Kit Myers, Margarita Smith, Lezlie Frye, Khanh
Lê, Chris Finley, Angie Morrill, Leslie Riggs, Beverly Zoll, Mark Padoong-
patt, Ari Divine, Christine Kolb, Héctor Miramontes, Michael Eaves, Katie
Barry, Bess van Asselt, Angeline Shea, Ashley Zamora, Eric Roth, Sarah
Phillips, Ashley DeGroot, Christa Kivarkis, Stephanie Murphy, and Liz
Verklan. All these students and many others have sustained me, pushed
me to learn new things and become more articulate, and reminded me why
education is still important.
A number of folks have been kind enough to read parts and drafts of
this manuscript. Their comments, advice, and acumen have made the book
better in every way. Thanks to Roderick Ferguson, Sherrie Tucker, Chantal
Nadeau, and Jerry Gonzalez. Emily Skidmore gave me great comments on
a draft of this book and also worked as my research assistant. I can’t wait to
read her book! A big shout out to Siobhan Somerville and Moon-­Kie Jung,
who not only have read earlier forms of this book, but have taken time to
mentor me and teach me how to exist ethically in institutions.
This book would not have been possible without the love and support of
my friends and family. Both my parents have done time in various capaci-
ties in academic institutions. Their love, support, guidance, and advice
have helped me through some of the most difficult of times. So thanks,
Mom, for all those hours-­long phone calls and for making me do times
tables while rolling meatballs! And thanks to my father, whose exploits at
trad jazz basement shows in mid-­century London serve as proper inspi-
ration for this project. My brothers and their families have served as in-
spirations because they are so smart, creative, and nice. Thanks, Ian, for

viii | Acknowledgments
buying my first guitar. It turned into this book. I have cherished some of
the most confused, funny, and heartening phone calls with Nalini, Caden,
and Asha. Caden’s drawing of a hammerhead shark floating in air next to
a tree reminds me to think against regimes of common sense. Asha’s punk
performances make me long for modes of resistance. Robin, you are one of
the smartest guys I know. Amazingly, you always seem to know everything
about everything. Whenever I see Kathy and Nigel, warmth fills my heart.
Nigel’s enthusiasm for, well, every single activity reminds me to live joy-
fully. Colin in particular did hands-­on work for this book, telling me that
what I thought was a clarinet was in fact a soprano saxophone, and helping
me transcribe music. He and the incomparable Aimee generously let me
stay at their place whenever I had research to do in New York. You two are
the best, or maybe just the best eaters.
My friends, who often seem like family, have gotten to witness this
project develop on a (sometimes almost painful) daily basis. They have
provided me with food, love, laughter, incredulity, and even places to stay
and airline tickets when I was down and out. They have also taught me how
to vacation and how to work without going crazy. Beth Stinson is one of my
oldest friends. We have joyfully collaborated as bandmates, coeditors, and
coconspirators. She often knows what I am thinking before I do. Thanks,
especially, for taking a first run through my footnotes and bibliography
and for staying up all night with me to turn in drafts. Mariam Lâm is super
smart and generous, and seemingly has endless energy. It has been a genu-
ine pleasure to collaborate with her. She is always welcoming and full of
warmth and cleverness. The perceptive Mike Masatsugu provides me with
another model of what it means to be a good person. Here’s to the every-
day! It was great to be a postdoc with him and Chris Lee, super genius.
Jennifer Allen made me into a mind warrior. That takes a lot of skill. Robert
Martinez kept me sane with his willingness to always hit the court. Bruce
Manning and Blake Manning Wong, may the force be with you. Thanks for
using your powers for good instead of evil. Dustin Allred has not said “no”
to writing a book with me. I am always impressed that he can discourse on
art, survive in a forest while eating ants, and fly planes. That’s cool. Max
is cool, too. Ian Sprandel has given me some of the most vaguely positive
and useful advice I’ve received, and is always welcoming, loving, licking,
and cooking. Also, Luciano looks like a keeper. Stephen Hocker, what a
tart. Seriously, he is a great pastry chef and a great friend, a gentleman and

Acknowledgments | ix
a scholar. David Coyoca really tried to make me a better writer, and when
that didn’t work, he made me a great cocktail.
I have also been blessed with the best writing companions ever. The
ebullient Mireya Loza cheers for everybody. Karen Flynn has finally joined
the (grading) party! Ruth Nicole Brown is creative and productive, and
often chooses to do things the hard way. In short, she inspires. Yutian
Wong smiles and demands the best and most work from me in a way that
makes me want only to thank her. She also knows everything about every-
thing and has the best real and fake ideas for book projects. I hope to join
her someday at the Giant Bonsai Institute because her intellect touches so
much of my own work. Isabel Molina has always opened her home to me,
has provided career guidance, and, most importantly, has been an admi-
rable example of how to cheerfully destroy institutions from the inside.
Unfortunately for Lisa Cacho, she’s the one I consult and lean on when I’m
totally wrecked. These moments often call on her broad set of skills, her
intelligence, and her patience. She is one of the smartest people I know, and
she never holds that against me. Soo Ah Kwon has sat down with me almost
every day for almost two years. She starts the clock so that we both get work
done. She is levelheaded, has a can-­do attitude, and has given me insight
into how the popular kids live. I really, really could not have finished this
book on this timetable without her.
Mimi Thi Nguyen is that rare combination of public intellectual, aca-
demic, and punk as fuck zinester. I am glad all over that she is in my life,
and would like to thank the Council of Magical Creatures for sending her
to the Land of Time. Her raw intelligence sustains me, and her presence
reminds me that I am free to fight. She always indulges me, even when it
is difficult. In addition to that, she is the most beautiful, bravest, smartest,
and kindest person I know. Morton is second.

x | Acknowledgments
 Introduction

F
“ olks, now here’s a story ’bout Minnie the Moocher / She
was a red-­hot hoochy coocher” is the beginning of one of
the most famous songs of the Jazz Age. Cab Calloway and
His Orchestra first recorded “Minnie the Moocher” in Decem-
ber 1930, while Calloway was presiding over Harlem’s world-­
famous Cotton Club in the absence of Duke Ellington and the
club’s regular orchestra, who were then touring and making
films in Hollywood. Perhaps the most famous “black and tan”
nightclub, where white patrons reveled in black pageantry, the
mob-­owned Cotton Club has come to represent the sundry de-
lights of the Jazz Age.1 A New Woman and New Negro, Min-
nie signified an age of newfound freedoms. The story Calloway’s
song spins about black womanhood, however, is multiracial and
spatial in nature. Minnie’s exotic, erotic dancing—named the
“hoochy coochy” in the song—was a fusion of “authentic” and
fantastical forms of belly dancing borrowed from an imagined
Orient, and in the course of her adventures, Minnie travels the
length of Manhattan and finds herself in an opium den in China-
town. This song, then, provides a complicated snapshot of Jazz
Age New York, in which we find not just the Harlem of black
entertainers and white interlopers, but a complex, multiracial,
imperial cityscape.
In Jazz Age New York, exotic tropes of empire had captured
the imaginations of city denizens. Nightclubs featured perfor-
mances and décor inspired by idyllic dreams of island paradises;
cabarets, speakeasies, dance halls, and the sheet music of Tin Pan Alley
teemed with jangling tunes infected with orientalist themes and images.
Even the Cotton Club, renowned for its “high-­yaller girls” and great orches-
tras, traded in other forms of exotica. Furbished with a plantation façade,
palm trees, and other signposts of warmer climes, the club’s interior simul-
taneously recalled the U.S. South, Africa, Latin America, and the islands
of the Pacific and Caribbean. “Minnie the Moocher,” with its reference to
belly dancing, and other popular tunes such as “In Harlem’s Araby,” “Pale-
steena,” and “The Sheik of Araby” contained fantasies of Arabia, made
popular in part through Hollywood spectacles. Performed nightly in New
York’s speakeasies, cabarets, and nightclubs, the hoochy coochy marked
its dancers, like Minnie, as sexual creatures with an exotic allure. One titil-
lated vice investigator, describing a performance of the hoochy coochy, ob-
served that the dancer stood in “one spot for about five minutes and simply
wiggled her body around the middle from her waist down to a little below
her hips, in such a way as to suggest that that part of her body was a uni-
versal joint.”2 Calling on an imperial language of strangeness and sexual
aberration, the disturbed vice investigator reported these movements as
an oriental corruption that “released” dancers from bourgeois respect-
ability. Indeed, for many New Women, orientalist forms became signs of
self-­possession, a way of mastering their bodies and their fates through
a mastery of the Orient. However, such performances also brought some
women to the notice of disciplinary powers, which perceived such women
as perversely intimate with racialized wickedness. This imperial logic was
thus double-­edged. Minnie is described as “the roughest, toughest frail,”
but by the song’s end, she is strung out on opium, a pitiable figure (“Poor
Min, poor Min, poor Min”). In some versions of the song, she is left for
dead. The same imperial markers that attract the listener to her also bring
her to her end.
The musical scene set by Calloway’s signature tune includes other ques-
tions of travel, and not just white adventurers journeying to Harlem’s Cot-
ton Club to encounter black performers. Not only were nightclubs filled
with the sights and sounds of distant continents and tropical islands, but
travelers from around the world—including the multiple outposts of the
United States—made their ways through the city streets and spaces of
nightlife. New migrants from the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii,
Mexico, Japan, and China crossed paths with black Harlemites and white

2 | Introduction
“slummers” in dance halls and speakeasies. Such movements traversed the
city, but as one consequence of imperial reach, they also reconceived its
ordering through more complicated racial and spatial schema. Though
New York was often imagined as a city of discrete neighborhoods whose
cartographies delineated racial boundaries—black people in Harlem, be-
tween 110th and 142nd Streets; Chinese migrants in Chinatown, around
Mott Street; Jewish families near Delancey Street on the Lower East Side;
and so forth—this song, like other cultural productions of the time, dem-
onstrates that such boundaries were indeed traversable by neighborhood
inhabitants, across the island of Manhattan. This is a simple fact, but one
that troubles often presumptive racializations of neighborhoods that de-
sign and desire separable and static racial and national categories. Minnie’s
tale begins with a hoochy coochy in Harlem, but she travels downtown
with her lover to an opium den in Chinatown: “Now she messed around
with a bloke named Smoky / She loved him though he was cokie / He took
her down to Chinatown / He showed her how to kick the gong around.”
Here, and in the later song “Kickin’ the Gong Around” (slang for smoking
opium), Chinatown is a foreign destination, where lawless people find plea-
sure in illicit deeds. In such stagings of multitudinous travels across oceans
and over thoroughfares, gender and sexual forms are transfigured not only
through interracial mixing, but also through the transnational production
of space as it remaps the imperial city.
These strange encounters present a novel account of the crucial presence
of empire in Jazz Age New York. Imperial Blues offers a study of empire at
home, one that critically rearticulates urban history and possible stories
about race, gender, and sexuality in the United States in the early part of
the twentieth century. This book suggests that without a new consideration
of how empire circulated in everyday life to inform and transform national
subjects and their understandings of the categories that defined their con-
ceptions of home and away, friend and stranger, we cannot comprehend
the complexities of how race and sexuality in the United States were lived in
the interwar years that comprise the Jazz Age. For the most part, discourses
of race in Jazz Age New York are framed around black and white dichoto-
mies.3 In regarding the city not as a discrete object of study but as a global
center for economic development and creative labor, Imperial Blues moves
beyond the “black and tan” to examine the considerably more complicated
borders and border crossings of the Jazz Age. Studies that investigate inter-

Introduction | 3
sections between Asian American and African American cultural practices
and political discourses are proliferating, though these studies base their
categories on the U.S. context.4 Taking Jazz Age music cultures as both a
cue and a circuit, this book pursues those intersections that are transna-
tional in nature. I ask, for instance, how did immigration from Asia, the
Caribbean, and Latin America transform city living and the imagination of
artists in this critical interwar period? Furthermore, how did the imperial
reach of the United States—or, indeed, its ties to other empires—shape
these vibrant metropolitan cultures? How did the increasing prominence
of eugenics and sexology as sciences of biological distinction and manage-
ment traverse national and other borders? How did political upheavals sur-
rounding women’s suffrage and continuing racial antagonisms manifest in
Jim Crow and anti-­immigration legislation influence governance, particu-
larly in relation to imperial gendered, sexual, and racial formations? I pro-
pose that the traffic in these bodies and the crises of knowledge about them
serve as evidence that the United States as a nation, an ideology, and a con-
cept has always been permeable and heterogeneous across its populations
and perimeters. Imperial Blues thus argues 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 the growing ambitions of modern U.S. empire.
For me, 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 served as a basis for meaning making. Imperial logic forms concepts
of distance and intimacy. The connections between peoples and places pro-
duce complex conditions for contact, through which a nation or an empire
relates stories of its past and establishes the cultures of its diverse subjects
in the present. 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, gen-
der, and sexuality, which often serve as a way to envision and wield power.5
Revisiting the Jazz Age through the lens of imperialism renders visible (as
well as audible) previously underacknowledged connections and collabo-

4 | Introduction
rations between domestic and imperial discourses of race and empire. I
demonstrate that the domestic and the foreign are intertwined, and that
modes of transgression and regulation emerge through their dense link-
ages. By approaching the cultural landscape of Jazz Age New York through
the logic of empire, it becomes possible to analyze formations of identity
within the nation by understanding both the influence of New York beyond
its borders and more intimate circumstances through the movements of
bodies in the city.
Imperial logic labors through a sometimes contradictory flow of signs.
My contention is that it manifests itself through the complex workings
of referentiality, and that the spaces, objects, and bodies that act as signs
of empire are mutable. In other words, a geographic marker of China or
Hawaii or Cuba might be repositioned in the city through a club’s interior
design, the placement of silk pajamas or pillows in a bordello, or the nam-
ing of a cabaret or restaurant. While this spatial reorientation may seem
insignificant, these kinds of renamings and replacings were modes of exoti-
cization and titillation designed to lure clients off the streets and into these
places of business through signs of empire. Imperialism, then, was a way to
understand pleasure, consumption, and sexuality. Furthermore, the muta-
bility of signs might also mean that imperially derived meanings could be
transferred from one type of body to another. For example, although we
might be used to thinking of Asian bodies as orientalized or orientalizable,
white, black, and brown bodies could also be orientalized. Artists such
as Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thur-
man, and countless chorus girls from Broadway and nightclub floor shows
might put on the accouterment of the Orient for various purposes: to sub-
jectivize or eroticize themselves, to build narratives of resistance to empire,
or to prove their cosmopolitan sensibility. Importantly, then, 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.
At stake in the mobility of meaning is the way that power structures
people’s life chances and access to subjectivity, as well as the way it valu-
ates difference, whether it is racial, spatial, gendered, national, or sexual.
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

Introduction | 5
colonization. But the meanings enacted through these understandings of
spatial and national relationships are not uniform, as the power structure
offers diverse modes of narrative identification that help produce particu-
lar subject positions within social systems. These subject positions include
those of a dominant citizen, a resistant artist, a social and moral outsider,
a knowledge-producing collector of artifacts and songs, and an artist ex-
ploring a historical racial past, depending on whether one identifies with
the colonizer or the colonized and how one understands that identifica-
tion. Because a complex of meanings is produced through imperial logic,
the use of imperial imagery in aesthetic production often speaks both to
the modes of resistance and, simultaneously, to the limits of that resistance
through regulation. For instance, the logic in a song like Porter Grainger’s
“In Harlem’s Araby” might signal the sexual and gendered freedom of a
neighborhood space by comparing it with an imagined Orient, but through
this signaling it might also hail regulatory bodies to that space so that it
might be policed. The logic, then, both in resistance and regulation, relies
on making city space and its inhabitants strange through ideas of distant
(and distancing) imperium, even while one celebrates that difference and
the other attempts to control it. The narrating of imperial difference and its
valuing become the basis for how people might be treated in these spaces
and gives rise both to a discourse of internal colonialism and to a language
for sexual and racial experimentation. Furthermore, as imperial logic is
domesticated, it helps to make sense of the continuing need for imperial
and colonial practice. In other words, the circulation of imperial logic at
home helps to justify, and even make necessary, continuing and new colo-
nial and imperial projects in the West and overseas.
Imperial Blues considers how jazz cultures are a particularly useful site
for investigating these connections, working as a contact zone for a multi-
plicity of discourses and practices anchored in imperial logic. This book
defines jazz cultures broadly, as places where nightlife, music and dance
performance, art making, and novel writing collide with newspaper re-
portage, the scientific discourses of sociology and sexology, vice reports,
and policing, and it draws the uneasy parameters of subjectivity and sub-
jection, resistance and assimilation. Although this text is about jazz cul-
tures, my focus is not always on the music, but often on spaces of musical
performance. In order to understand the modes of racialization, sexual
expression, regulatory regimes, and the imperial imagination, I inter-

6 | Introduction
est myself more broadly in the context in which jazz is played in public;
the dances that might accompany jazz performance; floor shows; novelty
songs; theatre; yellow journalism reporting on the chaos of the Jazz Age;
music-­oriented fiction, poetry, and graphic art; and vice reports aimed at
monitoring and regulating this context. In doing so, I bring together texts
and theories that may at first appear unconnected but whose discursive
formations and regimes of representation often overlap, in order to show
how empire informed the material and symbolic borders of the city. In this
way, I hope to uncover the context that helps to make meaning for jazz.
For example, in chapters 1 and 3, I examine the city’s extravagant, multi-
ethnic, multiracial, and polysexual ball scenes, where dancers crossdressed
and wore costumes signaling imperial time and space from around the
globe and throughout history. While these scenes were monitored by police
and vice investigators, and the sexuality of the participants questioned in
scientific reports, the mixing of people from various neighborhoods and
countries created new meanings for space that simultaneously drew on
and challenged discourses of empire. The alternative archive in which this
book is situated provides new opportunities to work through these pro-
ductive, repressive, and transgressive strains of jazz cultures as discursive
inventions and improvisations tethered to the expansion of empire. Jazz
cultures, I argue, are a key site for intimacies between colony and metro-
pole, between the realms of art and science, between bodies across bound-
aries, and the other vectors of contact and encounter that form the heart
of this book.
Central to this book’s discussion of the logic of empire, orientalisms
made the distant proximate, the national intimate, and the domestic for-
eign. Performances of the “Orient,” through the hoochy coochy dancer or
the cabaret’s chinoiserie, brought its signs and symbols closer and ascribed
to these bodies and spaces discourses of oriental sexual excess as promis-
cuity, (queer) perversion, or liberation from bourgeois norms—sometimes
all three at once. Orientalisms also described and circumscribed the bodies
and movements of Asians and Asian Americans who entered spaces of
nightlife, mingling there with other members of the city’s multiracial popu-
lace. Both imperial fantasies and diasporics’ joint presence speak to epis-
temological and material intimacies across continents. In her important
essay “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” Lisa Lowe uses three meanings
of intimacy in defining the “intimacies of four continents”: first, intimacy

Introduction | 7
as “spatial proximity or adjacent connection,” as in the case of “the political
economic logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were
forcibly transported to the Americas”; second, as the biopolitical manage-
ment of forms of gender and sexuality within (and without) the bounded
bourgeois private sphere; and third, as “the volatile contacts of colonized
peoples,” including sexual, laboring, and intellectual contacts that often
involved fears of racial mixture and unstable social order.6 Lowe’s schema
provides a way to understand how imperial logic underlies aesthetic pro-
duction in the Jazz Age, guided by new and continuing forms of empire.
These frameworks are especially useful for thinking about jazz cultures
through the multiple modes of intimacy that brought people together
across national borders and that directed and regulated the forms of desire
and anxiety circulating among them. Such intimacies between continents
are brought to bear on the close encounters found in nightclubs and caba-
rets and balls and bedrooms, where imperial logic transformatively im-
pacted encounters between empires, nations, and bodies.
Imperial Blues moves along these geographies to analyze the logic of
empire on, first, New York as an imperial metropole and its jazz cultures,
through which various racialized and nationalized groups were resignified
by the circulations of imperial logic and signs, whether dangerous embodi-
ments of sexual savagery or sensual seduction located on particular bodies
in the dance hall; second, productions of knowledge about the racialized
borders of neighborhoods through colonial discourses of invasion and oc-
cupation; and third, practices of local surveillance that drew on the govern-
ment of empire. In this project, then, imperial logic shaped the movements
of individuals and populations, as well as the construction of categories
that engendered new forms of creative expression and claims to imperial
selfhood.

Imperial City

How did these intimacies come to be? What accounts for the imperial
imagination in the Jazz Age? What effect did the presence of new immi-
grants from imperial outposts have on shifting currents of culture and poli-
tics in the city? How did they fit into a domestic racial order? How were
they fathomed through prevailing and emerging discourses about sexual
perversity or biological degeneration? How did the signs and symbols of
the places the immigrants had left—or had never known, because so many

8 | Introduction
of these signs and symbols were already hybrid in their origins—follow
them to this imperial city? Together, these issues begin to explain the rela-
tions of love and hatred (and indifference), and of intimacy and distance
between bodies and between continents, that played out within New York’s
public cultures.
If jazz cultures act as a contact zone, the first question I want to address
is who is in that zone of contact. To do this, I turn to some demographic
information that shows that immigration, caused in part by U.S. imperial
expansion and the aftermath of World War I, made New York an extremely
diverse space. The diversity of the urban landscape, however, did not mean
that there was equality between participants in New York’s nightlife; rather,
the melting pot was set to an anxious simmer. The influx of new U.S. na-
tionals, the movement of people of color from southern states to northern
cities, and their interactions with the people already there were considered
fraught with peril. Often narrated as a danger to white women, interactions
between races were sexualized, criminalized, and otherwise made strange
through the use of imperial logic. This meant that people at once found the
city space invigorating and in need of regulation. In this section, I explore
the making of this multiracial space and begin to point to the anxieties
these shifting demographic arrangements caused.
Much of the great shift in New York’s population during the Jazz Age was
accounted for by immigrants from imperial sites and Europeans trying to
make a new start following World War I. Migration internal to the United
States accounted for another significant change in population, as workers
from rural parts of the U.S. South moved to industrialized northern cities.
New York City’s population demonstrated these dramatic transformations
wrought by war and industry. During the Great Migration following World
War I, three-­quarters of a million African Americans left the South to work
and settle in industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New
York.7 In New York City alone, the black population grew from less than
100,000 in 1910 to more than 300,000 two decades later.8 Furthermore,
rapid industrialization as well as “massive troop deployments during im-
perialist expansion and occupation, the World Wars, and other military
projects” moved hundreds of thousands of working- and middle-­class men
(and some women) to city centers.9 In addition to these internal migra-
tions, successive waves of documented and undocumented immigrants
continued to enter the country, many from places with which the United

Introduction | 9
States had histories of economic and imperial relations. Immigrants from
Canada, China, Japan, the Philippines, Western and Eastern Europe, the
Pacific Islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other Caribbean nations made up a
growing percentage of New York City’s population. Sailors and merchants
from imperial outposts followed trade routes and troop deployments to
new ports along the U.S. imperial archipelago. Taken together, these mi-
grations force us to widen our understandings of race in Jazz Age New
York beyond a dichotomous color line, thinking instead in terms of a larger
colonial and imperial scope through which New York becomes an imperial
city that might also tell stories about the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Malaysia, Thailand, and the Pacific Islands, as well as European settlement
and African diaspora.
The kinds of racial, national, gendered, and sexual contact that occurred
in the city, imagined through colonial actions and brought about by im-
perialism, also bear the burden of representation that inscribed modernity
on the streets of New York in the Jazz Age. Indeed, scholars in postcolonial
studies have long theorized that the colonies were influential in shaping the
metropole and have connected that influence with the production of ideas
of “the modern.” 10 This is an apt description of New York City in the Jazz
Age. The very name of the period that began after World War I and lasted
into the Great Depression—the Jazz Age, a term coined by the novelist
F. Scott Fitzgerald—was shot through with such contradictions. Named
for the popular music that was understood to capture the modern spirit
as the U.S. empire marched across the globe, the Jazz Age usefully gathers
the threads of contact and movement between parts of the world, though
these were hardly experienced in the same way by everyone. The end of
the transatlantic slave trade in the preceding decades had been followed
by waves of “free” indentured laborers from Asia (often called coolies),
arriving to work in Hawaii, California, and New York.11 At the turn of the
century, the U.S. empire swelled with the acquisition of Mexican territo-
ries, violence against and displacement of indigenous populations, and the
wartime acquisition of Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Panama, and the
Philippines. These instances of both material and symbolic racial violence
also enabled great leaps in technological progress and economic prosperity,
encouraging the growth of industrial capital and urbanization and creating
and circulating new consumer goods and entertainments. These modes of
explaining, selling, and regulating the city became marks of modernity,

10 | Introduction
and New York situated itself as the Empire City within a cultural and social
global economy.
The production of urban space through imperial discourses and through
a shifting population also provided the means for the creation of a modern
aesthetic culture. That is, aesthetic production in the Jazz Age was guided
through imperial metaphor, read as dangerous through interracial con-
tact, and rendered alluring through the sexualization of space. Indeed, the
development of the modern city in the early twentieth century, Raymond
Williams observes, had much “to do with imperialism: with the magnetic
concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and the simul-
taneous cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures.”
“Within many capital cities,” he continues, “and especially within the major
metropolises, there was at once a complexity and a sophistication of social
relations, supplemented in the most important cases . . . by exceptional lib-
erties of expression.” 12 These liberties of expression, I would argue, were
grounded in imperial logic—a logic that might in some situations fight
against the domestic social order, and in other instances might help main-
tain that social order. Aesthetic modernisms such as Art Deco and primi-
tivism drew inspiration from colonial aesthetics, while the New Woman
who danced the fox-­trot and bound her breasts ushered in for some people
a newly streamlined modern femininity, for instance. This abundance and
avant-­gardism was countered, however, by tempering forces, including
Prohibition and other civilian and state stratagems to curb “vice,” which
saw a moral crisis in such rapid metamorphosis. Indeed, these shifting cur-
rents of sounds and images, politics and art, proved to be both disquieting
and vitalizing.
In fact, the presence of all the world’s peoples gathered together on this
island metropolis was mobilized to fashion U.S. exceptionalism as a global
spirit and a global culture. New York City was (and still is) understood as a
crossroad of the world, and thus some of its denizens imagined themselves
as world travelers, even if they did not leave the city. Especially during the
Jazz Age, city restaurants, nightclubs, speakeasies, and cabarets made ref-
erence to this U.S. exceptionalism through far-­flung geographic references,
such as the names of the Roumanian Restaurant Inn, the Moscow Inn, the
Parisian, Egyptian Garden, the Hacienda Club, Chez Mecca, the Riviera,
the Coconut Grove, the International Café, Sugar Cane Inn, the Russian
Palace, Bolivar Café, the Tokio, and the Little World Café.13 These names

Introduction | 11
connected city to empire as the United States stretched into the Pacific,
the Caribbean, and Central and South America, and they reflected the ex-
periences of travel and displacement of migrants and refugees caused by
World War I and U.S. imperial expansion. We might observe further that
these contact zones enacted a sort of racial liberalism, inasmuch as new
immigrants might be perceived in what Carrie Tirado Bramen names an
“urban picturesque,” which contributed the “best” of the world’s unique
cultures to the United States as a global exemplar. In this manner, Bramen
argues, “the urban picturesque was an important vehicle for transform-
ing immigrants from social threats to cultural resources, as signs of an
urban identity but also of a national one. It was part of a cosmopolitanism
with modern Americanism.” 14 It would be no understatement to say that
the imperial imagination of the co-­presence and encounter of peoples and
places from around the globe within the city ascribed meaning to those
people, those spaces, and New York City as a whole, although, importantly,
power across these geographies of scale might be distributed unevenly.
The notion of racial and ethnic tourism that work like Bramen’s relies
on made sense to tourists and city residents alike, but it told only part of
the story of race, ethnicity, and sexuality in New York’s neighborhoods.
Those neighborhoods were, and still are, marked by racial and ethnic sig-
nifiers, but the neighborhoods’ boundaries were imminently permeable,
and their populations were much more diverse than the schematic ren-
derings would have one believe. Harlem, for instance, was a neighborhood
marked by blackness. It was most often described as a site of black natives
and white interlopers, but Asians, Latinos, people from the Caribbean, and
some white ethnics also populated what was often referred to as the colony
of Harlem.15 Alongside the black and white flâneurs and flâneuses who
promenaded along its avenues, Asian and Italian immigrants also carved
out a niche within the bustling metropolis.16 Harlem’s black denizens them-
selves were quite diverse, with 40 percent being foreign-­born migrants.17
The Harlem Renaissance journalist, novelist, and playwright Wallace Thur-
man notes: “There is no typical Harlem Negro as there is no typical Ameri-
can Negro. There are too many different types and classes. White, yellow,
brown and black and all the intervening shades. North American, South
American, African and Asian; Northerner and Southerner.” 18 In an essay
on the “real Harlem,” Thurman and William Jourdan Rapp observe:

12 | Introduction
 Like New York, Harlem is a cosmopolitan city. Its people are as varied
and polyglot as could be found anywhere. The whites indiscriminately
lump them together as “Negroes” or “niggers.” But they are really un-
classifiable under any existent ethnic term, for the racial complexity of
the American Negro is astounding. In his veins flows the mixed bloods
of the Africans from whom he originally stemmed, the American Indi-
ans with whom he intermarried in pre- and post-­slavery days, and of
every white race under the sun. And then in Harlem this home-­grown
ethnic amalgam is associating and inter-­mixing with Negroes from the
Antipodes and Caribees, from Africa and Asia, South America and
every other place that dark-­skinned people hail from.19

Cosmopolitan and polyglot, connected to nations and peoples across the

globe, Harlem’s spatial and racial narration stretched to make present and
proximate the multiple histories of colonialism and imperialism that con-
structed New York’s heterogeneous population. Furthermore, imperialism,
as a heuristic device, exposes the black-­white binary that often character-
izes scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance as inadequate to describing
blackness, whiteness, or the plethora of imperial subjects visiting and living
in Manhattan. The work before you, then, in lieu of presenting a stable, un-
troubled mapping of the racial and ethnic neighborhoods of Manhattan,
suggests that the borders between neighborhoods—and, indeed, between
cities, regions, and nations—is always already varied.
Restaurants and spaces of nightlife provided prime real estate for this
kind of intermingling and neighborhood border crossing. Indeed, a typi-
cal space for jazz culture, like a dance hall, demonstrates how these forms
of racial contact, which were simultaneously erased by the idea of racially
bordered neighborhoods and monitored because those borders were never
secure, caused a variety of reactions from city inhabitants and city fathers.
Intertwining the presence of Asian immigrants with black creative endeav-
ors, empire sets a context for, but is also sited in, the dance hall. The dance
hall acts as one useful space I pursue in this book to investigate the mul-
tiple connections that extend across oceans and national borders, across
histories of racial labor, across techniques and methods of representation,
across scientific imperatives and aesthetic movements, across kinetic ener-
gies bounding between jangling limbs and pursed lips. The movements of
so many people from so many places failed to escape the notice of civic

Introduction | 13
authorities, who viewed such promiscuous contact as a social threat. Al-
though the mixing of peoples and cultures allowed New York to boast of its
cosmopolitan character, it also led to innumerable moral panics.
Painted as corrupting, sexualized contact between races was part and
parcel of the Jazz Age’s zeitgeist, which embraced the exuberance of a space
like the dance hall but also controlled what was viewed as deleterious be-
havior. This era ushered in the pernicious passage of anti-­immigrant legis-
lation, bolstered by the eugenic sciences that sought to sharply curb the
presence of supposedly inferior stock inside the nation’s boundaries. Such
panics about racial contamination and their attendant spatialization also
led to stricter municipal regulations for the licensing of cabarets and dance
halls, which were already largely aimed at spaces where people of color
gathered or, worse yet, people from across the “color line.” In reference to
the racial and sexual dangers presented by this kind of comingling, in 1926
the Board of Alderman flatly noted that “when strangers came to New York
they wanted to ‘run wild’” in Harlem.20 Multiracial dance halls, one of the
contact zones discussed in chapter 1, provided police and vice investiga-
tors with volatile ground for monitoring encounters between white women
and men of color. The inappropriateness of the assumed sexual proximity
written not only through race but also through space demonstrates how
racial others “come to embody distance.”21 The composite gaze of vice in-
vestigators, newspaper reporters, social scientists, and state authorities
sought to implement boundaries of nation and empire in the city, reinforc-
ing the understanding of Asian immigrants in the multiracial dance hall
as strangers, not belonging to the places where they now lived and where
empire had carried them. Jazz Age New York City, then, was constructed
through an imperial logic that governed immigration and integration but
also engendered modernist and avant-­garde movements in politics and
arts (and emerging subject positions through these movements), linked
by New Yorkers’ material and immaterial encounters with the sounds and
signs of outposts of empire and other faraway lands.

Space and Subjectivity

One of the major tenets of this book is that imperial logic is based in mu-
table meanings attached to stories about space. Spatial narratives provide
the basis for understanding the confluence of the U.S. imperium, U.S.
racialized domestic space, regulation and excess of sexualized bodies, and

14 | Introduction
aesthetic production. Space, race, and intimacy together render sensible
various modes of subjectivity: from reclamations of a primitivized Africa to
create the New Negro to performances of orientalized dances to sustain the
New Woman, from the renaming of Harlem as a “Mecca” to make the space
and its inhabitants both exotic and important to the renaming of black
and white men as “sheiks” to instantiate their sexual prowess or excess.
Nightly negotiations over subjectivity (and its value as ascribed through
imperial personhood) helped to reproduce modes of empire, whether per-
formers and artists reclaimed Africa’s past, imagined themselves as con-
querors, or performed versions of exotic and sexualized masculinities and
femininities; or whether the police, courts, journalists, and vice investi-
gators, whose supposed task was to control these types of displays, might
also produce that conspicuously consumable exoticism so that these spaces
and bodies might continue to be regulated. From discourses of oriental-
ized sexual freedom to justifications for internal colonialism, the ideology
of empire broke through the borders of the city to mark its inhabitants as
ready for subjectivity or subjection. In this way, modes of resistance and
regulation, subject making and disciplining, worked together to bolster
and reproduce imperial logic across an ever-­changing variety of situations,
bodies, and spaces.
In the Jazz Age, to borrow a phrase from Langston Hughes, blackness
was in vogue.22 However, the meanings ascribed to Harlem and its resi-
dents were heterological. If the fact that blackness was “in vogue” means
only that it was simply prized or exoticized, then this vogue does not speak
to the complexities of how these two treatments might work together to
produce a sense of racial and spatial difference. I suggest that the vogue
of blackness was more complex and that it was informed, at least in part,
by imperial logic’s creation of a spatial and ideological distance between
the rest of the city and Harlem and its residents. As an image and a style,
“Harlem” traveled around the world. Indeed, North American jazz and the
literature and arts of the Harlem Renaissance came to stand for the spirit
of the modern age. For instance, though hailing from Los Angeles, the
jazz trumpeter Buck Clayton and his orchestra were nonetheless billed in
Shanghai as the “Harlem Gentlemen,” so large did this New York neighbor-
hood loom in the spatial narration of black America.23 At the same time,
between World Wars I and II the signs and objects of primitivism, which
drew heavily on European appropriations (and inventions) of African aes-

Introduction | 15
thetics, became symbols of the avant-­garde in European modernist culture.
Such negrophile movements spoke in celebratory terms about all things
nègre—an expansive category that combined North American jazz and the
literature of the Harlem Renaissance with African and Oceanic carvings
and Josephine Baker’s delirious performances—at the same time that they
sought to preserve the primitive as such.24 As moderns searched for new
and novel forms to arouse the senses, stereotypes about the racial other
that had long been coupled with civilizational backwardness and moral de-
pravity became symbols of authentic freedom and spontaneous creativity.
Such an aesthetics was duplicitous for, as Simon Gikandi notes, it is in-
stead the modern who comes to understand or fashion his or her person-
hood, a process in which the racial other is used as both “raw material”
and counterpoint: “Savagery and the artistic sensibility would intimately
be connected in the aesthetic of modernism; however, it did not follow that
the moderns were willing to give up civilization to become one with the
savage.”25 As with orientalism, primitivism produced a discourse about
the racial other through a double bind of idealization and denigration.
In either case, the racial other must stay in its place. Here collocated with
imperial logic, both orientalism and primitivism transformed the imagin-
able range of human possibilities through modernist reinventions, while
reinforcing the spatial and temporal distancing of racial others.
It is in this way that Jazz Age Harlem was a site of contradictory spa-
tial ideologies. Often referred to as Black Manhattan or the Black Mecca,
Harlem was alternately located as the seat of the aesthetic modern, adjoin-
ing but also distinct from the imperial city, and as a domestic Arabia re-
calling oriental and African tropes. This spatial confusion, caused by a re-
ordering of referentiality, allows us to address the intersections of national
and imperial discourses of race and space. For example, the Romanian im-
migrant Konrad Bercovici, in his 1924 travelogue called Around the World
in New York, included in his chapter on Africa the nightlife of Harlem,
along with a tour of its literary and political stars.26 Such perceptions of dis-
tance and intimacy, mapped onto a distinction between a modern United
States and a backward Africa, were profoundly felt in Harlem itself. Re-
garding the travels of black people to Harlem, Thurman and Rapp ob-
served: “The American Negro looks down upon these foreigners just as the
white American looks down upon the white immigrants from Europe. The
native black man takes pride in the fact that he is a citizen of the ‘world’s

16 | Introduction
greatest country’ and is proud that he has had the advantages of a suppos-
edly superior civilization, with modern plumbing, a system of education
and high wages.”27 These remarks raise numerous questions about spatial
narrations of African American subjectivity with and sometimes against
the United States as nation and as empire. Spatial narrations derived from
imperial logic made distinctions between black progress (made by citizens
of “the ‘world’s greatest country’ ”) and black primitivism (people with-
out “modern plumbing”) that were located on black bodies.28 In similar
fashion, orientalisms also presented a way for people struggling for recog-
nition as U.S. subjects to identify with Western civilization, in contrast to
the benighted other. Contrasting themselves with the oriental woman con-
fined to the harem, and to a despotic sexual slavery, some African Ameri-
can women (and some white women) dancing like Salomé sought to claim
imperial personhood through discourses of mastery and distance from the
Arabian other, for instance. In order to claim citizenship in the present,
these women relegated the material history of black women’s exploitation
in the United States to the past and displaced it onto the premodern, ori-
entalist other. However, the women were circumscribed in advance of—
and especially during—their performances through a dangerous intimacy
with the racial other. References to imperial logic, therefore, foster myriad
possibilities for self-­fashioning, but as Minnie the Moocher might attest,
these are not reducible to freedom or captivity through such uneven and
contradictory encounters. In reconsidering what have been seen as sepa-
rate realms of material and immaterial forces—nation and empire—and
their profound consequences for subject formation and art making, I trace
this imperial logic as intertwined with the constant negotiation involved in
the story of racialized peoples’ incorporation into U.S. modernity.
This book calls attention to the continuities and discontinuities be-
tween imperial and domestic categories of modern selfhood and subjec-
tion through spatial narratives of movement, intimacy, and distance. In
this study, race and sex refer to mutable, “dense transfer point[s]” of power,
to draw on Michel Foucault, that are embedded within histories of empire,
including the transatlantic slave trade and Asian coolie labor, and also situ-
ated within national cultures.29 These are distinct, but not discrete, realms,
and this study follows a wayward path between movements and contacts
between continents in order to connect the material conditions of empire
and industrial capital with emerging articulations of subjecthood and cul-

Introduction | 17
tural labor. The rise of Western imperialisms and modernisms are linked,
yet, as Fredric Jameson observes, the encounter between these historical
movements does not reside just in content, but also in form.30 In this book,
I hope to show that empire both opened and resolved crises of differentia-
tion about the content of the modern, through recourse to discourses and
practices about space as the way of interpreting and managing these crises.
Practices of orientalism and primitivism and the rewriting of Harlem
as Mecca or Africa conjure up the relationship between spatialization and
subjectivity. Thus, much of my focus in this book is on the power granted
through narrations of subjectivity, and how very tenuous that power might
be. Building on this sense of space and subjectivity, I foreground imperial-
ism as a constellation of power—not simply power over, but rather a field
of forces that makes sensible, and sense of, many types of relations through
spatial metaphors and exercises.31 As seen above, this takes place in the city
through the renarration of space as being about power, race, sexuality, and
subjectivity. My understanding of power, space, and subjectivity comes in
part from the work of Michel Foucault. In the lectures collected as The Birth
of Biopolitics, he argues that modern forms of subjectivity and subjection
operate via both micropowers (which might intimately interact with the
regulation of the body or create docile subjects) and macropractices (like
the management of the body politic or the social body), and our critical
queries as such must accommodate a variety of stops along a geographic
scale, tied together through systems of thought. Foucault’s intent was “to
see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-­powers,
or of procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a pre-
cise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be consid-
ered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be
valid for the whole scale, whatever its size. In other words, the analysis of
micro-­powers is not a question of scale, and it is not a question of a sector,
it is a question of a point of view.”32 My interest in this formulation is in
Foucault’s use of space, power, management, and thought. He holds that
power works along geographies of scale, but that management happens in
the most intimate of spaces and in the grand strokes of institutions, which
in the Jazz Age might be represented by the police or the courts. For the
purposes of my project, I imagine the system of thought—what Foucault
calls “a point of view”—as produced by imperial logic. The spaces touched
by this logic are not confined, in part because it hinges on the continuous

18 | Introduction
unfolding of its “point of view” across the globe, and thus should be con-
sidered crucial to deciphering power elsewhere on the scale, which in this
book is focused on the U.S. imperium; Manhattan; and its neighborhoods,
cabarets and dance halls, and vice investigators and nightlife enthusiasts.
Indeed, beginning with the imperial contact coincident with the En-
lightenment, discourses of race and subjectivity have been drawn from en-
counters with distant or intimate others. Thus, concepts of freedom and
self-­possession crucial to liberal selfhood are deeply embedded within spa-
tial formations of the modern nation and empire. Charles W. Mills and
Denise Ferreira da Silva, for example, both argue that race is a global idea
that has persisted since the Enlightenment. For Mills, this has taken the
form of “racial liberalism,” as seen in Immanuel Kant’s reflections. Mills
writes: “Kant, the most important ethicist of the modern period and the
famous theorist of personhood and respect, turns out to be one of the
founders of modern scientific racism, and thus a pioneering theorist of
sub-­personhood and disrespect. . . . So the inferior treatment of people of
color is not at all incongruent with racialized liberal norms, since by those
norms nonwhites are less than full persons.”33 For Silva, such modes of En-
lightenment personhood continue to persist through raciality despite dec-
larations to the contrary: “The Subject is dead! we have been told. So why is
its most effective strategy of power still with us?”34 My answer to this query
is, in part, that modes of resistance still rely on imperial logic, even as we
are left with subject-­effects rather than Cartesian subjects, and that modes
of power that rely on racial, sexual, gendered, and national difference can
continue to reproduce themselves. In fact, the dissemination of imperial
logic helps promote these very modes, whether one resists them (for resis-
tance needs to create systems to resist) or perpetuates them (for perpetua-
tion requires the remaking of challenges to the social order).
My interest here is to understand how Enlightenment notions of sub-
jectivity are rendered meaningful through racial reference and spatial nar-
ratives that serve to divide humanity. The Cartesian subject, for instance,
did not just demarcate the seat of reason in the mind against the body (a
kind of spatialization of the consciousness). In Cartesian thought, space
was understood as static and absolute, against which consciousness was
produced—in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “as Object opposed to Subject, as
res extensa opposed to, and present to, res cogitans.”35 For Kant, space
became a way to know particular peoples through their distinction and

Introduction | 19
demarcation, although such knowing was an extension of the (European
and imperial) Subject. For instance, in his 1764 essay “Of National Char-
acteristics, so Far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beau-
tiful and the Sublime,” Kant suggests that various racial populations are
knowable and divisible (again, to the Enlightenment subject) according to
their spatial occupations, so that Persians were designated as sensual and
unreliable, and black Africans vulgar.36 Thus does imperial contact assert
that “otherwise diverse phenomena” should be grouped “into a single cate-
gory or class”—again, a spatial metaphor that places objects (or peoples)
together.37 Furthermore, such placements help us make sense of the nation
as a space. As Sara Ahmed explains, “the nation becomes imagined and
embodied as a space, not simply by being defined as close to some others
(friends), and further away from other others (strangers).”38 We can elabo-
rate on this understanding to note that these metaphors of “close” and “fur-
ther away” also engender a point of view internal to national space: “other
others” need not be outside the borders of the nation proper, but only iden-
tified or connected with extranational spaces.39 It is in this way that space
as both a physical and a metaphorical organization assigns subjectivity and
subjection to particular groups and bodies. As we shall see, forms of resis-
tance to, or preservation of, the social order or prescribed selfhood are thus
intimately embodied through spatial discourses and practices.
If the terms of subjectivity that concerned Enlightenment philosophers
were made sensible through both physical demarcations of space and spa-
tial narratives, through imperial logic such terms were further wrought by
trajectories of movement and contact. Whether actual traffic or imagina-
tive metaphor, movement acts as a primary mode for meaning making via
spatial logics. Movement and the contact it engenders can function, for ex-
ample, as an enhancement, the modern’s freedom as mobility; as displace-
ment, the removal or expulsion of a person or peoples from one place to
another; or as a contravention, the breach of safety and security by a way-
ward other. These are not distinct, and also not necessarily discrete, move-
ments. Most obviously, the myth of Manifest Destiny connects the crucible
of a U.S.-­based selfhood with the ruthless expulsion of and continued vio-
lence against indigenous populations in the name of territorial expansion
and settler colonialism. So, too, did modernist aesthetics depend on mys-
tified metaphors of movement, signifying commercial and leisure tourism
as well as elite, individualized travel in an era of expanding the U.S. reach

20 | Introduction
around the world. To travel the world one need not go far; the cosmopoli-
tan character of New York hangs on a “naturalized” mixing of peoples and
cultures, and movement through the city is to experience the whole world.
Yet, as transnational feminist scholars such as Caren Kaplan and Inderpal
Grewal demonstrate so well, cosmopolitanism and colonialism are inextri-
cably linked in cultures of travel.40 Inasmuch as immigrants—not a homo-
geneous group themselves—provide the raw materials for the creation of
the global city and give cosmopolitans in search of travel opportunities for
spatial expeditions, they are not themselves recognized as cosmopolitans,
or as producers of modernist culture.41 Kaplan notes that such manifold
“questions of travel” therefore operate as “signs of different critical registers
and varied historicized instances.”42 Although to be modern might equate
with the exercise of freedom of movement, not all those who moved could
be understood as modern. And though the city was understood as mod-
ernist through movement, not all who lived in the city were recognized as
modern or mobile. Imperialism and its spatial narratives spurred some mi-
grations of less modern peoples through the forces of labor and capital and
narrated some racialized groups as immobile, lending its ordering logic as
a means of disciplining these wayward populations. Furthermore, some
subjects experienced multiple forms of movement, such as forced migra-
tion but also pleasurable travel, whether real, imagined, or both (as in the
case of Minnie in her adventures to Chinatown and on to exotic lands).
As Kaplan observes, “many modern subjects may participate in any num-
ber of the versions of displacement over a lifetime—never embodying any
one version singly or simplistically,” and therefore “the material conditions
of displacement for many people blur these distinctions.”43 What I draw
from this insight for the project at hand is that real and imagined travel,
both modes of imperial formation, do not necessarily signal just one mean-
ing for any one person; rather, the meanings instilled by notions of travel
form subjectivities that are multiple and changeable. This mode of subject
making, then, reiterates the forms imperial logic takes as simultaneously
resistant and regulatory, as complex and often contradictory.
Modes of spatial displacement—the renaming of Harlem as Mecca or
Africa, travel across neighborhood borders, and travel across regional or
national borders—can be used to think about how travel across empires,
both actual and ideological, shaped the ordering of bodies, races, neigh-
borhoods, cities, and nations. To establish a comparative analytic in this

Introduction | 21
book, then, I consider how distance and intimacy play out both within an
empire and between empires. Through the first frame, internal colonialism
becomes for me a term of comparison, allowing linkages within a single
empire across oceans or borders. Following Linda Gordon’s definition of
the concept, I see internal colonialism as not only denaturalizing national
boundaries as proper and inevitable, but also as allowing us to recognize
that some racial others are always already strangers to the national polity.44
Chinatown inhabitants were spatialized as foreign, for instance, nearer to
China than to New York and otherwise belonging to another, strange social
order.45 Harlem, too, was understood as a colony by tourists and civic-­
minded scolds alike; as I show in chapter 4, the former found in Harlem
an exotic destination, and the latter a depraved nature. These analogies,
which often depended on naturalized relations of racial intimacy, thus per-
form specific cultural and political labors. In seeking to understand their
implications for this colony of Harlem or Minnie’s Chinatown, I reclaim
the term through feminist and queer of color critique and deploy the con-
cept to understand the strength of racial discourses as their mutable and
movable components as well as to comprehend the concept’s gendered and
sexual imbrications, in contingent and contiguous intimacies with empires.
I also reposition domestic racial and sexual classifications and concerns
through the idea of comparative empire. Imperial tropes often situated
in domestic racial and sexual schemata were not entirely of U.S. inven-
tion. Rather, references to Arabian deserts or Indonesian batik fabrics drew
heavily on far-­flung dominions including the British, French, Spanish,
Dutch, and Portuguese Empires. Indeed, the fantasy of escape from bour-
geois sexual norms through contact with and sometimes conquest of racial
others, including Salomés, Madama Butterflies, and sheiks, was shared
across European and U.S. empires and aesthetic modernisms.46 Tropes that
came from other empires, like the British or the French, found their way
into the lexicon of U.S. empire through the circulation of novels like E. M.
Hull’s The Sheik; operatic performances like Henry Hadley’s Cleopatra’s
Night; competitive collecting by museums of Egyptian artifacts; and travel
across imperial territories by would-­be adventurers, tourists, and artists.
Categorical creations (and confusions) regarding sex, race, civilization,
and humanity thus traveled through such intimacies among four conti-
nents, becoming transfigured as people encountered strangers in contact
zones close to home, refashioned themselves through the signs and sym-

22 | Introduction
bols of racial others from distant lands, or found themselves brought closer
together in body or metaphor for various purposes.47 Indeed, to this end
Ann Laura Stoler writes that studies in comparison allow us to denaturalize
the nation as a “historiographic directive,” interpret metropole and colony
as one analytic field, and fathom those circuits of knowledge and cultural
production and governance moving between the United States and its out-
posts, between the United States and other spaces of empire.48 With this
methodological insight into the work of comparative empire, I hope to
push the spatial boundaries of what urban histories might take as their ob-
ject in thinking through the definition of city borders and the systems of
thought, policing, and pleasure that occur in cities and beyond.
Jazz Age New York is thus replete with the material and metaphor of em-
pire, crucial to the forms of subjecthood and cultural production that came
to define this period’s political and aesthetic modernisms. To better grasp
the consequences of such material and metaphor requires histories of cul-
tural labors that illuminate emerging and often complicated subject posi-
tions, and critical and cultural practices that are more receptive to trans-
national movements. Imperial Blues proposes paths of inquiry for some of
these histories and labors, with the entangled rise of jazz and empire, by
analyzing discourses of space that create new subject positions, negotiate
power, and reiterate justifications for empire. Importantly, the reimagin-
ing of flexible urban borders—particularly as people and cultural objects
move in and out of city space, and as artistic inspiration becomes the un-
bounded invention of tropical islands, East Asian royal courts, and North
African desert landscapes—provides a valuable context for understanding
the uneven distribution of value associated with personhood and the desire
to police racial, sexual, and gendered boundaries.

Intimate Comparisons

Imperial Blues suggests a reorientation of Jazz Age New York, in multiple

senses. I ask how differing orientations toward and away from the Orient,
including the physical directionality of the body and its movements, might
transform the meaning of race and sex in the imperial city. It would almost
be an understatement to say that movement constitutes a source of both
intense power and acute anxiety for the imperial management of race and
space. Such movement is multidimensional or multidirectional—not just
shifting resources and bodies for war or labor, but actually placing and re-

Introduction | 23
placing categories related to sex, race, civilization, and even humanity. This
replacement—meaning substitution, settling, dislodging, and moving or
redirecting elsewhere—is central to the ways through which imperial logic
operates as a discourse of spatial and racial arrangement. At stake in this
argument is a more complex account of how imperial logic territorializes
spaces and bodies through new or transfigured orders of desire and dan-
ger, so that a subterranean cabaret in Harlem becomes an Arabian out-
post, and those who are close (within the bounds of the city, a neighbor-
hood, or the same dance hall) become materially and symbolically strange.
In this I follow Ahmed, whose uses of the term Orient also elaborate on
its multiple meanings simultaneously. “My analysis of orientalism,” asserts
Ahmed, “suggests that spaces become racialized by how they are directed
or oriented, as a direction that follows a specific line of desire. It shows us
how the Orient is not only imagined as ‘being’ distant, as another side of
the globe, but also is ‘brought home’ or domesticated as ‘something’ that
extends the reach of the West.”49 Ahmed’s mode of analysis rethinks the
meanings of space and how value is unevenly assigned to racialized and
sexualized bodies described by different spaces. For Jazz Age New York,
this analytic line intersects obliquely with analytics that imagine city space
and the characterizations of urban residents as static and defined only
through the immediate geography. Just as margins shape a text, what lies
outside of the city also shapes our ideas about the modern city and the flap-
pers, molls, dandies, and swells who winged their way along its boulevards.
In thinking through imperial logic’s mobilization of distance, intimacy,
and race, I also find it useful to turn to queer of color critique—a term
coined by Roderick Ferguson50—as a mode of analysis, though with a dif-
ference. Because my interest is primarily in modes of imperial thought and
draws heavily on postcolonial studies and postnational American studies
for its methodological grounding, my use of queer of color critique nec-
essarily joins with questions about the borders and meanings of national
space. Queer of color critique itself draws on a genealogy of women of color
feminisms to understand how analytic categories such as race, gender, and
sexuality are related to structures of economy. In this process, Ferguson
also uncovers the ways in which we are encouraged to think of these cate-
gories separately and what the cost of that kind of analysis is for social jus-
tice projects and aesthetic production. For example, racial analyses—such
as those forwarded by the author Richard Wright, which do not account for

24 | Introduction
gender and sexuality—retain hegemonic structures that ensure inequality.
In this way, social justice projects that remain focused on one category of
analysis might help reproduce modes of capitalist injustice. For my work, I
foreground the aftereffects of imperial violence rather than political econ-
omy as a way to understand how personhood is drawn and valued. To do
this, I extend the reach of queer of color critique to understand the rela-
tionships between nations, how those relationships are racialized and sexu-
alized, and what that process means for the construction of identities and
the policing of peoples within the borders of the United States.
It is in this way that Imperial Blues concerns itself with empire’s reper-
cussions in the intimate and public spaces of U.S. history in general, and
Jazz Age New York in particular. Such a study must certainly include and
account for Asian Americans in the racial mix of the city.51 But it is even
more critical to reframe the concept and lived experience of race through
techniques and methods of rendering space, both as a politics of repre-
sentation but also a practice of regulation, especially as technologies of
race and racialization are founded on crises of differentiation that in turn
hinge on fixed borders. For instance, Alva, the antagonist in Wallace Thur-
man’s most famous novel, The Blacker the Berry . . . , is of mixed race—part
white, part black, and part Filipino.52 His movement across the city’s strata
as an ambivalent figuration of the Harlem Renaissance is made possible
by his journey as an imperial subject to the imperial center. In contrast
to a nation-­based arrangement that isolates race and racialization within
national borders, Thurman’s Alva suggests that even domestic racial dis-
courses of subjecthood (and objecthood) are created through transnational
processes and imperial logic. The language of racial mixing, meant to guard
the boundaries of race and sex in the city, often borrowed the rationale as
well as the schema of empire and colonial rule to do so, imbricating the
regulation of women’s sexual behavior, men of color and their movements,
and the distinction between public and private space and making them
central to the governance of bodies. Even though racial classification itself
is fraught with creative fancy, as Jennifer Brody notes in regard to racial
taxonomies, “the language of purity is imprecise and impossible, as are the
lines that distinguish (binary) categories.” 53 Though racial (or sexual or
gendered) categories are “impossible,” it is still important to understand
how they are mobilized and for what purposes. In Jazz Age New York, racial
mixing might signal racial uplift, sexual freedom, or a reason for increased

Introduction | 25
disciplinary attention. Indeed, municipal regulations even suppose that
race and racialization might pass from neighborhood to neighborhood,
raising the specter of contamination and degradation through zoning laws
and other boundary enforcement. The language of racial mixing thereby
suggests multiple forms of contact—of being touched by another, whether
through sexual acts or mere proximate association—which requires fur-
ther inquiry.
In the first two chapters of this book, I propose a staging of multiple,
overlapping gradations of contact in order to understand the profound
anxiety about the discrete otherness of racial bodies and, as we shall see, the
objects appended to those bodies. That anxiety expressed itself through the
policing of spaces where interracial contact could be construed as sexual,
but it also created a queer black aesthetic that purposely played with and
denied the expectation of stable boundaries (of race, gender, sexuality,
and nation). How, then, do contact zones create crises of differentiation
through a crisis of referentiality for imperial logic that seeks to draw dis-
tinct boundaries between bodies—those of a friend and a stranger, for in-
stance—and between bodies and objects? That is, how is our desire for
difference (both sexual and taxonomic) denied or enforced when the refer-
ent of discourses of race, primitivism, or orientalism moves across various
bodies—like the orientalization of white men or women, or black men or
women—rather than remaining attached to those bodies that are already
coded as racialized in particular ways (like the orientalization of Asian or
Asian American bodies), or are imagined as foreign and strange.
In chapter 1, I introduce the inhabitants of the city in more substantive
ways. I argue that the sexual proximity and intimacy created in city spaces
marked by interracial contact were presented as simultaneously alluring
and dangerous. A configuration that drew readers, spectators, and cus-
tomers to these spaces and stories about them also drew the attention of
curious authorities like sexologists, sociologists, journalists, vice investi-
gators, and the police. In examining the mix of bodies in these spaces, I
elaborate on the concept of jazz cultures as a “contact zone,” borrowing
Mary Louise Pratt’s formulation, to consider 1920s New York, the imperial
city, as a space for improvisational encounters between empire’s subjects.54
Highlighting jazz’s sensual and kinetic energies, and the discursive and
performative productions of these energies, I argue that such contact is
manifold. That is, jazz as a site—or an assemblage of spaces—draws bodies

26 | Introduction
and movements together with popular and scientific discourses of racial-
ized sexualities and across genres of cultural labor, including sexological
studies, newspaper reportage, vice investigations, pulp fiction, and ex-
perimental literature. Jazz is therefore a contact zone struck through with
desire and danger. From the dance hall where Asian immigrant men were
thought to hold young white women much too close and the sensational
reporting of the unsolved murder of Vivian Gordon, a former chorus girl
thought to have been killed by variously racialized men—either a sheik,
a Latin lover, or a “darktown gigolo”55)—to Thurman’s mixed-­race queer
characters in The Blacker the Berry . . . , I pursue the multiple discourses
about race and sex that jazz cultures summon.
In these encounters we find Foucault’s “especially dense transfer point[s]
of power,” through which imperial logic reverberates across domestic
realms of gender and sexuality. Orientalisms in the popular cultures of the
1920s and 1930s borrowed from, and subsequently transformed, imperial
signs and symbols to generate new cultural forms of sexual expression and
popular entertainment as well as new languages of control about foreign
bodies and domestic bodies made stranger. In thinking through these new
forms and languages, I argue that the contact zone, subject to medical, hy-
gienic, and regulatory gazes, is also a zone of ontological indeterminacy.
In the sexological and eugenic sciences touched on in the book’s first two
chapters, mixed-­race bodies and queer bodies metaphorically occupied
such a zone as admixtures of supposedly discrete, but unstable, categories
of race and sex. I argue that orientalisms have a significant effect on gender
and sexual forms even in the absence of actual oriental bodies. Because ori-
entalisms act as the signs and symbols of imperial projection, attached to
particular bodies but not essential to them, the signs and symbols are mu-
table and mobile, repeating a crisis of referentiality that founded such im-
perial logic in the first place. The music, movements, and accouterment of
spaces or bodies marked as oriental (including those assigned to East Asia,
the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, West Asia, and North Africa) could
easily be reproduced by—but also importantly on—cabarets and night-
clubs as well as musicians and other performers in New York City. In the
case studies I offer here, I argue that race and racialization thereby occur
through modes of comparison and contact that are also spatial in nature—
such as distance, contamination, analogy, intimacy, proximity, juxtaposi-
tion, and directionality.

Introduction | 27
 In some of these cases, race and racialization may arise through an inti-
macy between a body and the signs and symbols of racial others from else-
where in the empire. The body is the primary site implicated in racial dis-
course because race is presumed to be in but also on the body, and it is
something that informs how bodies might sexually interact with one an-
other. As Jennifer González notes, race is especially “subject to display”:
“There is no escape from the fact of its ‘epidermalized’ status; the materi-
ality of the body is understood to offer a continuous surface of legible in-
formation.”56 Stuart Hall likewise observes—writing of the look that con-
firms the “fact of blackness,” as Frantz Fanon argues—that “exclusion and
abjection are imprinted on the body through the functioning of these sig-
nifiers as an objective taxonomy—a ‘taxidermy’—of radicalized differ-
ence, a specular matrix of intelligibility.”57 With these remarks in mind, the
mixed-­race body renders narratively unintelligible the skin, now a suspect
surface of disorienting information. Indeed, as I discuss in the first chap-
ter, Thurman’s Alva is one such figure, someone whose materiality con-
founds categories even as his depiction relies on the imperial logic based
on those racial taxonomies. Because race as a category is struck through
with sexual meaning—race might signal exotic and erotic pleasure, hyper-
sexuality or sexual excess, or frigidity—the boundaries of race might also
inform the boundaries of sexuality, and vice versa. This is certainly the case
for Thurman’s Alva, whose racial mix signals his bisexuality. For Thurman,
the mixed-­race body follows sexological knowledge that renders it simul-
taneously queer. In this way, expected connections between race and sexu-
ality, and between the nation and the city, contribute to the meaning of
bodies in the city and what dangers and pleasures their proximity held. The
combination of unease and heightened desire for this kind of racial mixing,
then, could produce a range of reactions: newspaper articles that breath-
lessly retold the story of intimacy, police raids and other forms of internal
colonialism, and aesthetic portrayals intended as social commentary about
the difficulties and joys of negotiating these various boundaries.
This kind of play between meaning and context, between danger and
pleasure, and between race and sexuality, could, then, serve multiple pur-
poses. Chapter 2, “Queer Modernities,” centers on a crisis of referentiality
arising when bodies imagined to signify categories that lend themselves to
a stable social order within a national discourse instead refer to heterologi-
cal and transient meanings conveyed by mutable and imperial geographic

28 | Introduction
and ideological borders. Through the production of a crisis of referen-
tiality, artists like the Harlem Renaissance writer, graphic artist, dancer, and
bon vivant Richard Bruce Nugent fashioned a semantic, visual, and mobile
vocabulary for queer black aesthetic practices. For this reading, I build on
Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “reconfiguration of the sensible” and the
insights of queer of color critique to analyze Nugent’s and Thurman’s art-
works as examples of their queer black aesthetic.58 Nugent mobilized the
signs and symbols of primitivism as avant-­garde culture, reclaimed from
the modernist movements in both Europe and the United States as particu-
larly African, together with images and styles of the Orient, inherited from
the European decadent queer canon, to collapse distances between maps
and bodies. The chapter also discusses Thurman’s presentation of Paul Ar-
bian, a character inspired by Nugent, in his novel Infants of the Spring.59
The figure of Arbian disrupts the boundaries of race, nation, gender, and
sexuality. Thurman boldly juxtaposes and collapses these categories, re-
ferring to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and other famous imperial texts as
a way to express the stakes involved in, and the purposeful tenuousness
of, a queer black aesthetic. By commingling primitivism and orientalism,
Nugent and Thurman seek to escape referential certainties, even while they
rely on empire’s signs and symbols. In this way, the wielding of imperial
logic both set the stage for an assertion of queer sexuality and imposed
limits on the representations of that sexuality.
The transgression and transformation of boundaries remain central to
this chapter. Through the works discussed in it, I show that Nugent and
Thurman adopt multiple strategies for confounding—or, indeed, queer-
ing—those forms of knowledge built on spatial and racial arrangements,
including doubling, collocation, and collapsing. All these forms come
together in Nugent’s novella “The Geisha Man,” 60 whose protagonist is
the mixed-­race child of Butterfly and Pinkerton, Puccini’s operatic lovers.
Following this character, named Kondo Gale Matzuika, as he experiences
various spatial and racial dislocations as a Japanese prostitute, immigrant
to the United States, and queer black man reveling in Manhattan’s poly-
sexual, multiracial ball scene (which I also describe in more detail in chap-
ters 1 and 3), Nugent whimsically fictionalizes the meanings of bodies, ob-
jects, and fantasies flowing across borders and the changes these bring to
modes of identification. In doing so, Nugent questions the ontological de-
terminacy of bodies and objects, and the use of race and sex as maps for

Introduction | 29
their distinction. Through the accouterment of an Orient perceived as par-
ticularly queer, Nugent’s works—including his best work, his life—seek
to interrupt the referentiality of the black body and the perception of the
space of that body’s gestures and movements, within both political and
aesthetic modernisms.
As I describe in the second part of this book, the traffic in Araby during
the 1920s relied on intimacies between empires. In the final two chapters,
I focus on circulations of the signs and symbols of North Africa and West
Asia throughout Jazz Age New York, shifting the timeline of U.S. interest in
these regions from the standard origin after 1945 into the Jazz Age. Though
the United States did not have a direct colonial relationship with North
Africa or West Asia in the 1920s or 1930s, it was nonetheless expanding its
imperial interests in these regions through informal means (for instance,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art funded and supported the excavations
of the British Egyptologist Howard Carter) and through cultural and po-
litical exchanges with the French and British Empires, which did directly
rule parts of these regions. These chapters thereby explore comparative
practices of empire. Stories about intrepid archaeologists unearthing an-
cient treasures in the desert circulated in newspapers and popular maga-
zines, and Hollywood studio productions such as The Sheik (1921), set in
Algeria, or The Thief of Baghdad (1924), set in Persia—featuring enslaved
princesses, irresistible princes, and rapacious sultans—all suggest contact
between empires.
Looking at multiple orientations toward Arab embodiment and move-
ment, chapter 3, “Orienting Subjectivities,” focuses on performances of
Salomé and sheiks by a diverse group of performers—none of them Asian
or Asian American—to consider how each might embody a politics of
space as particularized subjects through their world facing, to and away
from the Orient and the U.S. empire. I rely here on the heuristic devices
of the archive and the repertoire as discussed by Diana Taylor and Jacques
Derrida in order to understand the formation of subjectivity across diverse
bodies.61 Although the collection of artifacts, even those for live perfor-
mance, is associated with archivists’ projects that lend a sense of distance
and, in turn, mastery over the objects being created, the repertoire slides
more generously into that foundation of native goods and acts for, col-
lapsed, into, and performed. My argument, then, explores the slippages
between these imperially forged categories and attempts to understand the

30 | Introduction
difference that race makes in performances of empire’s elsewheres. For in-
stance, white women who sought to claim an imperial selfhood through
imperial activities, such as collecting the forms and objects of civilizational
others, nonetheless found themselves as performers too close to these
forms and objects to be judged through rubrics of expertise. Indeed, their
orientalist archives marked them as cosmopolitan, but their repertoires
branded them as carriers of a moral decay. The dance, we could say, had
got under their skin. In this way, orientalism as a discourse of promise and
power was brought to bear even on nonoriental bodies, and the Salomé
dancers’ display of an exotic sensuality and the disciplinary endeavors of
civic and state guardians of morality remained inseparable from one an-
other. Here I turn to Ahmed and her conceptualization of “orientation” as
a complication of orientalism as directional, and proximate, to understand
how these and other performers—including African American men and
women—­generated heterogeneous claims that did not necessarily secure
imperial subjecthood, even while such performances relied on the imbal-
ance of power supposed by imperial structures of knowledge.62
In chapter 4, “Dreaming of Araby,” I argue that references to West Asia
and North Africa, although manifesting the foreign in the imagination,
activated forms of imperial subjecthood and subjection in the domestic
order of race and space. In doing so, I demonstrate that the distance be-
tween the foreign and the domestic is an ideological construct. In exam-
ining these connections further, I revise a concept of internal colonialism
through feminist and queer of color critique in order to understand the uses
of imperial metaphor to warrant surveillance and control in the colony of
Harlem, as well as annexation into the continental West. Although some
African Americans had begun to claim a national affiliation with a cosmo-
politan United States, or a racial affiliation with Africa through their use
of exotic images and styles, vice investigators and lyricists construed a dis-
turbing distance between African Americans and the rest of the national
body, seeing both African Americans and West Asian and North African
peoples as part of an uncivilized cohort. Conversely, African Americans
saw Harlem as Araby, a space of intrigue and sexual freedom. Following
Porter Grainger’s “In Harlem’s Araby,” a novelty song that traces the ad-
ventures a tourist might have in the neighborhood, experiencing its night-
life, and enjoying pleasures described through an orientalist lens to lend
the space of Harlem both a mysterious and erotic sensibility. The final sec-

Introduction | 31
tion of the chapter traces the use of Arab or Muslim signs and images to
denote domestic spaces through strangeness and follows the courted New
York traveler to Palm Springs, California, via a tourist booster tract that
names this desert “Our Araby.” Describing the desert in the familiar terms
of Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, while promising friendly, disappearing,
and removable natives, the tract introduces a symbolic realm of Arab signs
and symbols to manifest the material expansion of U.S. empire throughout
western North America.
This investigation into Jazz Age New York will, I hope, make clear that
the various domains and borders that seem to be distinct actually remain
unclear. It may seem simple to say that empire both creates distance and
breaches it, but this fact has had profound implications for our histories
of and inquiries into those boundaries and the encounters that we pursue
or refuse with strangers. Indeed, the accounts I have brought together here
help us see that an imperial logic of distance may make people who are
close to us disappear, even as the intimacies among four continents bring
them closer.
In Imperial Blues, I pursue questions that reconfigure the meaning and
management of race and sex in Jazz Age New York through the differen-
tial knowledge that bringing empire home places before us. This book is
oriented toward these histories of intimacies in order to reconsider what
political stories inform the categories of race and sex, and what other
stories we might tell from the confusion of those categories. Toward this
end, Rancière is illuminating when he observes that “the ‘logic of stories’
and the ability to act as historical agents go together. Politics and art, like
forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions,’ that is to say material rearrange-
ments of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is
said, between what is done and what can be done.”63 This rearrangement is
what I hope to accomplish—to engender new relationships between signs
and images, politics and art, friends and strangers, and those other forms
through which we encounter empire at home and abroad.

32 | Introduction
 Chapter One

Desire and Danger in

Jazz’s Contact Zones

P
“ olice can do nothing in this obvious menace of young white
girls with young Orientals,” worries the journalist Marion
Carter, warning of the looming specter of racial mixing at a
Sixth Avenue dance hall.1 Marshaling her own moral sensibilities
as a measuring stick, Carter baited her readers with this sala-
cious description of the dance hall in a 1930 article, hoping to in-
cite shock and horror at the spectacle of interracial impropriety:
“A langorous [sic] and fragile blonde floating gracefully in the
arms of a Filipino! A little black haired flapper in the close and
questionable embrace of a Chinaman! A Negro orchestra blar-
ing out jazz tunes. All around, Orientals—Filipinos, Chinamen,
Japanese dancing with white girls for ten cents a dance! The only
white men in the place the three managers.”2 In this titillating
passage, Carter presents Asian men as a powerful threat. These
men have crossed great distances and now cross great bound-
aries to insinuate themselves in “close and questionable” em-
braces with “langorous,” “fragile,” and “little” “young white
girls.” Neither these white women, depicted as tractable victims
and being of easy virtue, nor Asian men, understood as carnal
predators, fare well at the hands of the journalist. While denigrating both
groups as immoral and lascivious, one by association and the other by
nature, Carter makes it clear that the dance hall facilitates acting on both
association and nature. The dance hall as a quasi-­outlaw frontier, with the
“Negro orchestra blaring out jazz tunes” as its medium, makes such em-
braces possible. For Carter, the presence of a few white men and the limited
laws present an inadequate defense of white womanhood. As she scorn-
fully observes, “so long as the law on ages and conduct in the dance hall is
observed,” the authorities could not further control this racialized sexual
(though notably legal) threat.3 Carter’s article was one of many that pointed
to the dangers of profiting—the “big money lure”—from interracial sexu-
ality in spaces of New York’s nightlife and the limits of the law in stopping
this kind of societal scourge.4 Carter sought to bring the manifest danger
of interracial sexual unions to public attention, and in her denunciation
of them help restore an imagined social order. In doing so, however, she
rehearsed the heightened eroticism and taboo thrill of encounters across
racial and imperial borders, relying on the same excitement of forbidden
contact that made interracial dance halls thrive.5
These and other scenes (actual, fictional, and in between) of racial mix-
ing were expedited by the rapid spread of U.S. economic and imperial
power around the globe—particularly in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and
Latin America—during the second half of the nineteenth century and into
the twentieth. The reach of U.S. empire shifted demographics at home,
forcing the renegotiation of racial, gendered, and sexual borders as waves
of immigrants from new possessions such as Hawaii, Guam, the Philip-
pines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico—as well as from China and Japan, where
the United States intervened at times—reached the United States. Such
global influence had pervasive and often perverse implications for the na-
tional imaginary, in particular for the constitution and governance of pub-
lic urban spaces, as forms of regulation and transgression sought to keep
pace with changing racial and national formations.6 New York City is a
key site for understanding the consequences and entanglements of imperial
states and domestic civics through new improvisations of regulation and
transgression, subjection and subjectivity. “Modern cities, especially major
ports,” Caren Kaplan reminds us, “function as crucibles where identities
are formed, transformed, and fixed. Such identifications not always self-­
chosen, welcome, or advantageous to the newly arrived, but they do play

34 | Chapter One
roles in the formation of literary and artistic canons as well as the deploy-
ment of political interests on the part of state institutions.”7 In the Jazz Age,
empire, immigration, and racial mixing served as vital contexts for under-
standing aesthetic production, nightlife, and the city’s imagination of space
and sexuality. The traversable lines of the cityscape invited both policing
and transgression in modes created through histories of imperial diasporas.
The task in this chapter is to think of jazz cultures as contact zones, with
all the spatial and somatic dimensions this implies. Jazz’s allure as well as
danger hinged on an extemporizing series of analogies and affinities with
and across imperial formations and racial classifications, through which
jazz denoted codes for border crossing. I borrow the concept of the con-
tact zone from Mary Louise Pratt, who in her coinage redefines the zone
of colonial encounter against ideas of sustained borders of time and space
between peoples, and instead argues for spatial and temporal copresence
and “interactive, improvisational” contacts within asymmetrical relations
of power.8 Instead of challenging frontier mythologies at empire’s outposts,
however, I use the concept of the contact zone to argue that the nation is
continuously created through racialized and sexualized contact with pur-
ported strangers even within its borders, as those frontier mythologies—
along with peoples from empire’s outposts—are brought home. Spaces of
urban nightlife drew attention to the anxieties caused by the increasing
breadth and breach of national borders (now redrawn precariously around
the globe), with particular attention to the concomitant unsettling of gen-
der and sexual formations. Configuring contact zones between Asian,
Latino, Caribbean, and Eastern European migrants and “native” African
and European Americans, spaces of nightlife thus prompted the emergence
as well as the entanglement of new discourses and practices of racialization
that describe much more than merely domestic race relations and their
relays of power. These multiracial spaces provided opportunities to flout
social norms and state regulations, and for that very reason they attracted
both formal and informal surveillance from people interested in reinforc-
ing and restoring order. Carter’s article and similar written works told a
manifold tale of racial mixing, produced by but also contributing to na-
tional debates about African American and Asian (and other) immigrant
urban cultures. The dance hall is not incidental but crucial to this tale about
the public character of the imperial city, as the scene for so much move-
ment of bodies.9 Reporters, police, and vice investigators patrolled those

Desire and Danger | 35

public spaces that also served as microsites of imperial logic made intimate
and thereby dangerous. The discourses and documents created to describe
jazz as a contact zone, like those in Carter’s article, addressed themselves
to complex triangulations of Asianness, whiteness, and blackness; moral-
istic allegories and also supposedly scientific assertions about distinctive
racial formations of gender, sex, and sexuality; and a multitude of anxieties
about national borders and imperial volatility. Thus the power of move-
ment coded in the syncopated jazz that flowed from the bandstand to the
dance floor was necessarily transnational in nature.
Traversing geographies of scale, from transnational and international to
national and metropolitan, and further to commingling bodies, as I argue
happened in Jazz Age New York, the imperial logic of regulation and sub-
sequent resistance—both too often violent—took place not only abroad
but also in the heart of the metropole. Expressions of identity and subjec-
tivity in jazz cultures helped challenge gender norms and racial formations
while using imperial logic, albeit often for different ends than those of the
civic and state institutions that sought to police those norms and forma-
tions. In this way concepts of space crucially informed differing claims of
subjectivity and subversion. I intentionally use terms such as boundaries
and borders because these terms speak to the spatial dimensions that create
and challenge the categories and vocabularies of various epistemological
authorities on racial and national difference. As we shall see, forms of resis-
tance to, and preservation of, the social order are embodied through spa-
tial discourses and practices. Travel, whether actual movement or imagina-
tive metaphor, is a primary way to make meaning via spatial logics. Travel,
especially across borders, can function as an enhancement, the modern’s
freedom seen as mobility; or as a contravention, the breach of safety and
security by a wayward other. For some people, world travel demonstrates
their achievement of modern subjecthood. Others, such as those Asian im-
migrants who peopled the dance hall, were subject to monitoring and sur-
veillance as carriers of moral but also biological threats to city dwellers.
Likewise, the metaphor of travel is often assumed to transmit both liber-
ating prospects and vectors of contagion. Narratives and performances of
passing and crossing, and the border figures that incarnate these move-
ments—whether via racial passing, appearing in drag, racial miscegena-
tion, or bisexuality—rely on the epistemologies and methodologies that
inform spatial logics and their signifying economies.10 In this way, ideas

36 | Chapter One
of resistance and discipline, of possibility and power, produce themselves
through conceptualizations of space and the differences these make.
Because of their compelling connections between music and immigra-
tion, race and sexuality, jazz cultures act as key sites for understanding
the machinations of scientific discourses, immigration legislation, imperial
fictions, and racial classifications in the give-­and-­take of identity making.
That is, jazz is also a contact zone for multiple ideological and institu-
tional schema addressed to technologies of the body. Therefore this chapter
juxtaposes a range of cultural texts often separated in popular and schol-
arly accounts of the construction of Jazz Age modernity. In doing so, I ex-
amine how imperial logic worked across and between genres of aesthetic
production, such as novels, music, and dance—as well as analogous docu-
ments of vice investigations, eugenics, sociology, and sexology—to map
the city and the movements of the body (and its parts) through an econ-
omy of distance and intimacy. The first section of the chapter investigates
the multiple interpretations of jazz as a contact zone to describe the sexual
transgressions invited by the dance hall. In that context, sexological dis-
courses that described interracial sexuality as aberrational seeped into vice
reports that provided evidence of aberration, thereby confirming the stakes
of surveillance. I argue that the imperial logic, which informed immigra-
tion legislation and national security, was also imposed on the bodies of
immigrants and other city dwellers, especially in these contact zones, to
police and monitor their sexual activity. The second section of the chapter
addresses the imposition of imperial fantasies of the contact zone onto the
city’s nightlife, through which white women’s sexuality was policed in re-
lation to the looming specter of racialized masculinity. In reporting on the
murder of Vivian Gordon, a former chorus girl, I argue that the yellow jour-
nalists of The New York Evening Journal used conventions of the domestic
pulp novel (especially those tropes of the urban underbelly and the fallen
woman, who had even further to fall) in order to produce a story of sexual
danger dependent on imperial logic’s racialization and nationalization of
men described as threateningly out of place. The third section brings these
vice reports and their sexological counterparts to bear on Wallace Thur-
man’s description of Harlem nightlife in his best-­known novel, The Blacker
the Berry. . . .11 In this novel, Thurman explores the nightclub as a site of
possibility, thwarting expectations dictated by compulsory heterosexuality
and monogamy through the particular provocations of interracial contact.

Desire and Danger | 37

These profoundly dissimilar documents present cross-­racial sexual activity
as an imperial matter, gesturing toward an alternate history of negotiation
between racial formations and national borders in a new age of empire.12

Jazzing Empire: Immigrants and Scientific

Discourses in the Dance Hall

The multiracial character of Jazz Age New York presented city residents
and visitors with myriad possible encounters and contact points at which
manifold boundaries were nightly negotiated. A constellation of racial and
sexual discourses targeted jazz in particular as a powerful medium for con-
tact and encounter in the imperial city. Though we well know that the port
city is a juncture of empire, I argue that imperial logic augmented and
transformed the port’s domestic racial logics in shaping intimate relations
of power. Operating across geographies of scale, discourses and practices
aimed at controlling the movements of bodies were themselves peripatetic,
sliding from empire’s outposts to the imperial city where those outposts’
outlaws lived, from the peripheries to the center and back again. The dance
hall in particular drew the regard of sociologists and vice investigators alike
as a place where new Asian and Latino immigrants, African Americans,
and white adventurers met; at the borders and on the streets, the pres-
ence of these immigrants both provoked and justified new legislation and
policing measures at the national and local levels, meant to protect the na-
tion’s whiteness.13 Jazz was a contact zone for concerns as well as creations
materializing from transactions among immigration control, local legisla-
tion, sociology, eugenics, sexology, vice reports, and aesthetic modernisms
such as primitivism and orientalism. Although jazz cultures are imagined
to provide freedom from social constraint, they also occasioned new dis-
courses of restraint.
Pieced together by multiple migrations originating both inside and out-
side the expanding territory of the U.S. empire, the multiracial character of
what could be understood as its key metropolis was a cause of concern for
some. Sciences including eugenics, sexology, sociology, and psychoanalysis
found fertile ground to emerge and become established in the empire’s dis-
locations, discerning there the specter of racial miscegenation, sexual per-
version, congenital criminality, and other forms of pathology. Addressing
the diagnosis and management of these pathologies, these fields informed
imperial rule as well as national legislation, such as the Johnson-­Reed Im-

38 | Chapter One
migration Act of 1924, which included the National Origins Act and the
Asian Exclusion Act. An addendum to the Immigration and Naturaliza-
tion Act of 1917, which immigration restrictionists had come to consider
too lenient, the 1924 Act was passed with the support of work in eugenics,
which warned of the racial threat posed by inferior genetic material that
could contaminate bloodlines. Although such immigration legislation had
a powerful effect on limiting the presence of supposed undesirables in the
United States, the application of such scientific discourses for the control
and curtailment of possible incursions into the body politic did not end at
the national border.
Within the limits of this imperial city, sociologists, social workers, vice
investigators, and police officers worked to delineate and demarcate the
character, and in some cases the pathology, of neighborhoods. As the pres-
ence of new immigrants sparked concerns about danger and degeneracy,
scientific and state authorities sought to create comprehensive maps of the
constitution of the national and civic body. These new sciences, committed
to Enlightenment notions of personhood, created racialized epistemologi-
cal frameworks for knowing the city and its diverse inhabitants.14 Although
some denizens could be construed as cosmopolitan in their movements,
others were marked through racial and imperial schema as out of place.
For example, as Henry Yu argues, sociologists labeled whole swathes of the
city as alien: “Chinatowns and Japantowns were delineated as distinctive
geographic and cultural spaces within America. Because the definition of
Oriental culture was tied to an opposition between American and non-­
American cultural traits, Oriental communities became equivalent to for-
eign places within America.” 15 (Harlem was also seen as outside Manhat-
tan proper, as I discuss in chapter 4.) These scientific formations sought to
further delineate and demarcate bodies through vectors of contagion and
congenital abnormality. Eugenicists measured craniums, lips, and fore-
heads to denote innate racial differences and promote theories of racial de-
generacy,16 while sexologists measured labia, nipples, clitorises, and hypo-
thalamuses to understand the congenital aberrations of the homosexual.17
Physiological models like these rendered bodies as series of somatic signi-
fiers that then grounded certain biopolitical discourses and practices for
city, nation, and empire. Nor were these unrelated pathologies. Siobhan
Somerville connects the significance of scientific racism to the invention of
the sexual deviant, and Nancy Ordover observes that anti-­immigrant legis-

Desire and Danger | 39

lation also denied entry to anyone who had been convicted of, or had con-
fessed to, crimes of so-­called moral turpitude, including prostitution and
other activities deemed to be sexual perversions.18 In this case, such scien-
tific discourses became powerful instruments for people seeking to identify
whole racial groups as criminal elements prone to perversion, and to police
neighborhoods and spaces of leisure through the ostensibly authoritative
language of science and security.19 Though varied and often contradictory
in application, an imperial logic often underpinned these border crossings
and the fields (and forces) of knowledge used in their explication, through
which spatial difference operated as a significant medium and metaphor
for racial and sexual transgression.
Accompanying these scientific explanations of pathology and modes
of classification were regimes of policing and social research. One organi-
zation established to carry out investigations of unlawful activity, particu-
larly focused on wayward women and their sexuality, was the Committee
of Fourteen. The vice investigators employed by the Committee of Four-
teen provided some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of spaces of
New York nightlife from 1905 to 1932, which have become an important
source of information about the history of sexuality—despite their authors’
biased belief in the need to control women in public spaces.20 The privately
funded Committee of Fourteen worked alongside city police to investigate
prostitution, women working as hostesses in dance halls, the phenomenon
of sex in moving taxicabs, the sexual perils of cabarets, and queer relations
within the city’s ball scene, among a multitude of other potentially sexually
transgressive spaces and activities. The Committee researched, compiled,
stored, and published thousands of reports regarding civic sexual dangers
of all manner—illicit, legal, private, public, and consensual. Its vice inves-
tigators often were proactive in collecting data. They entered cabaret spaces
looking for and noting, among other details, the number of hostesses and
other female employees who could be seen, the number of hostesses and
other female employees seen who admitted to being prostitutes, the num-
ber of other prostitutes seen, the number of other questionable women
seen, and the number of exploiters and go-­betweens seen.21 In addition to
using these schema that mirrored sociology’s craze to classify, the Commit-
tee also employed at least one investigator who was a student at Columbia
medical school and who showed an interest in sexological discourse. In
these ways, the Committee melded the language of sociology and sexology

40 | Chapter One
with the compelling discipline of the police force. Indeed, working hand in
hand with law enforcement and the judiciary, the Committee’s vice inves-
tigators sought to uncover women they suspected as being prostitutes and
could request or recommend the women’s arrests. Thus, those interested
in controlling women’s sexuality and their contact with men, in general,
and with men of color, in particular, had official means at their disposal to
carry out their wishes.
These discourses of restriction came together as ways to understand
emerging forms of nightlife, especially as jazz became an entry point into
public culture and a contact zone. As perhaps the most obvious impetus
for movement in jazz cultures, music intimately connects power to sub-
ject formation at the somatic level of the body and movement. As Susan
McClary observes, “the music itself—especially as it intersects with the
body and destabilizes accepted norms of subjectivity, gender and sexu-
ality—is precisely where the politics of music often reside.”22 Music thus
functions as a compelling example of how Foucauldian analytics of sub-
ject formation and subjection can be brought to bear on popular forms
and their sensate, somatic effects. McClary further elaborates on theories
of the body as a site of power, mediated through Foucault as well as Teresa
de Lauretis, writing that “music is foremost among cultural ‘technologies
of the body,’ that it is a site where we learn how to experience socially me-
diated patterns of kinetic energy, being in time, emotions, desire, pleasure,
and much more.”23 And like other discursive forms, music can shape rela-
tions between bodies; this power was well known to nightlife patrons and
those bent on policing them.
At the dance halls, patrons were treated to some of the finest and most
popular jazz bands in New York, as the songs that emanated from the band-
stand came from the orchestras of Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Cab Callo-
way, Jimmie Lunceford, and Paul Whiteman.24 These groups might mix
imperial and sexual themes in novel songs such as Chick Webb’s “Swing-
ing on the Reservation,” Fletcher Henderson’s “He Wasn’t Born in Araby,
But He’s a Sheikin’ Fool” (1924), Duke Ellington’s “Swingtime in Honolulu”
(1932), and Porter Grainger’s “Hula Blues.” 25 Songs like “Swingtime in
Honolulu” and “Hula Blues” profited from the craze for Hawaiian sounds
that began in the Jazz Age and continued beyond it. One of the most re-
cent U.S. acquisitions, Hawaii took hold of the U.S. imperial imagination,
inspiring music, dances, and nightclub routines. Indeed, ambiguously

Desire and Danger | 41

named Hawaiian Orchestras—either orchestras from Hawaii or orchestras
with instrumentation meant to sound Hawaiian—also played at places like
the Bluebird Cabaret.26 Additionally, sheet music arrangements were often
sold to accommodate the single ukulele player, as home sales of ukuleles
skyrocketed. Reportedly, Hawaiian music “sold better than other music
in vogue” in Jazz Age New York.27 Hawaiian music, as played in both New
York and Hawaii, was marked by the popular music of the time—jazz—
and vice versa. For instance, Sol Ho’opii and His Novelty Quartet’s record-
ing of “Hula Girl” uses conventions associated with Hawaii, like Hawaiian
language singing and steel string slide guitar; those associated with the pop
songs of Tin Pan Alley, like a pronounced use of ninth chords; and those
associated with jazz, like the slide guitar mimicking a jazz violin perform-
ing the instrumental melodies between verses. The heterogeneous nature
of jazz itself already expressed empire’s contact zones; in the case of music
performed at dance halls, this was often achieved through a rhythm suit-
able for physically intimate fox-­trotting.
Vitally important to the study of jazz as a contact zone for multiracial
New York are its associations with sex—the sort of movement and con-
tact, infused with “kinetic energy, being in time,” that inspired the most
anxiety about jazz. Though its origins remain obscure, etymologies of the
word jazz suggest that it functioned as a euphemism for or an allusion to
sexual intercourse. Some speculative accounts even propose that the rela-
tion of the term jazz to sexuality predated its connection to any musical
form. One contemporaneous commentator notes: “Used both as a verb and
a noun to denote the sex act, . . . ‘jazz’ . . . has long been a common vul-
garity among Negroes in the South, and it is very likely from this usage that
the term ‘jazz music’ was derived.” 28 The ethnomusicologists Alan Mer-
riam and Fradley Garner observe that “there is a certain degree of logic
in the assumption that the musical use of the term was derived from its
sexual use,” but the etymology remains unclear.29 Whatever the word’s ori-
gins, the intimacy and intercourse between jazz and sexuality is undeni-
able. This intimacy was also connected to race, and blackness in particular.
Through its association with race and sex, jazz was construed as a kinetic
discourse of unbounded and dangerous sensuality. Artists and musicians
further associated jazz cultures with primitivism, a modernist aesthetic that
sought in the signs and symbols of the African “primitive” a way to resist
the stultifying tempo of a disciplined life. “Inspired by Freud and others

42 | Chapter One
who documented the repression presumed endemic to Western civiliza-
tion,” the jazz historian Kathy Ogren argues, “twenties artists and intel-
lectuals invested primitive culture with ‘uncivilized’ virtues—­particularly
sexual freedom.”30 These associations also suggest an intimacy with emerg-
ing sexological discourses, particularly those that assigned a range of sex
acts to distinct civilizational times and spaces.
What we could call jazz’s constellation of multiple technologies of the
body is further reified by its distinction from other modes of dance music.
One vice investigator, reporting on his experience at a jazz-­filled dance hall,
describes the wildly uneven distribution of sexual energies and emotions
that emerged in response to distinct musical forms: “While dancing with
Helen a second time a waltz was suddenly struck up by the orchestra and
I observed about 25 men leaving the floor. I said ‘What is the matter, the
dance is not over is it?’ She replied ‘No, the cops are here.’ I said ‘How do
you know that?’ She said ‘That’s the signal. Just as soon as they come we get
that and we are ordered to immediately break into a waltz.’”31 According
to the same report, the “six piece colored orchestra” had been playing jazzy
fox-­trots before breaking into the staid waltz after the unexpected arrival of
the police. The quick-­time rhythms and looser motions of the fox-­trot are
themselves the reason for unwelcome surveillance; the waltz, on the other
hand, though at an earlier time considered shocking for its mandated em-
brace, had become respectable and morally faultless (unless, perhaps, one
were dancing to Chick Webb’s rendition of “The Naughty Waltz” at the
Savoy Ballroom in Harlem). Performing a waltz was intended to cleanse
the dance hall and its patrons in the eyes of authority.
Jazz thus transmitted a series of codes for rebellion—against respect-
able sexuality, racial segregation, and even civilization—though these
codes often had a troubling provenance. Furthermore, its kinetic music
was seemingly infectious. Jazz threatened to spill forth from the nightclubs
and cabarets, seeping onto the street but also stimulating and entering the
body.32 Jazz was thus perceived as a primitivizing, uncivilizing technology
of the body, inasmuch as the body would be compelled by its music toward
promiscuous movements, emotions, desires, and pleasure across bound-
aries of a multiple nature. Accordingly, jazz appeared to require concerted
surveillance from sometimes conflicting, sometimes collaborating, insti-
tutional and ideological apparatuses. One article in the New York Evening
Journal, for instance, described a sax player who had been wooing women

Desire and Danger | 43

with his jazz music. He was so successful, according to this account, that
he had seven wives. The story of the “Sax Tooter” relied on jazz as a signi-
fier for non-­normative, aberrant sexual practices—in this case, the article
drew a direct line between jazz and contemporaneous public debates being
waged about “free love” and polygamy. This immoral situation was re-
solved through juridical action—with the law unleashed on the hapless
musician, the “Sax Tooter” was sentenced to two and a half to five years
in Sing Sing.33 Of course, this disciplinary action did not only establish a
prohibitionary discourse. It and other acts, such as the publication of the
article by Carter cited at the start of this chapter, reified jazz as the scene
for those illicit activities that these actions sought to limit, thus circulating
and possibly inventing a context for linking jazz and perverse intimacies.34
The threat of racial mixing and sexual encounters, mediated by jazz,
proved to be so threatening that New York City’s government created new
juridical discourses and practices in order to curtail its menace. Indeed,
many of the public spaces associated with jazz culture were so fraught with
racialized sexual tension that the Board of Aldermen sought to regulate
those spaces where jazz moved bodies. In December 1926 the board re-
quired “any room, place or space in the city in which any musical entertain-
ment, singing, dancing or other similar amusement is permitted in connec-
tion with the restaurant business” to apply for a cabaret license from the
city.35 In this way, city fathers hoped that they could legislate the morals
of the cabaret scene. Many of the instruments and combinations thereof
named in this legislation were used to play jazz. We can surmise from this
that the regulations were aimed specifically at spaces of nightlife guided by
the jazz ethos.36 Indeed, though the ordinance was commonly referred to
as the “cabaret laws,” it also applied to dance halls.
As one particularly disturbing (at least to the state) contact zone, the
dance hall brought together itinerant populations of U.S. empire with im-
perial economies of distance and intimacy. The dance hall was specifically
given to encouraging close encounters of a sensual kind, and it functioned
as a multiracial locale for adventuring as well as a cause for concern for
authorities.37 Multiracial dance halls were fairly common across Manhat-
tan, and they included Roseland Dance Hall, St. Nicholas Rink, Happyland
Dancing Academy, Moon Dancing Studio, Lincoln Square Dancing, Romey
Dancing School, Rose Danceland, Roma Danceland, Mayflower Dancing
Academy, the Cathedral Ballroom, the Sunbeam Dance Palace, and the

44 | Chapter One
Bamboo Inn.38 Many dance halls had male patrons hailing from all over
the world—the consequence of imperial expansions. For instance, Yeaple’s
attracted a varied, multiethnic crowd including men identified as Chinese,
Japanese, Filipino, Cuban, and the amorphous “Spanish.” 39 Dreamland,
run by Morris Goodman, also boasted a mixed patronage of Italians, Span-
iards, Greeks, and “Latins,” and its patrons reportedly expressed joy over
the fact that Dreamland was unlike the Royal Dancing, where “Chinks and
Japs” might be found.40 In the remainder of this section, I argue that the
dance hall makes clear the multiple technologies of the body that were
brought to bear on empire’s racialized masculinities. Through scientific
and state schemas of colonial and domestic racial classification and sexual
categorization, as well as these schemas’ intercourse with jazz discourses
of primitivism and free movement, the new immigrants carried with them
a double contagion. Together these technologies interpreted the new im-
migrant, the Asian man from empire’s outposts, as a vector of danger—to
U.S. borders, the integrity of white women (and, in turn, white manhood),
and the civic honor of New York City.
Empire and city were spaces of both possibility and limitation: where
there existed discourses of freedom and defiance, there also existed the
desire—on behalf of city administrators, police, and reformers—to man-
age the shifting population in this urban contact zone. Furthermore, pre-
vailing social codes and inequalities among patrons and managers also
found their ways into the heterogeneous space of the dance hall. Doreen
Massey notes that “the spatial has both an element of order and an ele-
ment of chaos.”41 This was certainly true of New York’s spaces of nightlife:
while these spaces organized new social relations, allowing interrelations
and interactions, they also ordered the limits of those relations, keeping
their outcomes unpredictable. The simultaneous presence of so many dif-
ferently racialized people in clubs and dance halls did not testify to equal
access to public space, because racialized borders and other striations of
power continued to operate there. As the jazz historian Sherrie Tucker ar-
gues, interracial nightclubs were not signs of democratization; rather, race,
gender, and sexuality were negotiated in uneven exchanges within those
spaces.42 Public places that included so many peoples from so many places
were also predicated on the necessarily antidemocratic acts of empire that
provided the contexts for how, and why, those people were “here.” These
antidemocratic grounds further transposed themselves into multiple read-

Desire and Danger | 45

ings of the wayward bodies that moved through these quasi-­outlaw spaces.
Jazz cultures, as such, provide a novel means to examine the movement of
bodies as a marker of how anxieties over borders manifested on the dance
floor and in public space.
If imperial logic brought certain racialized bodies from the empire’s
possessions to the metropole, it also helped name those racialized bodies
as they entered spaces of public entertainment. Specifically, the logic that
names racialized, imperial masculinities as unsophisticated and uncivilized
could be used to understand bodies in the urban core: racialized masculini-
ties posed a threat in a distant “elsewhere,” and this threat was multiplied in
closer proximity to “our” women “here.” Discourses of containment thus
sought to both control and temper the so-­called yellow peril. Bruno Lasker,
a researcher and social worker from New York City commissioned by the
American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations to address the issue
of Filipino immigration, noted that it was “widely conceded, among those
whose business it is to watch their behaviors, that the Filipinos are unusu-
ally considerate in their dealings with women.” This consideration, Lasker
explained, facilitated Filipino men’s success in the dance halls, an intol-
erable situation for authorities. In order to diminish the specter of Fili-
pino sexual prowess, Lasker attributed their success less to virility than to
gullibility. In doing so, he argued that women who frequented the dance
halls were probably prostitutes, or at least women interested in Filipino
men only for their money.43 Lasker observed that “in several cities dance
halls have been closed, not so much because their patrons were in dan-
ger from immoral Filipinos, but because professional prostitutes invaded
these places in large numbers attracted by the presence of unsophisticated
Filipino patrons, who are known as lavish spenders.”44 This formulation
served a dual purpose. First, it constructed Filipino sexual luck as the con-
sequence of an irrational impulse, spending flagrantly on morally dubious
women. Second, it named white women in relationships with Filipino men
as likely prostitutes.45 Together, these assertions further served as a caution
to white women to stay away from Filipino men, lest they be confused with
loose women.46 Asian American men in these scenarios are routinely de-
scribed in terms of criminality, demonstrating the difference in valuation
across imperial personhood.
Lasker’s findings were echoed in vice reports as well, where Asian
American sexuality was imagined as inappropriate, undesirable, and un-

46 | Chapter One
romantic. Reporting on a night out at the Cathedral Ballroom in Manhat-
tan, a vice investigator noted there were “25 Chinese and Japs, among them
3 sailors. There were 15 Philipinos [sic] and Spaniards and the only white
men in the premises besides myself were bouncers, and lobby guys who are
not considered as patrons.”47 His description of the racial mix of the dance
hall divides the men into groups: the Chinese and Japanese; the Filipinos;
whites; and, most likely, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. The presence of multi-
ethnic and multiracial men complicated the meaning of proper white femi-
ninity, and how women should behave in public space.48 Though this was a
multiethnic space, and any of the male patrons could be seen as threaten-
ing the authority of imperial white masculinity, the investigator singled out
the first group for particular scrutiny.49 He surmised: “A white man has very
poor standing here, the instructresses ignore them and prefer the Chinese
or Japs who spend quite some money on tickets, drinks, and besides tip the
girls.”50 The investigator divulged his worry that these “Chinese and Japs”
had been able to “buy” access to white women who enjoyed their attention.
The fact that Asian men had to spend much larger sums in order to have
the pleasure of these women’s company seemed not to have been entirely
lost on the investigator, but this did little to relieve him of his worry that
the wrong men were able to access white women. Again, the difference in
human value is evident in the description, which here depends on the im-
perial logic of valuation being made mobile and brought home.
Such anxious discourse centered on notions of proper and improper
sexualities, instigated by jazz’s energies and movements. “Some of the
dancing instructresses laid full length on the benches here,” reported the
investigator, “and some of the Orientals fooled with them while they were
in that position. Also improper dancing was observed by girls and men
rubbing bodies imitating the act of sexual intercourse.”51 The investigator
made the stakes clear: he found white women engaged in sexual actions
with men of color in a public space where white men were virtually ignored
by women. Though this might appear to be a case of competition, the in-
vestigator painted all of the sexualities found in the dance hall with the
same brush: all were cast as suspect under the sign of jazz. Asian men were
sexual aggressors willing to go to extreme (financial) lengths to fulfill their
perverted desires, whereas the white women were money-­hungry vamps.
Reports such as these (and Carter’s) thereby produced Asian masculinity
as simultaneously threatening and thrilling.

Desire and Danger | 47

 Although these investigative accounts give us a sense of who frequented
dance halls and how Asian men embodied particular danger and degen-
eracy, abetted by the primitivist energies of jazz music, the style in which
these “facts” were reported means that they do not offer much insight into
how racial mixing and seemingly concomitant transgressions might them-
selves account for the appeal of the dance hall. One 1929 article centered
on the Bamboo Inn, a Harlem nightspot owned by a Chinese man by the
name of Lee Shu, offers a clue.52 Described as a “transplanted bit of Mott
St. whose oriental setting seems strangely out of place in the center of the
capital of colored America,”53 and reportedly boasting a significant base of
Asian patrons, the Bamboo Inn’s provenance certainly added to the foreign
feeling of the club for the white reporter. Though the space may have ap-
peared exotic by design, it was the racial mix that the reporter found fas-
cinating and newsworthy: “Men of the mysterious lands of the Far East—
Hindus, Japanese, Chinese, Malays—rub elbows on the dance floor with
West Indians and colored folk from all parts of America. . . . [A] man of
any color may walk in accompanied by a woman of any color—or with
no woman at all.”54 The author’s amazement concentrated on unconven-
tional sexual couplings—not necessarily queer couplings, but those that
strayed across racial boundaries. Though the article did not condemn the
Harlem nightclubs that it described, and even illustrated their pleasures,
the author nonetheless borrowed from the imperial schema to make sense
of sights before him. In other words, by making the clubs seem all the
more foreign because of the transgressions occurring there, the author re-
iterated empire’s bounds, too—in which whiteness defined moral measure
and proper civilization, with the Orient, the primitive, and racial admix-
ture as its outposts.
The multiracial character of New York denoted both the cosmopolitan-
ism and civilizational thinking of U.S. empire. In the contact zones of jazz
cultures, eugenicist nomenclatures of racial degeneracy; sexological ma-
terials; sociological demarcations of race and space; and the multidimen-
sional, multifunctional movements of bodies, goods, and capital across
these borders shifted and converged to produce their own kinetic energies.
It is as such that imperial logic described both the arts and allurements of
jazz-­filled nightlife as well as its dangers.

48 | Chapter One
 Danger and Death in the Empire City

Some white women, such as the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham
and the mezzo-­soprano Eva Gauthier, assembled for themselves an im-
perial subjecthood from contact with the other that bestowed an air of cos-
mopolitan sophistication.55 For others, such as immigrants and working-­
class women, proximity to empire’s outposts could be dangerous, even
fatal. Respectable women were warned in numerous ways that their en-
trance in increasing numbers into the public sphere—as workers in fac-
tories and shops, for instance, or as consumers of fashions and entertain-
ments—could be dangerous, and not just in terms of their virtue. In the
late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, more and more women
sought some measure of autonomy inside but particularly outside the
home. As Kathy Peiss argues, “many young women, particularly the daugh-
ters of immigrants, came to identify ‘cheap amusements’ as the embodi-
ment of American urban culture, particularly its individualism, ideology of
consumption, and affirmation of dating and courtship outside of parental
control.”56 Some women sought to exercise their newfound freedoms only
in leisure pursuits, but the radical shift in traditional familial authority that
these exercises denoted did not go unnoticed by public officials, newspaper
reporters, police officers, and civilian vice investigators. Indeed, these dis-
ciplinary bodies issued (often in concert but sometimes in conflict) dire
cautions about the disorder and chaos brought about by women who pub-
licly participated in commercial entertainments and economies of p ­ leasure.
The likely convergence of white women enjoying jazz culture’s nightlife
and racialized men—some racialized through their participation in night-
life, some through more recent movement from the Caribbean, and some
through histories of the transatlantic slave trade—provided the ground
for a discourse of danger simultaneously meant to tantalize and to provide
a rationale for regulation. These cautions, founded on the confluence of
fact-­finding forays by reporters and vice investigators with the genre con-
ventions of pulp fiction, were used to spin a rationale for the surveillance
and control of the movements of women, men of color, and immigrants in
the imperial city. Women were warned to keep their distance from spaces
of multiracial urban nightlife and the moral taint—even mortal peril—
that awaited them should they enter. Newspapers often tried to proscribe

Desire and Danger | 49

and circumscribe women’s movements with scandalous tales of reputations
ruined and lives destroyed. Members of civic-­minded organizations like
the Committee of Fourteen, created to fight the so-­called blight of pros-
titution, considered most women in public to be possible prostitutes and
maintained that most men would assume the same. Though the Committee
represented some of the stodgiest interests in the city, the ideological and
disciplinary undertakings its members pursued and propagated helped
define the parameters of acceptable sexuality within these economies of
pleasure, especially because the Committee had direct contact with the
legal apparatuses that could enforce these views. But sexual peril carried
racial, even civilizational, dimensions—and even within the city limits. The
freedom to move around the city, to be public, was depicted as a danger
by dint of encounters and contact with immigrants and people of color. In
these seductive cautionary tales, immigrant and nonwhite men were por-
trayed as hypersexual predators and violent monsters. White women risked
the loss of virtue—and, worse still, life—if they had illicit contact with
these volatile bodies. Indeed, women in public who had participated in
the city’s nightlife turned up dead at regular intervals, according to news-
paper reports. These murders were often born of illicit sexual situations:
women who entertained, a class of labor understood as a scant distance
from prostitution; women who otherwise cultivated suspect sexual con-
tacts in nightclubs, cabarets, and speakeasies; and women who daringly
exposed themselves to the dangers of New York’s underworld were at risk.
But in publishing lurid tales of sex and murder, oftentimes supplied by
civilian vice investigators, newspapers and their accomplices (including
law enforcement officials) sought to lay these deaths at the feet of empire’s
others through reasoning derived from the familiar narratives of popular
culture, scenarios created in the spaces of nightlife that ironically beckoned
police and vice investigators to monitor those engaged in what was known
as the sporting life. These stories told of the sexual danger and disorder of
empire brought home to the city.
One particular murder case illustrates both how these civic and quasi-­
civic organizations, together with yellow journalism, sought to circum-
scribe and control sexuality (while reinscribing the behaviors they pro-
posed to end) and how, in doing so, these entities re-­created categories of
control and condemnation that drew on the racial schemas of empire to
map the city’s underworld. On 26 February 1931 a passerby discovered a

50 | Chapter One
strangled, lifeless body in the bushes in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx.
The disheveled and partially exposed corpse was soon identified as Vivian
Gordon, a former chorus girl, enthusiastic participant in New York’s night-
life, and mother. For the next four months, Gordon’s morals and murder
became linked objects of intense interest and speculation in the pages of
New York’s newspapers. As told in the New York Evening Journal, owned by
William Randolph Hearst, the titillating aspects of the tale behind Gordon’s
death were found not in the precious few facts about her murder unearthed
by the police investigation but in the fantastical details, presented as both
real and imagined, of Gordon’s purportedly wild life. Though most papers
reported on some aspect of the murder and its investigation, few devoted
as much space to it as the Evening Journal. Hardly restrained in its report-
ing and editorial decisions, the Evening Journal deployed a purposefully
thrilling and broad net of societal fears and suspicions through which to
portray the murder case. Gordon’s postmortem fame illustrates some of
the ways in which women moved in public and illuminates the rubrics of
discourse and discipline delineating acceptable and unacceptable sexuali-
ties. On the wild frontier of New York’s nightlife, the unfolding story of this
slain beauty illustrates the many gendered transactions between imperial
and domestic racial and sexual classifications that made sense of the public
spaces where she moved and was murdered. As Gordon’s story unfolded
in newspaper pages, tropes familiar from other forms of entertainment—
nightclub shows, popular songs, operas, minstrelsy, films, and novels—
made apparent the marking of women in public space as both dangerous
and endangered, and the marking of racialized masculinities as criminal.
The metaphors used to tell Gordon’s story often borrowed from spatial
discourses of empire to make sense of her transgressions, in effect engen-
dering a circular logic for her death. Additionally, her story, situated within
the larger story of industrial capital, demonstrated how the decades-­long
move of women into public space and the workforce caused the shifting
of nationalized boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. Because Gordon
had dared to cross into the dark territories of the city, a journey that posed
certain dangers to the body and soul, her death was not supposed to be
surprising. According to the papers, before moving to New York, Gordon
lived as a wife and mother in Pennsylvania under her birth name of Benita
and her married name of Bischoff. Like so many women seeking to escape
the strictures of small-­town life, Bischoff was propelled toward the city.

Desire and Danger | 51

Hers was not a case of an innocent lamb stumbling into a lion’s den, how-
ever. Bischoff had already made her reputation as a familiar fixture in pub-
lic nightspots; she had been working as a chorus girl when she met John
Bischoff, the man who would become her husband. Thus in the newspaper
accounts, Bischoff did not embody noir’s blameless ingénue but rather her
opposite: the already fallen woman. Both victim and perpetrator, her lurid
adventures in the underworld guaranteed her eventual destruction. Thus
the tale of her journey, from small town to big city, would encompass a
cautionary (if voyeuristic) story of transgression—of the actual and imag-
ined boundaries of gender and sexuality, family and nation, race and em-
pire. Hers was also a story of industrializing capital, of changing economic
pressures and their manifestation in social relations in the city, wrought
by national and transnational shifts in bodies and labor, goods and mar-
kets. As Peiss marks the increasing number of women in the workplace at
the start of the twentieth century and its attendant disruptions in gender
norms, familial authority, and public space, Roderick Ferguson argues that
capital “calls for subjects who must transgress the material and ideological
boundaries of community, family, and nation. . . . Indeed, the production
of labor, ultimately, throws the normative boundaries of race, gender, class,
and sexuality into confusion.”57 Therefore Gordon’s death is a palimpsest
of multiple travels and transgressions. The simultaneous and overlapping
movements of women, European immigrants, and laborers from the out-
posts of U.S. empire—along with the Great Migration of African Ameri-
cans from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North and Mid-
west—radically transformed both work life and leisure time and shaped
both challenges to and reinscriptions of these border crossings.
Gordon’s early life and her skirmishes with the constraints on women’s
mobility were pieced together through her documented contacts with the
police and the judicial and penal systems, illustrating the overlap of institu-
tions that both create narratives of illicit sexuality and seek to reform those
named as illicit. Beginning with her death, readers of the Evening Journal
were slowly introduced to many (often fictional) aspects of Gordon’s mad-
cap life. The unfolding story suggested that her itinerant nature had long
been a disciplinary problem for various state institutions. For instance,
newspapers found that her husband and Andrew G. McLaughlin, a local
police officer with a corrupt streak, had set her up on charges of pros-
titution.58 Reportedly interested in taking her daughter away from her,

52 | Chapter One
the husband helped ensure her eventual conviction on those prostitution
charges and sentencing to Bedford Reformatory.59 For the newspapers and
the reading public, as well as the legal system, her apparent movement
from chorus girl to convicted prostitute seemed a natural progression,
given that “the chorus girl as a ‘working girl’ was closely associated with
prostitution.”60 After being released from the reformatory, Benita Bischoff
renamed herself Vivian Gordon, left her husband for good, and moved
to New York on her own. With the name change, and branded as a pros-
titute, Gordon reinvented herself as a single woman out to make a living
and find excitement in the big city. Although she retained a strong love for
her only child, according to the newspapers, she was determined not to be
censured any longer for her taste for nightlife—and her appetites were re-
portedly voracious. Over the course of the next few years, Gordon broke
social boundaries, traveling between New York’s smart set and its lowlifes.
She supported herself in fine style, even raising enough capital to become
a landlord. Economic independence and mobility, the papers had it, came
at much too high a price, and Gordon paid with her life. The newspaper
reports invented, or reinvented, the wayward woman as public, disorderly,
and hypersexual and told Gordon’s story through tropes and characters
lifted, as we will see, from the imperial mythologies of popular culture.
As told by the newspapers, and as modeled by a pulpish, hard-­boiled
blueprint of gritty realism and sexual depravity, Gordon’s story carried a
series of warnings against women’s sexual freedom in general and included
strong prohibitions against the increasingly threatening scourge of inter-
racial relations. These cautions against sexual—particularly interracial—
contact were written through the familiar logic of empire. Her affairs with
wealthy white men were portrayed through orientalist narratives of sheiks
and harems, while her affairs with nonwhite men (including Puerto Ricans
and a “darktown gigolo”61) were described as an even more savage order of
danger. Gordon bore the brunt of the moral fault in these tales: if she chose
to approach rich white men, she was a wily woman out to score riches from
easy marks; if she associated willingly with Puerto Rican and black men,
she was a willing consort to treacherous men of color. Her life, encapsu-
lated in this way, served as a warning of the dangers faced by women who
moved in and out of public life. As bad examples, Gordon’s life and death
functioned as evidence of a general principle, and Gordon could be viewed
as one of many or as any woman. Newspapers compared her with other

Desire and Danger | 53

tragically fallen figures like Anna Urbas, Louise Lawson, and Dot King,
three other women reportedly drawn to the bright lights of the big city,
which led to their ultimate undoing. In this way, the popular narrative of
Gordon’s story elaborated the principle of cause and effect, darkly illustrat-
ing what wayward women could expect from daring to transgress the rote
and routine of racialized gender and sexual norms, moving from the safety
of private life to the danger and excitement of nightlife.
In the stories of her travels from the small town to the big city, from
the smart set to subterranean depths, Gordon played the role of a vamp, a
trope familiar to newspaper readers. The vamp emerged on the stage and
in film as a figure that marked women as highly sexual predators, creating
an inappropriate, yet independent, woman with sexual volition. As im-
mortalized by the silent film actress Theda Bara, the vamp incarnated the
archetypical femme fatale, a seductress whose feminine charms lure her
lovers into her dangerous, even deadly, embrace. “In 1922,” Gaylyn Studlar
writes, “William J. Robinson declared in a popular marriage manual that
the ‘frigid’ woman was ‘becoming rare,’ but the greatest contemporary dan-
ger was the ‘menace’ of the woman of ‘excessive sensuality or the Woman
Vampire.’ She threatened ‘the health and even life of her husband.’ Robin-
son concluded that a ‘hypersensual woman . . . with an excessive sexuality’
deserved ‘the name vampire . . . in its literal sense’ because ‘out of igno-
rance’ (excessive demands) or ‘intentionally’ (to kill her husband for his
money), she demanded too much, sexually, from her mate.” 62 As such,
the vamp singularly threatened respectable and dependent femininity,
especially in her sexual predations. But her wayward nature was also esca-
lated by her racial ambiguity; indeed, one popular rumor, created by her
promoters, claimed that Theda Bara’s stage name was an intentional ana-
gram of “Arab death.” The vamp thereby indexed an exotic, mysterious
origin that borrowed from multiple orientalisms—invoking gypsies and
harems—to make sense of her unruly sexuality.
In this way the stories told about sexual transgressions in the city refer-
enced an imperial vernacular that protested the presence of such devia-
tions among its white denizens and instead assigned the presence of sexual
corruption to empire’s others through analogy and affinity. But if Gordon
was more often than not portrayed as a vamp, what were her victims and
accomplices? Although reporters depicted Gordon as courting trouble in
any case, the men in these stories fared far differently from each other. In

54 | Chapter One
newspaper accounts, the vamp swindled older, rich white men, trimming
their wallets whether through blackmail or payment for sexual favors. In
these tales, she was a gold digger, a high-­class prostitute, a predator with a
plan, and she coolly and unsentimentally separated good men from their
even better money.63 In her wake, the men appeared easily duped but also
uncontrollably lascivious in their tastes; in combination these qualities ren-
dered them perfect victims of the vamp’s allure. This masculine persona
we have seen before, and, indeed, one narrative device used to rejuvenate
these older, rich white men was contrived through empire’s other mascu-
linities. Comparisons to orientalized Arab men of West Asia and Northern
Africa thus explicated both these elderly marks’ moral defenselessness and
their unusual sexual proclivities.
Using imperial logic to name a rich white man a sexualized caliph, a
figure straight from stage and screen, one fantastical explanatory story at-
tributes Gordon’s death to her crossing of racial, national, and gendered
borders as she gained sexual and economic power over this wealthy man.
In writing about Harry M. Joralman, a “multimillionaire chemical manu-
facturer,” the New York Evening Journal describes his “strange Harun-­al-­
Raschid-­like existence” 64: “For, like some Caliph of Bagdad out of the
Arabian Nights, Joralman was said to have held high court, levying with
his millions upon the most beautiful of Broadway’s beautiful women—­
surrounding himself with them, for all the world like an Oriental potentate
in the midst of a harem.” 65 Through such orientalist figures of both profli-
gate wealth and aberrant sexuality, the sixty-­nine-­year-­old millionaire was
cast as a dynamic sexual force, if also a moral alien. In this instance, the
name of the “Caliph of Bagdad” was familiar to readers as a foreigner, ap-
pearing in The Arabian Nights (the first French translation was published
in 1704, the first English translation in 1706); François-­Adrien Boieldieu’s
French opéra bouffe Le Calife de Bagdad (1800); Peter Cornelius’s German
opera, The Barber of Bagdad (1858); the novel Kismet, by Edward Knoblock
(1911), and the 1920 and 1930 film versions of that novel; the film The Thief
of Bagdad (1924); and the popular song “The Caliph of Bagdad,” composed
by Berenice Benson Bentley (1929). Such signifiers of oriental masculinity
were thus regularly mobilized to explain the extraordinary sexual appe-
tites and moral failures of elderly white tycoons. Ann T. Gibson, reputedly
a “close friend” of Vivian Gordon’s, told the Evening Journal, “‘There was
another rich old man she talked about. Said he was a banker and a regular

Desire and Danger | 55

turk, with six or eight women.’”66 Again the sexual aberrations of Gordon’s
marks were made sense of through reference to orientalized masculini-
ties (“a regular turk”). This produced a peculiar dichotomy. White men
could be sexual predators, but such predation could not be attributed to
the nature or culture of European or European American masculinity lest
the moral, civilizational center disappear. Racialized masculinities, how-
ever, could carry the burden of such failures. These wealthy men’s good
standing in the imperial city (as its tycoons and entrepreneurs) could be
preserved in this manner. Illicit sexuality and possible violence were obfus-
cated and disconnected from these men’s whiteness and laid instead at the
feet of orientalized masculinities that had in some frightful way contami-
nated these men.
Just as white men were marked through racialization that could carry
implications of sexual licentiousness, reifying narratives of criminaliza-
tion adhered to the bodies of men of color in fantastical stories about
Gordon’s life and death. Although in the accounts above Gordon courted
trouble by luring some of the most powerful men in the city—indeed, in
the country—into her trap, no such manipulation was necessary to entice
men of color into sinning with her. Nonwhite men already tended toward
the morally reprehensible in these stories, rendering any association with
them immediately dangerous. Gordon’s acquaintance with Puerto Rican
men, for instance, was enough to cast suspicion on her associates as pos-
sible murderers. The Evening Journal noted that “Mrs. Halsey herself . . .
is a Cuban. Thus, with her story of the two ‘Porto Ricans or Spaniards’
who were the flaming-­haired Vivian’s companions, and the fact that Zeno,
the ‘mystery man’ of the Hamilton Apartments, likewise was described as
a Porto Rican, the mystery surrounding the murder began to take on a
decidedly Latin-­American cast.”67 Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other im-
migrants from U.S. possessions were an observable part of the cityscape,
traveling from “there” to “here” as laborers or moving parts of the engine
of imperial capital. In songs like the Tin Pan Alley–style “Chile Bean,” Lati-
nas in the city and in empire’s elsewhere remained desirable: “You think
we’re full of blarney / We’re full of Chile con carne,” the male characters of
the song sing to woo their Caribbean island love interest, named “Chile.”68
The song thus makes a case for more proper modes of choosing sexual ob-
jects through empire’s lens. Unlike Latinas, who were marked as sexually
available to a range of white masculinities, including the implied Irishmen

56 | Chapter One
in “Chile Bean,” Latinos were already suspect. Their economically neces-
sary if socially undesirable presence conjured up the continuing threat of
their semitamed nature, and they were viewed as likely suspects for violent
murders.69 Indeed, it was later noted by an “expert” that “the crime seems
to have a Latin touch. The fact that the woman was strangled doesn’t jibe
with the idea of American gangsters and gunmen. The Latins in their mur-
ders have a cruel streak, an element of torture—the garotte, the knife.”70
Not only do race and connections to the outposts of empire link these men
to murderous acts in these reports, but their supposed national and racial
character also betrays particular forms of sensual cruelty in intimate situa-
tions. These assertions, then, rely on an imperial logic that imagines those
from the islands of empire to be uncivilized and not to value human life. As
in the dance hall examples above, white womanhood is particularly threat-
ened by racialized and nationalized masculinities.
Imperial figurations of Latino sexual prowess and violent propensities
also played out in a story viewed by the newspapers as parallel to Vivian
Gordon’s murder. In a series of articles, the Evening Journal compared the
brutal murders of other Broadway beauties, other women who had dared
to carve out a place for themselves in public life. One article described the
slain beauty Dot King’s weakness for Albert E. Guimares, her Puerto Rican
lover: “The girl and her lover lived a gay life and turbulent. They frequented
the most bizarre haunts in town and they fought many a battle. Guimares
at times beat her, punched her, kicked her, made her body an ugly picture
of black and blue. But she loved him. She confided once to an intimate she
could never love any man that she did not fear. And she feared Guimares,
the dapper, smooth-­shaven suave Porto Rican of Latin temperament.”71 In
this passage, descriptions of King’s life with her Puerto Rican lover shifted
smoothly between the excitements and the terrors of New York City night-
life. Indeed, King’s attraction to Guimares was attributed to her fear of
him; his propensity for violence was portrayed as a perverse personal mag-
netism. His powerful physicality lent him an air of animalism that was at
once fierce and enthralling. This brief excerpt thus demonstrates the immi-
nent threat that the empire’s racialized masculinities posed to the domestic
order, a threat made all the more real with the crossing of boundaries—
first, in Guimares’s movement from Puerto Rico to New York, and second,
in his associations with white women across divisions of race and in spite
of racialized norms of gendered and sexual propriety.

Desire and Danger | 57

 Stories of Gordon’s murder also mobilized particular notions of black
masculinities, whose longer and lingering imperial histories linked them
to violence, criminalization, and incivility. These complicated histories of
containment and movement, tied to the all-­too-­recent past of transatlan-
tic slave trading and more recent migrations from the Caribbean and the
southern regions of the United States, marked black men in the cityscape.
Their movements, however circumscribed in fact, also posed a danger to
the racial order. One journalist, Alex Feinberg, invoked a mobile black
masculinity in his invention of a potential suspect in Gordon’s murder.
Drawing on minstrel stereotypes, Feinberg created a character named “the
Duke,” a gigolo based in Harlem, a fabrication that came on the heels of the
newspaper’s discovery of a connection between Gordon and a black man
with whom she was supposed to have had an affair.72 In these two reports,
Gordon’s murder was linked not only to the manifest menace of black male
sexuality, but also to the passionate, all-­hours Harlem nightlife. Her jour-
ney to Harlem further challenged the racial boundaries of the city, where
jazz-­filled cabarets and nightclubs foreshadowed the horror to come.
The danger of transgressing the city’s demarcations of safety and dan-
ger, mapped onto racialized neighborhoods and semi-­outlaw spaces of jazz
cultures, established the threatening milieu of Gordon’s rendezvous. These
accounts couple the jazz life with primitive passions, whose nature was
both sexual and violent, and with the compelling force of musical rhythms
and alcohol. In the initial account reporting her connection with a “dark-
town gigolo,” Gordon was described as “tiring of the ‘ordinary’ pace set by
her Broadway companions.” To revive her interest, she “became a frequent
habitué of the jazzy clubs located in the vicinity of 7th Ave. and 135th St.
where ‘hot’ rythms [sic] and hotter hootch keep downtown patrons danc-
ing and drinking until the wee small hours of the morning. It was in one
of these places that the redhead met this darktown gigolo.”73 As with the
dance hall, “jazzy clubs” were blemished by racial mixing and sexual de-
pravity (much wilder than the Broadway scene). Multiracial nightclubs,
cabarets, and “sin and gin joints” were part of an outlaw culture—here set
in the heart of Harlem’s nightlife district—comprised of criminal bodies
and forbidden vices. Such themes of racial degeneracy and sexual wicked-
ness, accompanied and encouraged by the sensual syncopations of jazz
music, appeared in Feinberg’s speculative account, which sought to offer
to authorities a clue to Gordon’s murder by providing a fictional version of

58 | Chapter One
what might have happened. Setting the scene for Gordon’s imaginary en-
counter at a club with the Duke, Feinberg attributed a primal imperative
to the persistent, perverse rhythms of jazz: “In the Blue Jazz Club, a per-
spiring band blared forth its maddest tunes. Jazz loud, piercing, broken,
poured from the trumpets and the sax’s [sic] as brown-­skinned damsels,
grinning, swayed and contorted their bodies in ecstatic convolutions.” 74
As Feinberg sets the scene, the madness of the music was paired with the
“contorted” bodies of black women dancing. Jazz music, and the move-
ments it inspired, disordered its listeners’ subjectivities at the level of the
body.75 Jazz compelled bodies into “contorted,” “ecstatic” reconfigurations
that contrasted with social norms of respectable comportment; jazz as pre-
sented in this brief but profoundly telling excerpt sounds like a thrilling
violation of the moral order. In this lunatic atmosphere, these grotesque
(to Feinberg) dancing figures strongly foreshadowed the convulsing, strug-
gling body of Gordon as she fought and eventually succumbed to her mur-
derer. The music was part of the joyful danger, according to Feinberg, sub-
liminally inspiring the Duke to his primal rage. It does so first by creating
outlaw subjectivities prone to perversity, and second by offering primitivist
brute sensual scenes of distressed female bodies, on which the Duke might
imagine imposing his murderous desires. All the while, however, the article
continues to draw on the vocabulary of the adrenaline-­producing Harlem
nightlife that white patrons already enjoyed for years. A seemingly contra-
dictory mode for explaining murderous rampages, the economies of plea-
sure represented in accounts of the Duke also tell why the air of criminality
simultaneously seduced and repulsed, in a manner similar to the imagined
populations of empires.
In this speculative account, the disposition of the “darktown gigolo” is
drawn from pop culture figurations of black masculinity that lend mean-
ing to our understanding of his possible role in Gordon’s murder. In par-
ticular, the character of the Duke seems to come to the reader straight
from the vocabulary of minstrelsy and vaudeville, both popular cultural
forms that preceded and continued throughout the Jazz Age.76 Like the
dandified gentleman, a contemptuous image of black masculinity from the
early nineteenth century, the Duke was a man with ambitions far beyond
his station in life.77 Feinberg’s naming of this gigolo is a mockery; no one,
we are meant to understand, could possibly mistake a black man for a
nobleman. His act, shot through with unearned arrogance and rampant

Desire and Danger | 59

fraud, thus exemplified a serious threat to those white women who dared
to wander into darkest Harlem.78 In search of delight, they would instead
find danger. Feinberg’s opening description of the Duke paints a picture of
the particular instruments of his deception: “‘The Duke’ was a picture of
sartorial perfection. A green velour hat, its brim snapped down at just the
right angle, adorned his head. His dress waistcoat was as snowy white as
his gleaming teeth. It showed through, with its imitation pearl buttons, a
suit whose color was neither quite green nor quite purple, but an eye-­filling
combination of both. His trousers were creased, not front and back, but
sidewise in the manner of an extreme dandy.”79 This detailed description
of his clothing sought to illustrate the Duke’s suspicious qualities. First, his
appearance was meticulous, his hat’s brim “at just the right angle.” He is
clean and neat, but his tastes are garish and vulgar. The colors he chose are
bright and “eye-­filling,” his suit a color so extraordinary that it defied exist-
ing categories. But his reputed perfection was strictly sartorial—set dress-
ing, as it were: his gentlemanly appearance was an illusion, strictly tailored
for a price, rather than naturally occurring in his black person. It was his
buttons that gave him away most plainly. They were “imitation pearl,” and
the Duke himself was also imitation, in Feinberg’s estimation.80 With these
few clues about his costuming, then, readers would be expected to know
that this was a suspect man, an assumption predicted by their familiarity
with popular entertainment that marked particular black men in this way.
Although the façade of gentlemanliness might be played for comic effect
in these accounts, it only partially covered a wrathful, savage black mas-
culinity, a racialization that marked the Duke—who could be any black
man—as a likely murder suspect. Indeed, in Feinberg’s fiction the man
hiding behind a pretense of nobility and affected gentlemanliness was a
violent creature of primitive urges. But it was not the loss of Gordon’s fi-
nancial support that angered him; the Duke could find “plenty of other
women” who would pay his way.81 Rather, in spite of the account of pa-
tronage that would seem to have made the Duke Gordon’s dependent, he
viewed her sexual being as his property. When Gordon spurned him, the
Duke felt “strange uncontrollable impulses,” deciding that “if he couldn’t
have her, no one else would. He was no plaything to be tossed aside by a
woman when he wanted that woman, fiercely, with all his being.” 82 Un-
able to deny his primal impulses, according to Feinberg’s story, the Duke
murdered Gordon. The fact that the Duke was fictional did not detract

60 | Chapter One
from Feinberg’s claim that this invention might offer a clue to her death;
in doing so, he suggested that any striving black man could be the Duke.
Despite a pleasing exterior, and the appearance of civilized bearing, black
masculinity always embodied an imminent danger because of its continu-
ing associations with primitive sexuality. Jazz, furthermore, was the key to
unchaining the beast.
Stories of Vivian Gordon as well as other women reputed to have met
their deaths because of their movements into New York’s nightlife—where
races mixed, danced, and bedded one another—had multiple functions:
engrossing, delightful tales of wild nightlife; cautionary tales; and confir-
mation of tales already told. As such, these stories appeared to be reform-­
minded, while still drawing on the appeal of heterogeneous jazz cultures
and thereby luring more of the population into the sporting life, with the
result that they would eventually need reform. That is, although the stories
about Gordon were meant to naturalize her death, to render it inevitable
because of her travel into jazz’s contact zones—empire’s outposts brought
home—they also hinted that what was to be feared was terribly tempt-
ing. The maps and movements of empire may have denoted and described
these transgressions, but these accounts drew a new chart of the city, letting
readers know where and how to commit their own. In these narratives, jazz
with its unbounded energies provided the soundtrack to such absorbing
danger, and imperial figurations supplied the ground for comprehending
jazzed subjectivities. The imperial logic used by these reports, then, pro-
vided the language of transgression and regulation, freedoms and its limits,
and simultaneously served as a means of building the social order.

Mixed-­Race Metaphors and Mediums

In February 1928 a vice investigator charged with monitoring prostitution

met with Lucienne Delapazieux and Lorna Denny in a ground-­floor apart-
ment at 140 West 57th Street. Liquor flowed in the course of the “investiga-
tion,” and the conversation turned to “fairies.” One of the suspected prosti-
tutes, Lucienne, advised the investigator to “read a book of homo-­sexuality
by Havelock Ellis, (which she wrote on a piece of paper),” according to the
investigator (the influential British sexological researcher Havelock Ellis
sought to shift homosexuality from the category of criminal acts to one of
congenital, and thus involuntary, physiological abnormality). Lorna then
offered to “stage a circus” if the investigator would pay each of the women

Desire and Danger | 61

twenty-­five dollars. The circus they offered to perform would consist of
queer sex acts between the two women that the vice investigator, turned
prospective john, could watch. Sex between him and the women would
cost more.83 This is just one of many references to the emerging science
of sexology to be found in vice reports from the era. Indeed, the traffic
in knowledge between pervert and vice investigator was not unusual, nor
was the sly recognition that the investigator might also be a voyeur un-
remarkable. One report on the Liberal Club’s Pagan Rout, dated 1917, in-
sisted that the free-­love crowd were “close students of sex psychology and
read every book on sex that can be found.”84 And at the highly sexualized
balls in Greenwich Village, where scantily clad participants wore scandal-
ous costumes drawing on Greek antiquities, Arab and Asian extravagances,
and African primitivisms—all times and spaces distinguished in sexologi-
cal and historical discourses as homosexual or so-­called inverted scenes.
As with eugenics discourses of the races mingling and consequently dis-
solving, these reports indicate that sexological discourses marked city in-
habitants and informed surveillance. They further show that some of the
new supposedly scientific ideas circulated among nonscientists, including
social workers, government agents, civilian investigators, and even the de-
viants whom the others sought to police and reform.85 Furthermore, these
reports convey fears that these same discourses produced more queer be-
haviors. And, as the 1917 report makes clear, the moral delinquencies of
free love as well as queer and interracial sexualities can and do intersect
each other, especially through the signs and symbols of imperial and civili-
zational divides. Here again, empire crucially informed the local demarca-
tions of the city, its spaces, and sexualities.
This section brings together concerns from the previous two sections,
in that here I am interested in the circulation of imperial logic both across
the sexualized spaces of racially mixed dance halls and through discourses
of racialized masculinities, as they pertain to narratives about black femi-
ninity and queer masculinities. This section turns to a novel that also took
up these scientific and surveillance discourses, in order to think through
the bounds of identity in the Jazz Age. The black artists and writers of
the Harlem Renaissance contemplated questions of racial mixing and
non-­heteronormative behavior in city publics. They demonstrated par-
ticular interest in new formations of black masculinity. This younger gen-
eration, the historian Martin Summers contends, “constructed and per-

62 | Chapter One
formed their gender subjectivity through the elevation of the physical and
sexual potency of the body, consumption and self-­gratification, and an
individual self-­expression that was not confined by the black bourgeoisie’s
standards of propriety.”86 Thurman addressed some these experiments in
self-­making through the multiracial character Alva in his novel The Blacker
the Berry. . . . When he turned his attention to the performing and polic-
ing of social and cultural identities in New York City, the impact of Asian
immigrants from empire’s outposts on urban demographics and the pres-
ence of Asians and Asian Americans in spaces of nightlife were not lost
on him.87 Incorporating Asian bodies as well as orientalist tropes in two
of his novels, The Blacker the Berry . . . and Infants of the Spring, Thurman
transformed debates about racial commingling, miscegenation, and black
subjecthood.88 In these ways, Thurman’s work demonstrates connections
between the making of queer black subjects, imperialism, and various sci-
entific discourses, each of which are informed, shaped, and written against
and through one another.
In The Blacker the Berry . . . , Thurman addresses imperial consequence
and simultaneous multiracial presence through the mixed-­race body of
Alva, his main antagonist. As a villain, however, Alva is multidimensional.
He does not simply represent the precarious social position of a mixed-­race
man; his multiraciality also operates as a metaphor for race relations in the
city. In other words, he stands for both a phenotypical and a multivalent
cultural admixture. Furthermore, rather than present his mixed-­race char-
acters as wretched or miserable, Thurman provides a more nuanced read-
ing.89 Additionally, he troubled dialogues about race and sex with his intro-
duction of multiple non-­normative sexualities, including queer acts and
free-­love ideologies, into the overwhelmingly heteronormative conversa-
tions about multiraciality and black modernity.90 To some degree, these
concerns followed from Thurman’s interests in sociological and sexologi-
cal studies. Although Alva’s mixed-­race body represents the (very literal)
commingling of blood across an imperial color line, it also denotes the
congenital physiological abnormality that was how most people then saw
homosexuality. As Somerville so aptly observes, connections and trans-
actions between racial science and sexual science in theories, methods, and
analogies also created linkages between mixed-­race bodies and queer ones.
“Through notions of ‘shades’ of gender and sexual ‘half-­breeds,’” Somer-
ville explains, early twentieth-­century sexologists “appropriated dominant

Desire and Danger | 63

scientific models of race to construct and embody . . . the intermediate
sex.”91 In Thurman’s usage of the metaphors and analogies attached to
mixed-­race characters—literary and scientific in nature, but also mutually
interdependent as technologies of the body—he responded to racial and
sexological science in his examination of the multiple dimensions of inter-
racial contact in the city.92 Furthermore, he not only deployed mixed-­race
identities to represent the racial and national borders being drawn and re-
drawn in the city, but he also used these identities as instruments to pry
open the borders of respectable gender and sexuality.
I argue that in much of this era’s jazz cultures, the provocations of desire
do not arise separately from histories of imperialism and colonialism.
These histories reveal what Gayatri Gopinath calls an “erotics of power.”93
In Thurman’s work an erotics of power is invoked through the bringing
together of national and imperial structures of racialization and sexuality
with scientific studies and the surveillance those studies inspired. By imag-
ining the structural affinities of race, sexuality, science, and national be-
longing, Thurman productively created his congenitally queer figure at the
scene of multiple collapses between categories. In The Blacker the Berry . . .
(and, as I will discuss in the next chapter, Infants of the Spring), the meta-
phor and materiality of mixed-­race bodies describes the transgression of
distinct sexual boundaries and more. That is, Thurman also created char-
acters that defied gender normativity, which we might call “genderqueer”
from our vantage point. For Thurman, the mixed-­race body as metaphor
also becomes a medium for exploring anxieties about, as well as the chal-
lenges to, multiple (spatial, social, and sexual) borders.94 The breaches and
disobediences that Alva performs in the novel are instructive, demonstrat-
ing the constitutive nature of imperial logic to meaning making for inter-
racial and queer relations in the domestic scene. Thurman, then, borrows
from sexological and sociological theories and technologies in order to
produce a black urban aesthetic practice of race and sex that is indelibly
marked by empire.
In The Blacker the Berry . . . , Thurman addresses some of the concerns
surrounding interracial contact in jazz cultures—including, for example,
Carter’s anxiety about the presence of Asian men in New York—in a fic-
tional replication of Small’s Paradise, one of Harlem’s most popular night-
clubs. In an early encounter between the novel’s principal characters at
this nightclub, Thurman illustrates the allure of the mixed-­race man to a

64 | Chapter One
woman out for an evening’s excitement. Thurman describes Emma Lou’s
initial attraction to Alva: “Then some one touched her on the shoulder, and
she looked up into a smiling oriental-­like face, neither brown nor yellow
in color, but warm and pleasing beneath the soft lights.”95 Alva’s racial un-
intelligibility is both pleasing and perplexing to her. When he asks her to
dance, “Emma Lou was confused, her mind blankly chaotic. She was ex-
pected to push back her chair and get up. She did. And, without saying a
word, allowed herself to be maneuvered to the dance floor.”96 In this pas-
sage, Alva’s appeal is evident, due in large measure to the erotic enigma of
interracial contact that he embodied as person and promise. At the same
time, this mixing inspires both confusion and chaos in Emma Lou that
were incited through music, dancing, and intimate interracial contact.
Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry . . . is most often studied for discourses
of color consciousness and consequent practices of social division among
African Americans themselves, a practice that Thurman clearly abhorred.97
Like Rudolph Fisher’s “The City of Refuge” or the writings of the New
Negro intellectuals, Thurman’s novel destabilizes the notion of a unified
and coherent black identity for Jazz Age Harlem.98 Interrogating the pri-
macy of skin color as the metaphor and medium for appointing value in
the United States, Thurman argues that racialized identities are constructed
according to demonstrably fallible categories.99 However, this issue is more
complex than simply questioning those forms of “colorism” that occur in
black communities. In Thurman’s novel, Emma Lou Morgan grew up in a
small black community in Boise, Idaho, whose members valued light skin
as a sign of status. In this community, much of the discussion of race re-
volved around the effort to make “good” marriages, defined by having an
acceptably light-­skinned heterosexual partner. Emma Lou is the daughter
of a light-­skinned mulatto woman and a dark-­skinned black man—a pair-
ing that the community and Emma Lou’s extended family deemed inap-
propriate. Emma Lou’s feelings about sexuality are shaped and guided by a
black-­white dichotomy, color hierarchies, and heteronormativity.
Worried about appearing too dark and finding a suitable partner, Emma
Lou is attracted to the fairer-­skinned Alva. But, of course, Alva is not just
a light-­skinned black man. Rather, he is multiracial. Thurman etches the
transgressions occurring at nightclubs like Small’s onto Alva’s corporeal
body and complex personhood, especially as a subject of U.S. empire:
“Alva’s mother had been an American mulatto, his father a Filipino. Alva

Desire and Danger | 65

himself was small in stature as his father had been, small and well devel-
oped with broad shoulders, narrow hips and firm well modeled limbs. His
face was oval shaped and his features were more oriental than Negroid.
His skin was neither yellow nor brown but something in between, some-
thing warm, arresting and mellow with the faintest suggestion of a parch-
ment tinge beneath, lending it individuality. His eyes were small, deep and
slanting. His forehead high, hair sparse and finely textured.” 100 In this de-
tailed description, mirroring the scientific scrutiny of the body’s measure-
ments by eugenicists and sexologists, Alva’s ambiguous racial and sexual
characteristics emerge. These complex characteristics, that cause anxiety in
others as they traverse formerly stable categories, foreshadow Alva’s queer
acts, divulged later in the novel. As Somerville explains, “sexologists and
others writing about homosexuality borrowed the model of the racially
mixed body as a way to make sense of the ‘invert,’ an individual who ap-
peared to be neither completely masculine nor completely feminine.” 101
Alva’s queerness is thus placed at the intersections of unsettled and upset
categories, and though his queerness is disparaged by the novel’s narrative
structure, his liminal status nonetheless affords him access to all the iden-
tifications implicated in his particular ambiguity. A mobile figure, Alva ac-
commodates a range of settings—from highbrow intellectualism to falling-­
down drunkenness and abject poverty, from heterosexual cohabitation and
fatherhood to gay bachelorhood.102 In many ways, Thurman presents Alva
as the most compelling character of the novel, capable of movement and
contact with many disparate people and places.
In Thurman’s description, Alva’s complicated racial mix (a mulatto
mother and a Filipino father) produces layered unease.103 Alva embodies
a troubled triangle of race and racialization—part white, part black, part
Asian—through those complicated economies of distance and intimacy
that stand in for the legacy of the U.S. empire’s chattel slavery and im-
perial expansion. As noted above, Thurman identifies Alva as “neither yel-
low nor brown but something in between,” though his in-­betweenness is
not demonized at this point in the novel. Rather, Thurman uses this racial
ambiguity to illustrate Alva’s allure; his skin was “warm” and “arresting.”
In Emma Lou’s first encounter with him, she notes the “pleasing foreign-
ness of his face.” 104 This blend, however, ultimately proves unsuccess-
ful and undesirable. Though Emma Lou longs for a light-­skinned man (a
worry heightened by the “poor” marriage her light-­skinned mother made

66 | Chapter One
with her dark-­skinned father), Alva’s skin tone proves misleading and ulti-
mately inadequate. Though Emma Lou is also the progeny of mixed-­race
couplings, her multiraciality remains legible, unlike Alva’s. His “parchment
tinge” betrays the racial otherness that metastasized throughout his body,
his blood’s contamination—through its failure to be black, white, or even
mulatto—of all known and legible terms.105 Accordingly, the introduc-
tion of the Orient into a black and white equation signals new corruption.
Furthermore, Alva’s Asianness denotes his moral and sexual depravity as
neither black nor white, saving both domestic categories from the horror
and blame of Alva’s despicable actions. Thurman thus uses Asianness as a
character flaw to demonize Alva, even perhaps to demonstrate that lighter
is not always better. However, Alva’s exotic ambiguity is rendered appeal-
ing to some (albeit dangerous) degree. Though he is not rehabilitated in
the story, Alva’s allure is visible in his considerable knowledge of Harlem’s
nightlife and his social mobility as a charming guide to it.
Alva’s racial ambiguities cannot be separated from their gendered and
sexualized dimensions.106 The visual markers of his racial otherness are also
found in emerging scopophilic sexological discourses. This new language
of sexual science, Somerville argues, “conceptualized sexuality through
a reliance on, and deployment of, racial ideologies.” 107 Sexological dis-
courses created gender, racial, and sexual classifications to determine what
was normal and abnormal, healthy and pathological, classifications that
Thurman employs in this novel as scenes of tension. In the textual caress
cited above, he deliberately confuses Alva’s biological sex categorization
with the origin of his sexual aberration, even before the novel’s revelation
of Alva’s queer acts.108 Although notions of dimorphic sex often under-
lie descriptions of masculine strength and bulk in contrast to feminine
softness and slenderness, Alva is described as having shoulders that were
simultaneously “small” and “broad.” Troubling the ordering mechanisms
of gender and sexual categories, these sexually ambiguous physical charac-
teristics function to prompt further anxieties about Alva’s moral character,
and they foreshadow the disclosure of his queer sexuality near the end of
the novel.109
Though Alva’s gender transgressions can be understood as an instance
of the feminization (or emasculation) of Asian men, Alva retains a threat-
ening, even controlling, masculine agency that necessitates a more com-
plicated reading of gender with race and sexuality. While Alva and Emma

Desire and Danger | 67

Lou are married, Alva continues to have sexual relationships with many
other characters in the novel, including the bisexual Geraldine, hetero-
sexual Marie, and queer Bobby.110 His sexual relationships deny the expec-
tation of monogamy, instead promoting a free-­love sensibility alongside
his queer choices. In the climactic scene of the novel, Alva is with his male
lover, Bobby. In this last relationship, Alva asserts a confident and vigor-
ous (queer) masculinity, as Bobby appears to be a more docile partner, even
going so far as to do Alva’s laundry for him. While Alva’s queerness, attrib-
uted to his Asianness, certainly blurs the borders of femininity and mascu-
linity, his sexuality does not emasculate him. There is, of course, a troubling
history of Asian American critics perceiving homosexual acts as a means
of feminizing and otherwise degrading Asian and Asian American men.
Such an argument, however, cannot account for queer acts that substanti-
ate hierarchies of gender and sexual power, let alone challenge or embrace
the idea of queerness as disruption or deviancy.111 In the novel, Alva is still
considered a sexual threat despite, or perhaps because of, his deviant mas-
culinity. He has sex with men and women, and he dominates all of them.
His relationship with Emma Lou provides him monetary resources, while
his relationships with Geraldine, Marie, and Bobby function as narrative
devices that reinforce his power over Emma Lou.
As Ann Stoler argues, imperial order focuses on ambiguous identities
as well as the anxieties they create precisely because their features do not
cohere in stable or clear categories.112 In much the same way that neces-
sarily malleable social and legal categories of blackness transformed the
racial composition of the United States, Alva’s transgressions confuse those
discourses of gender and sexuality, racial thinking, and national bound-
aries that attempt to arrange physical and moral attributes in a hierarchi-
cal order. His ambiguous identities, then, can only be read as problematic
given the conclusion of the novel. Though Alva’s racial difference pleases
and seduces, by the story’s end it indicates his (congenital) pathology. Por-
trayed as being rotten to the core, the origins of his despicable nature can
be discerned in Thurman’s initial physical description, in both the mad-
dening ambiguity of his visual and corporeal exterior and the muddled
abnormality of his hidden interior. Alva fails to be black or even mulatto;
his Asianness, as his other queer quality, taints his character and actions
from the outset. That is, Alva’s racial excesses gesture toward and other-
wise guarantee his sexual excesses within the novel’s arc. His sexual per-

68 | Chapter One
sona is marked as aberrant because he shamelessly philanders, repeatedly
breaking his marital vows, and performs queer deviancy. His dangerous
unintelligibility, identified as evasive and deceptive because it cannot be
indexed properly, explains why he cannot be a proper lover for Emma Lou,
the novel’s heroine.
But to understand this danger, the tensions and outright hostilities pro-
duced by Alva’s ambiguities must be read against empire, through which
racial and sexual classifications emerge as ordering mechanisms. My read-
ing of this novel brings into focus histories of colonial and imperial rule and
all their racial and sexual dimensions. In this way, New York City emerges
as a modern city defined by imperial ambitions and domestic struggles.
Stories about new immigrants and people of color commingling in dance
halls, nightclubs, and other jazz scenes thus illustrate anxieties about and
also possibilities for the changing demographic characteristics of the na-
tional body, even as they extend the discourse of imperial reach. Cultural
as well as scientific categories of race and sexuality, changed by encounters
in multiple contact zones elsewhere, proliferate at microsites of national
and imperial subject formation and forms of subjection in the city. Disci-
plinary rationales, incentivized by empire’s encounters with racial others
on the outposts, are aimed at wayward bodies within city limits. These
vocabularies of race and sex, desire and danger—transported to Manhat-
tan to underwrite the policing mechanisms of vice investigators, city legis-
lators, and journalists and to animate aesthetic labors such as novels and
nightlife—produce a complicated mesh of contacts and encounters as the
grounds for negotiating freedom and control. Jazz appears as a contact
zone through which imperial and domestic forms of racial thinking index
Harlem nightlife as adventurous and stimulating because strange and
erotic, but also unsettling and dangerous. Therefore, although the novel’s
outcome treats Alva’s Filipino blood as treacherous, consistent with the
manifest dangers associated with the yellow peril, and his mixed-­race sub-
jecthood echoes elements of the tragic mulatto (both elements common in
racial thinking for the era), Alva could also be read as a more complicated
and suggestively ambivalent figure. Even identified as a threat and menace
emanating from empire’s incursions, Alva offers a portrait of a life lived, if
not beyond then beneath a stifling social order.
In this chapter, I have brought together newspaper accounts, music,
dancing, performance, vice reports, sexological texts, and the specter of

Desire and Danger | 69

sociology as a way to explore how imperial logic contextualized and made
sense of New York’s nightlife in the Jazz Age. The racial mixing, with all
it implied about empire’s homecoming and sexual border crossings, was
viewed as both enticement and danger. Thus, stories of these crossings were
repeated across genres both as titillation and as forms of regulation. These
narratives helped create nightlife participants, who could enjoy the com-
mercialized entertainments of the Jazz Age, and suspect subjects, whose
presence in public space challenged race, gender, and sexual roles and at-
tracted scrutiny from authorities and reformers. Jazz music itself described
urban neighborhoods in the United States as contact zones, where nightly
negotiations of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality took place in spaces
of commercialized entertainment. Participants in the sporting life chal-
lenged gender, racial, and sexual borders, the meanings of empire, and the
proper use of public space. All the while, though, they gave cause for the
policing of all those borders, and thus their actions described both bound-
ary challenges and its own set of limitations. In the next chapter, I build
on these ideas of transgression and regulation in an imperial context, to
understand the creation of queer black aesthetic ­practices.

70 | Chapter One
 Chapter Two

Queer Modernities

T
he cover of the March 1926 issue of Opportunity magazine
featured a rough sketch of a primitivized black man in pro-
file, his shoulders bared and a hoop dangling from his ear
(fig. 2.1). He is posed adjacent to a palm tree, a climatic signifier
for nonspecific jungles and sultry islands. This artwork accorded
with other reclamations of the signs and objects of primitivism
and fetishism characteristic of the New Negro intellectuals, who
sought to seize and secure these symbols of modernity in avant-­
garde culture for the black arts—and black men—in the U.S.
imaginary. The sketch is Richard Bruce Nugent’s earliest pub-
lished drawing, completed when he was just nineteen years old
and within seven months of his return from Washington, D.C.,
to Harlem with Langston Hughes. Although the sketch draws
on a repertoire of meanings attached to African natives and far-
away landscapes, it also manifests Nugent’s strategies for cre-
ating a queer black aesthetic in New York City during the Jazz
Age. This particular image from Nugent’s body of work brings
together images of the African diaspora and narratives of the
modern city to reconfigure the spaces in which we might find
the African subject. Instead of remaining in the wild, outside of
urban modernity, Nugent’s figure confounds the boundary be-
Figure 2.1 Richard Bruce Nugent, cover illustration for Opportunity,
March 1926. Courtesy of Thomas H. Wirth.

tween the city and the jungle, the island, the faraway Eden. In doing so, he
takes up various points of reference: he is an inhabitant of a remote land
but also of New York City nightlife, where exotic club décor and costumed
dances denoting distance also abound. In other words, this primitivized
man also doubles as an urban denizen heading to a primitive ball in Green-
wich Village. Thomas Wirth asks: “Is the young man really a denizen of the
jungle, or is he perhaps a Harlemite in drag?” 1 The multiplicities of urban
sexualities are made clear in this doubling, where the rouge on the figure’s
cheek and his hoop earring gesture toward queer cultures, and where the
palm tree, while certainly a sign of primitivism, is also penis-­shaped, a

72 | Chapter Two
visual joke perhaps beyond the recognition of the magazine’s editors, and
references the sexualization of the primitive; the jungled sites of Africa, the
Pacific, and the Caribbean; and spaces of city nightlife.
Through Nugent’s sketch, it becomes evident that narratives of the
primitive and the modern have a spatial relationship to each other and
form the boundaries of the imperial city. Throughout his work, Nugent
played with the solidity and surety of those boundaries of space and con-
ceptions of geographic scale. The doubleness of the figure in this image
thus locates the faraway in New York City, confounding the distance that
marks both people of color as perpetual strangers and empire as a distant
venture.2 Thus, this sketch tells of the movements of peoples and ideolo-
gies in the construction of the imperial city. In the early twentieth century,
public dances like Un Bal Primitiv were popular spaces of nightlife in the
Village, sexually open affairs featuring partygoers dressed in jungle cos-
tumes and orientalized outfits, among whom we might find characters like
the one pictured in Nugent’s sketch.3 Or perhaps the figure is a reference to
those Harlem costume balls where men and women in drag received prizes
for their transgendered efforts.4 Nugent’s drawing plays with these multiple
mobilizations of primitivist imagery without assuming an originary point,
understanding instead that these images circulate widely and carry mul-
tiple meanings to and fro as they move.5 In this play with narratives of the
primitive, Nugent blurs the boundary between the imperial city and other
sites within and beyond the African diaspora.
In this chapter, I am interested in expanding the place of queer of
color critique by rethinking the role that national borders, and their ever-­
changing configurations, play in sexual and racial formation. Artists,
writers, and intellectuals of the Jazz Age insistently blurred spatial, racial,
gendered, and sexual boundaries as a political strategy in the creation of
a queer black aesthetic, focusing on the purposeful production and occa-
sional (though uneven) deconstruction of nation and empire. My work
here is partially in response to Roderick Ferguson’s challenge in the con-
clusion of Aberrations in Black, where he invites the field of queer studies to
more deeply engage with questions of the postnation in the field of Ameri-
can studies. Although Ferguson’s call is focused on “the ways in which
state and capital have achieved and continue to achieve racial dominance
through discourses of gender and sexual normativity” as a means of under-
standing “contemporary global social formations,” my methodological

Queer Modernities | 73
focus here centers on imperial aesthetic and social formations—which, of
course, are affected by those modes of capital that helped found the mod-
ern city.6 Nonetheless, I hope to take up his challenge in thinking through
how imperial logic, as a system of meaning making that occurs through
and across national borders and bodies, can be an important heuristic de-
vice for complicating sexual and racial formation and, more specifically, for
understanding the creation of a queer black aesthetic on a global stage. In
regard to the formation of a queer black aesthetic, imperial logic played a
defining role in how power, social justice, the disciplining of populations,
and resistance to that disciplining might take place. As artists imagined
representations of bodies, city streets and interiors, and movement around
the nation and between nations, the meaning of those representations was
guided by empire’s uneasy connections between the primitive, the orien-
talized, race, gender, and sexuality. In the formation of a queer black aes-
thetic, the instability of empire’s meanings was mobilized to demonstrate
the constructedness of these categories and their different social valuations.
In the instances I discuss in this chapter, these representations took both
spatial and ideological form. That is, the meanings produced through im-
perial logic and made apparent through aesthetic practices questioned the
constancy of the construction of bodies, cities, and nations as a way to, in
turn, question singular modes of identity formation. I take my cue in part
from Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark work in Borderlands / La Frontera, where
she theorizes that the borderlands are spaces not only between nations but
also between bodies, races, genders, and sexualities.7 Part of how this iden-
tity manifests itself is in the organization and divisions between bodies,
cities, and nations, even as these relationships are radically unstable and
under constant negotiation. Anzaldúa thus intervenes in the continuous
history of U.S. imperialism’s assembling identities and affinities in relation
to space and ideology. Imperial logic, then, brings together the material,
the aesthetic, and the spatial to naturalize relationships of power. The ap-
plication of imperial logic naturalizes the transference of power dynam-
ics between these sites and creates distance where movement, bodies, and
sexual desire might stand in for nations, colonies, and the desire to expand
empire. This, then, also naturalizes the logic of violence against bodies en-
gaged in desires that confound the state’s enacted or legislated forms of
racialization and/or desire. This logic naturalizes racial difference and re-
imagines imperial violence as commensurate with domestic surveillance

74 | Chapter Two
and the disciplining of bodies believed to be aberrational in the project of
the state—namely, bodies of color and queer bodies.
Although people interested in disciplining techniques might imagine
the boundaries of cities and bodies to be regulatable by the police, law, and
government, those who were marked as objects to be disciplined might
also use imperial logic to resist those inscriptions. Aesthetic production in
the Jazz Age often revealed cracks in the social order, enforced the flexi-
bility of boundaries, or pointed out that the enforcement of those bound-
aries might have violent social consequences. For artists like Richard Bruce
Nugent and writers like Wallace Thurman, whose work I discussed in the
previous chapter, the marks of empire and the uneven relationships be-
tween nations might be used to point out differences in value across race,
class, gender, and sexuality. People of color, the working class, women,
queers, immigrants, and people who defy categorization along any of these
lines might identify themselves in opposition to the imperium and in con-
junction with those that the state considers outside of its national, social,
and cultural borders. Although these aesthetic and political strategies turn
the logic of the state on its head, I will show that they still rely on im-
perial logic to point out inequities through the mobilization of primitivist
and orientalist signs that take on multiple meanings through empire. As a
strategy, then, this kind of formation of a queer aesthetic practice is deeply
imbricated in the imperium, even as it critiques differential valuation.
Imperial logic, therefore, provides an important context for under-
standing racial and sexual formation and the production of meaning for
aesthetic practices in the Jazz Age. In considering the production of a queer
black aesthetic through both imperial complicity and subversion, I sug-
gest that we should ultimately see these works as articulating a crisis of
referentiality and as arguing for the reconfiguration of our senses and the
meanings attached to the sensible. As Helen Jun has astutely argued in re-
gard to black orientalism, these moments of negotiation between racial
and—in this case—national borders can be paradoxical and contradictory,
as groups fight for inclusion through existing rhetoric and logics whose
meanings may be attached to other forms of differentiation and exclusion.8
Artists and intellectuals like Nugent and Thurman produced art and also
critiqued aesthetic modernisms and the making of black art through simi-
larly complicated and sometimes contradictory engagements with imperial
logic and its demarcation and spatialization of intimacy as well as racial,

Queer Modernities | 75
national, and other boundaries. That is, through the accouterment of an
Orient perceived as particularly queer, these works sought to interrupt the
referentiality of the black body, and the sensual perception of the space of
that body’s gestures and movements, within both political and aesthetic
modernisms. In describing these cultural and intellectual labors, I take my
cue from Jacques Rancière. His notion of the “map of the sensible” provides
a useful entry point for understanding the relationship between geogra-
phies of scale and aesthetic meaning making. He writes: “[Literarity and
historicity] define models of speech or actions but also regimes of sensible
intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and
the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and
modes of doing and making. They define variations of sensible intensities,
perceptions, and the abilities of bodies” 9—in the larger sense of human
bodies, social bodies, the body politic, bodies of writing, and geographi-
cal bodies.10 Rancière continues: “They thereby take hold of unspecified
groups of people, they widen gaps, open up space for deviations, modify
the speeds, the trajectories, and the ways in which groups of people adhere
to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images. They reconfig-
ure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures
and rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction,
and submission.” 11 I borrow from Rancière’s imagining of bodies across
geographical scale, and the way it raises questions of how the map of the
sensible might map onto the space of empire. I argue, then, that the map
of the sensible—for the purposes of this chapter, a map that describes the
boundaries of sexuality and race—becomes legible through the context of
imperial logic and that this logic sets the limits on what can be sensed and
known. For artists, this means that the referents for their art must, at least
in part, be drawn from empire. These artists, though, are able to interpret
empire, mobilize its meanings to challenge social convention, and some-
times repeat imperialist symbols, meanings, and modes.
This chapter, then, focuses on the crisis of referentiality that occurs
when bodies that are meant to signify certain relationships within a na-
tional discourse take on multiple and unstable meanings brought about by
the changes—often produced through empire—in geographical and ideo-
logical borders. Given the importance of the map of the sensible both in
constructing the common sense of society and as a marker of the political
limits of representation, considering the work of sensibility as it pertains to

76 | Chapter Two
all those bodies Rancière had in mind—human bodies, social bodies, the
body politic, bodies of writing, and geographical bodies—speaks directly
to and expands the figurations of queer of color critique. Delineating the
map of the sensible in this moment of ascendant empire—a geographical
and corporeal phenomenon—enhances our understanding of the range
of meanings of primitivist and orientalist referents (for there have to be
limits, even if signifiers are loosened), as well as of queer of color forma-
tions and critiques. As I will argue in this chapter, the early forms of queer
of color critique that emerge from the Jazz Age deconstruct the meanings
attached to space, bodies, race, gender, and sexuality by making uneasy the
relationships between bodies and disciplining ideologies of identity, bodies
and imperial signifiers, and bodies and geographical space.
The chapter is divided into four sections. The first demonstrates how
Jazz Age authors and artists used imperial logic to create modes of queer
subjectivities. These were created, I argue, through the proximity of primi-
tive and orientalist objects that marked those around them as queer in
some respect. These artists adopted multiple stratagems for confounding—
indeed, for queering—those forms of knowledge built on inflexible spatial
and racial arrangements, including doubling, collocation, and collapse. In
the three remaining sections, I turn to the production of a queer black aes-
thetic and a queer of color critique as examples of such reconfigurations of
the map of the sensible in three registers. The first register follows represen-
tations of queerness in the absence of fixed and therefore knowable bodies
and sex acts. Examining Nugent’s infamous short story “Smoke, Lilies
and Jade,” 12 I argue that he obfuscates “the functionality of gestures and
rhythms” by remapping bodies and acts through another, queer order of
the senses. This obfuscation directly questions the ontology of bodies and
the processes by which they become attached to meanings of queerness,
race, sexuality, and nation. The second register examines primitivist and
orientalist objects’ simultaneous abstraction from and attachment to queer
bodies, and to queer of color bodies—again, with a difference. Looking at
more of Nugent’s visual art and a second-­order representation of Nugent
by Thurman, his good friend, I argue that Nugent and his literary figura-
tion (or doubling) as a queer black artist collapsed boundaries between
orientalist objects and his queer of color body through a resignification of
queer European modernist tropes, heralding the productive practices of
comparative empire. The mobilization of imperial markers here, I argue,

Queer Modernities | 77
deconstructs the boundaries of race, sex, and gender as a way to formu-
late a queer black aesthetic. The third register further regards the relation-
ship of bodies to space, as I argue that Nugent’s posthumously published
novella, “The Geisha Man,” 13 thus pursues a deterritorialized queerness.
Through a reading of this novella, I argue that Nugent develops a queer of
color sensibility that expresses itself through a collapsing of geographies
of scale, where the Orient is in New York, the stability of racial categoriza-
tion fails, and sexual possibilities polymorphously abound. Though each of
these strategies may not entirely succeed, we nonetheless find in Nugent’s
work an expressive desire for another order of intimacy with and in con-
trast to the others of empire.

Queer Aesthetic Practices in the Age of Empire

Imperial logic provided a basis for modernist authors and artists to create
modes of queer subjectivities. Though guaranteed through uneven national
relationships, these queer subjectivities often signaled the author’s or char-
acters’ liberalism. Because imperial logic works through modes of differ-
ential valuation, and through models of power involving both center and
periphery, the use of orientalist and primitive signs, language, and symbols
marked narratives, music, and art as simultaneously outside the bounds of
normativity, civilization, and respectability and as exemplary of moder-
nity, as it was defined through imperialism and cultural contact. In order
to produce these aesthetic effects, which were rooted in the political, Jazz
Age artists mobilized notions of race, space, and sexuality both in oppo-
sition to and together with multiple imperial formations to explore the
bounds of sexuality and the instability of individual categories of identity,
which were implicated in the construction and destruction of other indi-
vidual categories of identity. That is, the strategies of modernity and mod-
ern aesthetics already relied on imperial contact (Picasso’s “discovery” of
Africa, for instance). Artists interested in queer aesthetic practices disiden-
tified themselves with these modernist strategies in the hope of producing
new subjectivity-­effects for queer folks in the United States.14 This kind of
work begins to display the way modes of Western rationality hide from
view the intersections of spaces, ideologies, bodies, and identity categories.
The form of queer of color critique supported by artists and intellectuals in
the Jazz Age—though they did not use that name for it—puts pressure on

78 | Chapter Two
racial and sexual formation through the evidence of empire while simulta-
neously creating powerful meanings for bodies, cities, and nations.
Although this chapter focuses primarily on the work of Nugent, and on
a fictional version of Nugent produced by Thurman, these authors were not
alone in mobilizing the modernist symbols of primitivism and orientalism
as means of conveying the non-­normativity of queer sexualities. Nugent’s
contemporaries also used primitive and orientalist signifiers to produce
queerness and queer aesthetics. The articulation of queer aesthetics re-
tained multiple purposes as sexual non-­normativity and its imagined rela-
tionship to colonial outposts—the others of U.S. empire—were turned into
symbols of liberalism and cosmopolitan engagement with modernity, or
used to demonstrate the multiplicity of lives lived within the United States.
In Passing (1929), for example, Nella Larsen signals the underlying queer
tensions between the novel’s two main characters, Clare Kendry and Irene
Redfield, by placing oriental objects in both women’s homes: a lacquered
cigarette box on a tea table, and a Japanese print hanging on the wall.15 Thus
does Larsen use the imperial logic that interconnects race, nation, and sex
throughout Passing to establish that the crossing of some borders of iden-
tity might also signal the simultaneous crossing of other borders of iden-
tity. Following this logic, through which these kinds of traversals appear as
multiple, Larsen equates certain orientalist signifiers of nation with sexual
signifiers to suggest queer desire. Larsen repeatedly refers to Clare’s face as
an “ivory mask”: “Unrevealing. Unaltered and undisturbed by any emotion
within or without.”16 Although literary critics observe that this image of the
ivory mask enables her passing by hiding her blackness, it might also con-
nect the orientalist-­signifying material of ivory with stereotypes of Asian
impassivity or lack of emotion. Orientalist signifiers—lacquered boxes
and ivory masks—underscore the queer desire that exists between the two
women, providing coded signals for readers to understand that sexuality
beyond the bounds of normativity is in the offing.17 Larsen, then, stretches
the meanings of the modern—meanings often used to reassert the place of
the West in relationship to the rest—by making identity and sexual practice
in the metropole complicated. In doing so, she points to the cracks in the
idea of the West as universal in contrast to spaces marked as primitive or
orientalized. Through aesthetic design, too, she reimagines sexual norma-
tivity as a mask or veneer that hides queer sexualities existing in plain sight.

Queer Modernities | 79
 Likewise in Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald mobilizes orientalist
signifiers to allude to the staging of queer sex acts, which doubly signify
the liberal and cosmopolitan sensibilities of the novel’s protagonist couple,
Alabama and David Knight. A critique of heterosexual monogamy—­
subverting both the finality of monogamous relationships, even after mar-
riage, and the expected deference of women to their husbands—­Fitzgerald’s
novel relies on stable spatial scales to produce sexual difference. In one in-
stance, Fitzgerald introduces Tanka, Alabama and David’s Japanese butler.
Tanka is marked as foreign, not just as a Japanese national but also as a
non-­normative sexual figure, through obvious aural signs. He is a domestic
laborer whose “disquieting laughter” is obnoxious, and he speaks a pecu-
liar English dialect: “Missy, kin see you jessy minute—jessy minute, this
way, please.” 18 What interests me about the introduction of Tanka is that
it occurs right at the moment when two men have been discovered sleep-
ing in the same hammock, the aberrant outcome of a presumably wild
party the night before.19 The Knights try to conceal their freethinking ways
from Alabama’s visiting family, but they are unable to contain their move-
ments—queers literally creep out from behind closed doors. The orientalist
signifier of the butler’s intrusion onto the sleeping men is not the interrup-
tion of queer possibility, then, but a defining part of the spatial narrative
of a connection and expectation of sexual experience that lies outside the
bounds of heterosexual monogamy. Thus, the orientalized body of the
domestic servant multiply signals queerness, liberalism, and the way seg-
ments of society can be simultaneously present and invisible.
The kinds of imperially bound figurations that mark these novels were
also important to Nugent’s creative works. His creative output—which in-
cluded drawing, painting, dancing, and acting as well as writing poetry,
fiction, ballet scenarios, and plays—provides an important entry point for
thinking through the connections between modernity and modernisms,
imperial logic, and queer black aesthetic practices. His relatively few pub-
lications kept Nugent from becoming a well-­known author and artist of
the Harlem Renaissance, but he was nonetheless a leading light of the arts
and social scenes in Harlem, exercising great influence on many of the
more acclaimed writers and artists of the time. While Nugent appears as
only a minor character in general histories of the Harlem Renaissance, in
queer histories of the twentieth century, he is recognized as a much more
important figure. Born in 1906 in Washington, D.C., Nugent’s mother had

80 | Chapter Two
Scotch, Native American, and black ancestors. A woman of many inter-
ests, she played piano and worked for the National Geographic Society
and, later, as a waitress.20 His father, an elevator operator at the Capitol
and a singer in Washington’s Clef Club Quartet, passed away when Nugent
was just thirteen years old. Later Nugent and his mother moved to New
York City.21 As a child, Nugent pursued an interest in the arts. He was en-
couraged by his bohemian parents and given full access to the contents of
their library, and what he read there would have an indelible influence on
his life and work. His father’s copy of Richard Freiherr von Krafft-­Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis introduced him to sexological studies while he was
still in high school, helping him to give a name to his sexual proclivities.22
His earliest, informal training in arts and letters, and as well the emerging
science of sexology, would greatly influence his views on art history and
unconventional sexuality. Often cited as the first African American to have
published an openly queer story, he is thus heralded as a path-­breaking
author and artist. The central role he plays in queer literary history suggests
that his work merits closer attention, especially its role in the emergence
of a queer black aesthetic in the Jazz Age. Because of his place in a longer
queer of color genealogy, it is also important to understand the genealogies
and epistemological boundaries of his work, both as art and as criticism.
Nugent’s queer black aesthetics, and the early version of queer of color
critique found there, developed within and in opposition to European,
African, and Asian arts and letters—that is, his body of work was engen-
dered by the movements of signs and symbols across multiple empires.
Like Nugent, most Harlem intellectuals and artists wrestled with the simul-
taneous admiration and domination that underwrote European negrophile
movements, which had seized on the signs of primitivism as symbols of
European avant-­garde culture. However, the primitive, the oriental, and
other did not serve as end points in this economy of new energies, but
merely the conduit for multiple artistic sensibilities. Nugent’s body of work
in particular commented on these aesthetic modernisms, including his dis-
covery of a queer European arts tradition and the uses of primitivism for
creating avant-­garde and queer subjectivities by U.S. expatriates and Euro-
pean writers, composers, and artists such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beards-
ley, Erté, the British Arts and Crafts Movement, Joris-­Karl Huysmans,
Richard Strauss, and Giacomo Puccini. The array of European intellectual
and artistic figures tells an alternate story to the one in which the work of

Queer Modernities | 81
the New Negro is made only across the Atlantic. The modes of imperialism
that Nugent employed stretch across five continents and multiple empires.
Even as intimacy is sought between these spaces, distance is sometimes re-
instated. In his works, Nugent as artist and character considers the terms
of these and other manipulations of geographies of scale for modern and
modernist figurations of race and sex. In doing so, he sometimes replicates
the ontological and epistemological schemas of imperial logic, even as he
seeks to confound their authoritative classifications. Although I do con-
sider his works through this duality of complicity and subversion, I ulti-
mately argue for a reading that would see them as a crisis of referentiality,
and as the reconfiguration of our senses.
For Nugent, his work depended on the circulation of meanings that
guided modern art’s relationship to the primitive and the orientalist. As
we know, much of modern art was predicated on the uses of primitivist
imagery in order to create a modernist sensibility. Nathan Huggins has
written: “It seemed that the black man was being ‘discovered’ through his
music and art, and it seemed to be his spirit which symbolized the Jazz
Age.”23 And Marlon Ross argues that Alain Locke “explicitly associates the
New World Negro with the artistic experimentation of high modernism.
. . . Given his belief that Africa’s traditional culture, correctly interpreted,
represents a level of sophistication so high that Europe must borrow from
it to modernize itself, it might be said that the American Negro must ‘go
back’ in order to go forward to his already-­awaiting modernity.”24 Indeed,
the circulation of racialized and nationalized signs and stories was key to
the creation of a modern Western self-­image. These movements repre-
sented Enlightenment narratives and rationalizations of space and sub-
jectivity that spoke to a celebratory sense of discovery and the mixing of
cultures, and to the distancing operation of othering, as central to Western
self-­making. Travel outside of Europe, sometimes real, sometimes imag-
ined, thus became a way to produce modern subjecthood. Furthermore,
concepts of moral lasciviousness, sexual excess, and congenital deviancy
that had distinguished the sexualities of colonial and imperial outposts
became—in a revaluing but not a reversing of imperial logic—liberating.
Empire thus became a place for queer subjectivity; however, that queer sub-
jecthood is made viable and visible through imperial logic. Queer subjects
like Oscar Wilde could reimagine themselves as queer moderns through

82 | Chapter Two
an imperial discourse of travel, which marks their place within the empire,
even if national belonging still eluded them.
Art making and the realm of the aesthetic, then, became an important
mode of intervening in national and imperial sexual and racial politics.
Nugent did not simply reiterate these terms in his own work. He knew well
that the ability for people from imperial metropoles to discover and dis-
place the avant-­garde spirit of spontaneity, or even sexuality, onto the black
primitive (and, as I show below, the Orient) depends on the unavailability
of similar movement to those presumed to be stuck in the colonies. He was
interested instead in colliding, collapsing, and confusing tropes of racial-
ized and queer modernisms and modernities, especially in the use of the
signs and symbols of primitivisms and orientalisms. Thus, he commented
on the use of primitive signs in two ways. First, he provided a counterpoint
to the appropriation of an imagined Africa by European arts communities,
and second, he broadened the reappropriation of imagined Africas and
Orients by black U.S. intellectuals to also provide a space for queer sexu-
alities within the redefinition of blackness through language and aesthet-
ics. Nugent’s cover art for Opportunity provides a good example of how
he understood the racial, national, and sexual markers that were circu-
lating in art, and his view of how these markers could be manipulated in
order to create conversations around the place of black arts within modern
arts communities. Though he too used the tropes of African primitivism,
such as the palm tree and the nude figure, Nugent’s sketch is no simple re-
iteration of fetishistic tropes. Rather, he is at play with those tropes, and
the result of that play is the creation of a racialized queer visual vocabu-
lary, produced through the strategically mimetic repetition of primitivist
iconography layered with reference to Manhattan’s queer public culture.25
Conscious of the use of primitivisms, Nugent reread stories of cultural con-
tact to tell a different story about the place of racialized peoples within the
narration of modernity. In other words, he produced an aesthetic repeti-
tion with a difference. As Gilles Deleuze observes, “repetition as a conduct
and as a point of view concerns non-­exchangeable and non-­substitutable
singularities. . . . If exchange is the criterion of generality, theft and gift are
those of repetition.”26 For Nugent’s work, the theft is of the primitive sign,
and the singularity he makes from this theft is a queer black aesthetics. The
productive heteroglossia that pervades the Opportunity illustration and

Queer Modernities | 83
Nugent’s other visual work denoted a genealogy of queer identities rooted
not in Europe but in reimaginings of Africa and diasporic blackness. While
Nugent participated in the New Negro intellectual project of reclaiming
Africa to construct a powerful space for blackness in the United States, he
did so with a disloyal difference, creating also a space for queers of color
through a retelling of the history of queer black masculinities.
Nugent also mobilized orientalist aesthetic signs in his artwork, though
they are not overtly present in the Opportunity cover. In some ways Nugent’s
mobilization of these signs follows the same logic as his dissemination of
Africanized primitivisms, but in other ways his use of these signs reiter-
ates and repeats the imperial logic of queer European masculinities and
aesthetic practices, often without commenting on this logic. The redeploy-
ment in queer modernisms of imperial logic reiterated the construction of
the Orient through concepts of gender and sexual perversion—what Eve
Sedgwick might call a “gay affirming and gay-­occluding Orientalism.” 27
Yet the connections among Wilde, queerness, and orientalism are so over-
determined that when Thurman’s Infants of the Spring references Wilde
among orientalist signifiers, in relation to Nugent, those signifiers are read
through a European tradition of queer arts and literature. Elisa Glick, for
instance, notes that Thurman uses orientalist signifiers, but that he does
so because of Wilde’s influence.28 Here, because orientalism itself as an
archive of images and acts is so connected to Europe and occidentalism
(as Edward Said has famously argued), the Orient becomes a complete
simulacrum, associated with Europe rather than referencing actual orien-
talized territories or peoples.29 Though I agree that orientalism is indeed
an invention of the West, it is important to grasp how a black queer artist
such as Nugent might have mobilized orientalist signifiers to manage not
just sexual but also racial relations in the United States, both in the city
and beyond its borders.30 Nugent’s use of orientalist imagery mapped the
logics of queer whiteness onto queers of color and created a queer method
for understanding what is produced through contact between racialized
groups within city space. In other words, although he inherited oriental-
ist tropes primarily from the European decadents, he repeated them for a
new purpose: these tropes no longer signified a queer white masculinity;
rather, they took on new meanings in creating a space for racialized queer
masculinities.31 Additionally, they provided a means for understanding im-
migration and diaspora through a queer of color critique, holding out the

84 | Chapter Two
possibility of addressing the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Western
expansionism, military and economic incursions into Latin America, and
the imperial wars fought in Asia and the Pacific.32
Nugent’s work, then, becomes a starting point for a version of queer of
color critique: his interest in work across sexual, national, and racial spaces.
By investigating the stability of the borders of identity, Nugent’s work sug-
gests a form of queer of color critique that retangles the strands of identity
that have been separated through Western rationality. Ferguson has argued
that “as social order achieves normativity by suppressing intersections of
race, class, gender, and sexuality, rationality must thus conceal the ways in
which it is particularized by those differences.”33 Part of the work of queer
of color critique is to make those intersections visible. Nugent does so by
destabilizing the relationship of the signifier to the signified. He plays with
the inherited meanings of empire to show its standing contradictions. He
disallows the separation of identity categories by unveiling the fact that in-
stability in one might create instability in another. It is in this kind of geo-
graphical and ideological borderland that Nugent’s work helps articulate
this intervention into queer of color critique, where the modes and context
of empire are paramount in the making and unraveling of meaning.

Bodies and the Crisis of Referentiality

This section focuses primarily on the interconnections between empire, the

production of a queer black aesthetic, and the crisis of referentiality sig-
naled by the representation of bodies. Because bodies, desire, and sensu-
ality have been linked to one another in the study of queerness from early
sexology and psychoanalysis to contemporary queer studies, it is impor-
tant to track the ways in which bodies have come to stand in for queer-
ness as queer objects. Nugent’s work predates some of the current trends
in queer studies that have troubled the easy equation of queer bodies or
queer sexual practices with queer identities. His writings produce a queer
black aesthetic that occurs sometimes without bodies, and sometimes with
bodies that transform and work themselves into aesthetic objects, thereby
desiring detachment from stable systems of scientific classification and
knowledge. In thinking through the relationship of bodies and referen-
tiality, I take my cue in part from those scholars interested in music cul-
tures—theorists who pose questions regarding the correlation of queer
bodies, race, sensibility, and aesthetic production. For example, in his ex-

Queer Modernities | 85
ploration of the linguistic slippages and sutures characterizing punk as a
term that refers both to queer black men and a musical subculture, Tavia
Nyong’o asks: “Might we theorize the intersection of punk and queer as an
encounter between concepts both lacking in fixed identitarian referent, but
which are nonetheless periodically caught up and frozen, as it were, within
endemic modern crises of racialization?”34 His provocative question asks
scholars to rethink the connection of “queer”—and thus queer theory—
with problematically fixed queer identities. In short, it forces us to think
about queer aesthetic and signifying practices, how these might contribute
to racialization, and—I would hasten to add in regard to my project—how
they might constitute national and other borders.35 Also arguing against the
fixity of categorization, Scott Herring provides a warning that the reconsti-
tution of borders of identity reifies the kinds of scientism that fields like
sexology and sociology establish in order to control populations. Instead,
Herring works across the grain of political projects that quicken “sexual
visibility and sexual recognition” in hopes of “put[ting] out of order” the
means of classifying bodies.36 Also building on this framework, Sherrie
Tucker invites jazz scholars to reconfigure the burden of representation in
sexuality studies from queer bodies to straight ones.37 This move challenges
the equation of queer bodies with the production of queerness, as well as
the overdetermination of sexuality studies through queer bodies. Nugent’s
work during the Jazz Age ties these questions of sensibility and bodies as
referents to empire. If empire is part of the context that lends meaning to
the map of the sensible, Nugent uses that system of meanings to produce
a novel subjectivity through queer black aesthetics. Losing the stability of
identitarian categories, Nugent’s new and mercurial vision of queer black
subjectivity is purposefully mutable, constructed as the uneasy assemblage
of decadence, bodies, queerness, and space. Within the context provided
by imperial logic, Nugent makes bodies unstable as both signifiers and
what is signified, where bodies are inhabited by sexual subjects; are re-
placed by other aesthetic forms, such as objects or music; and stand in for
beauty themselves. This form of queer black aesthetics, then, focuses on the
exotic beauty of imperial objects, even turning queer bodies into objects,
and on understanding a queer sensibility in relation to those objects. Some-
times these slippages occur simultaneously, marking the various ways that
imperial narratives can manifest themselves. In these ways, Nugent’s work

86 | Chapter Two
concomitantly depends on imperial logic and marshals it against itself to
create new, if in some sense failed, possibilities for queer black subjectivity.
To pursue this reading, I am particularly interested in the writing of the
body as a sign that both supports and delimits the logic of imperialism.
Following Ferguson and others, I will explore the aesthetic and the epis-
temological in the formation of subjects of the state—and empire—in the
language of the African American literary canon.38 For Nugent, the body
itself is often circulated as an aesthetic object that works to deconstruct the
absence of queer black bodies. Although the literary scholar A. B. Christa
Schwarz points to Nugent’s literary sensuality, particularly in his writing
of a desire for bodies and beauty, this love of bodies and beauty is argu-
ably not about bodies as themselves, but—as Barthes suggests, in writing
about the structure of Japanese—as “signs cut off from the alibi referential
par excellence: that of the living thing.”39 In other words, these bodies are
purposefully emptied signs, signs that work as aesthetic objects beyond
the biological matter of racialized and gendered bodies. As these signs are
recirculated, they rework the logic of empire, marking an epistemological
shift for the production of the knowledge regimes of race, sexuality, and
imperialism. In the works that I discuss below, Nugent and Thurman con-
fuse the boundary between signifier and signified, where the body becomes
in this instance an orientalized signifier. In the confusion of meaning that
Nugent produces, certain boundaries between race, nation, and sexuality
that establish ways of knowing are critiqued in unique ways. Using devices
that seem to refer to racial and national difference in “Smoke, Lilies and
Jade,” Nugent produces a queer sexuality steeped in imperial logic, even
while he exploits that same logic to comment on and challenge imperial
intimacies’ engendering of racial and sexual politics in New York City.
While he lived in New York, Nugent shared a Harlem apartment at 267
136th Street, an address playfully referred to as “Niggerati Manor,” with
Thurman, an author and editor with whom he often collaborated. Nugent
and Thurman had a productive and mutually beneficial relationship. Their
best-­known collaboration was the one-­off journal fire!! that Thurman
edited and to which Nugent contributed “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” his most
often reproduced literary work. Nugent’s short story is often cited as the
first piece of African American published writing to openly address queer
possibility; in Daniel Kim’s insightful words, “it was the first piece of Afri-

Queer Modernities | 87
can American fiction expressing an openly homosexual sensibility.”40 This
possibility or sensibility marked a political aesthetic practice, though the
honor of being the first to forward a queer black literary aesthetic could
well have fallen to Thurman. According to Nugent, he and Thurman
flipped a coin to see who would write a story on prostitutes and who would
write a story in the manner of “the decadents.” Thurman drew the former
and Nugent drew the latter, whereupon he undertook to write a story in
the style of Joris-­Karl Huysmans’s Là-­bas.41 On its publication, fire!! was
openly scorned. Nugent recalled a conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois at the
height of the controversy surrounding the magazine: “I remember Du Bois
did ask, ‘Did you have to write about homosexuality? Couldn’t you write
about colored people? Who cares about homosexuality?’ I said, ‘You’d be
surprised how good homosexuality is. I love it.’ Poor Du Bois.”42 Nugent’s
irreverence in speaking of Du Bois in this manner (“poor Du Bois”) was
indicative of his (and Thurman’s) desire to break away from the “talented
tenth” politics of the older generation of black intellectuals.43 Such a poli-
tics, in so many ways, did not leave a space for “dandified aesthetes” like
Nugent and Thurman, who shared unconventional ideas about the range of
masculinities that could or should be portrayed in Harlem Renaissance arts
and letters, as well as a radical notion of success.44 As Glick argues, Nugent
and Thurman’s “decadent aesthetics . . . disrupts the commodity relation
to African American culture.”45 Nugent’s answer to Du Bois’s concern also
holds clues to an unprecedented queer politics, suggesting his distanc-
ing of queer acts (homosexuality) from queer identities (homosexual), a
move that values queerness but does not classify and thereby “fix” bodies.
Nugent’s friction with Du Bois also points to how rare the combining of
racial justice and queer aesthetics was, even as this combination is a corner-
stone in Nugent’s creation of a queer black aesthetic. Although a number
of scholars have echoed Henry Louis Gates’s sentiment that the Harlem
Renaissance was “surely as gay as it was black,” the fact remains that many
of the writers and artists who are taken up in a queer genealogy were forced
to use various strategies in the production of queer identity when national
leaders like Du Bois were resistant to queer assemblages.46
“Smoke, Lilies and Jade” explores the artistic life of the mind, and the
mind as an organ of the senses, as a way of defying and denying catego-
rization. Although Nugent is interested in these forms of denial, he also
relies on imperial logic that at times reasserts the differential valuation of

88 | Chapter Two
empire’s others. Following the lead of the Aesthetic Movement, Nugent
references Oscar Wilde in the story’s hailing of similar orientalist signs
in the name of “art for art’s sake,” but, of course, Nugent as well as Wilde
operated in a racialized political context. Sidestepping a binary of black
and white relations, Nugent instead chooses to engage the racial politics
of the time by depicting in his short story an interracial queer relationship
between a black man and a Latino man. Nugent’s aestheticized rendering
of interracial queer acts informs an avant-­garde mode of queer of color
critique. As Rancière notes, “aesthetic acts as configurations of experience
. . . create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of politi-
cal subjectivity.”47 Shifting modes of sensibility may engender new subject
positions, but those positions are still attached to a larger field of the distri-
bution of the sensible. New modes are always still in conversation with old
modes, where meaning is interpolated between many ways of understand-
ing.48 Nugent aestheticizes bodies, objects, and places in order to comment
on the pragmatics and practices of empire. The imperial logic he deploys
to break through the boundaries of possibility and sensibility at the level
of the body, city, and nation, also provides its own limits, because this shift
in subjectivity relies on international and imperial differences to reinvigo-
rate the negotiation of domestic boundaries. As Caren Kaplan warns, “the
modern era is fascinated by the experience of distance and estrangement,
reproducing these notions through articulations of subjectivity and poet-
ics. Yet displacement is not universally available or desirable for many sub-
jects, nor is it evenly experienced.”49 Even as empire makes sense of queer
acts, those acts still exist within asymmetries of power. Nugent’s work,
even as it deconstructs imperial logic, depends on it for some of its sense
making, at points reproducing the modes of imperialism apparent in the
genealogy of queerness and European empire.
The genealogies of imperial logic and European queer subjectivities help
provide the grounds for producing novel queer black subjectivities in the
Jazz Age, as Nugent references decadent artistic production as one of the
keys to remapping and revaluing queer sensibility. One way that Nugent
draws his readers into a worldview ruled by aesthetic sensibility is through
the main narrative voice of the short story. As many authors have noted,
Nugent wrote in a stream-­of-­consciousness style, replete with ellipses,
which Schwarz connects to modern white European modes of fiction.50
The literary critic Michael Cobb traces the production of a black and queer

Queer Modernities | 89
literary aesthetic and argues that Nugent produces an “elliptical rudeness,”
a form that in itself disrupts.51 Furthermore, as Daniel Kim notes, although
the story is written in stream of consciousness, it is also written in the
third person.52 The effect of a narrator describing the thoughts of Alex,
the story’s protagonist, creates a sense of disembodied detachment. But
though the narration challenges embodiment, deflecting the burden of rep-
resentation from the body, Nugent also creates a highly sensual account.
He relies on sights, sounds, and feelings to produce an aesthetic vocabu-
lary. Many objects whose colors are foregrounded recur in the story as
signs and symbols. For instance, the color blue, usually describing smoke,
denotes creativity and the artists’ enterprise. Red calla lilies are associated
with death and transcendence. Ivory, red, and green make up a cigarette
holder, an orientalized object that serves as a refrain, capping each section
of the story. Alongside color, music is also an important signifier for the
senses. “Alex walked music . . . it was nice to walk in the blue after a party,”
Nugent writes, and continues:

Alex walked music . . . the click of his heels kept time with a tune in his
mind . . . he glanced into a lighted café window . . . inside were people
sipping coffee . . . men . . . why did they sit there in the loud light . . .
didn’t they know that outside the street . . . narrow blue street met the
stars . . . that if they walked long enough . . . far enough . . . Alex walked
and the click of his heels sounded . . . and had an echo . . . sound being
tossed back and forth . . . back and forth . . . some one was approach-
ing . . . and their echoes mingled . . . and gave the sound of castanets . . .
Alex liked the sound of the approaching man’s footsteps . . . he walked
music also . . . he knew the beauty of the narrow blue.53

In this passage, Nugent uses color, music, and space to produce Alex as a
subject through his senses, through his ability to see beauty and color that
elude others; to hear music available only to those of artistic temperament;
and to appreciate his surroundings in a detached, critical manner. Impor-
tantly, too, Alex’s body disappears into music; the body is replaced with
another signifier of beauty and sensuality. For Nugent, this new aesthetic
epistemology engenders Alex’s novel subjectivity—the subjectivity of the
artist, the queer, the man of color.
The creation of this novel subjectivity happens through a particu-
lar knowledge of space and the remapping of the sensible. In the passage

90 | Chapter Two
above, though Alex cohabits space with others, he separates himself from
the men inside the café who live in the “loud light” and cannot appre-
ciate the night, where “narrow blue street met the stars.” Because Alex
exists in a different epistemological system, his mode of producing space
and therefore sociality contrasts with the men in the café. They did not
make sense of the world. They are therefore not subjects in Nugent’s world-
view. Conversely, Alex embodies a positivist position, repeating some of
the axioms of Cartesian subjectivity, but, again, with a difference—a sen-
sualist, he sees, hears, and feels as a mode of knowing. Through aesthetic
practice, Nugent creates a new distribution of the sensible. His political
call for a novel subjectivity is accomplished through a reordering and re-
experiencing of space, perception, and—ultimately, through epistemologi-
cal shifts—the will to knowledge. “It is a delimitation of spaces and times,
of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,” Rancière writes, “that
simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form
of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said
about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around
the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”54 For Alex, remap-
ping the sensible is a spatial and political project. Modes of encountering
space and the multiple sensibilities of space can in and of themselves pro-
duce novel subjectivities. The queer practices of Alex’s sensuality speak to
the stakes of a queer politics that is simultaneously about the queer sen-
suality of the body and about bodies that are not necessarily sexual in the
manner designated by scientific knowledge of sexuality. In this way, Alex
reimagines the political boundaries of queer identification and subjectivity
through playing with the map of the sensible.
As can be seen in the passage above, Nugent’s epistemological shifts
are created through a refiguring and revaluing of difference through sense
perception. Nugent continues to work through ideas of sensuality, space,
and perception where difference—and thus the mode of subject making—
is borne through imperial logic and its system of differential valuation.
Part of the tension and complexity in this form of subjectivization comes
as Nugent collapses imperial space with New York City space through the
replacement of objects and bodies in space. Like the work of Wilde, Huys-
mans, Larsen, and Fitzgerald, Nugent’s work is peppered with objects from
elsewhere as a way of creating a difference between the sensible and in-
sensible others, a novel mode of subjectivity. The ivory and jade cigarette

Queer Modernities | 91
holder, incense, “precise courtesans winking from behind lace fans,” per-
fume, Buddha, and Salomé all make appearances as objets d’art.55 Orien-
talist modes of knowing and collecting signal an aesthetic practice that
occurs beyond the ken of the limited sensibilities of others who also in-
habit the city. In a twofold operation, Nugent locates the Orient outside the
West as a fantasy of the exotic, and inside the West as a badge of distinc-
tion for those who can know the Orient. Orientalisms draw on Enlighten-
ment epistemologies that often exclude bodies of color from these modes
of self-­making, but Alex uses them in imagining another life that would
better suit him:

he would like to live in a large white palace . . . to wear a long black cape
. . . very full and lined with vermillion . . . to have many cushions and to
lie there among them . . . talking to his friends . . . lie there in a yellow
silk shirt and black velvet trousers . . . like music-­review artists talking
and pouring strange liquors from curiously beautiful bottles. . . . yes to
lie back among strangely fashioned cushions and sip eastern wines and
talk. . . . yes and have music waft softly into the darkened and incensed
room . . . he blew a cloud of smoke . . . oh the joy of being an artist and of
blowing blue some thru an ivory holder inlaid with red jade and green.56

This orientalist fantasy, no doubt abetted by romantic (or erotic) visions

of the film star Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik and also “music-­review[s]”
from Broadway and off-­Broadway, illustrates Alex’s artistic sensibility.
Demonstrating worldly knowledge of the Orient’s (and the Orient in New
York’s) built environment, fabrics, and drinks, this description is both
bohemian and cosmopolitan. Alex refines his subjecthood through know-
ing and valuing difference, but of course the capacity to know the Orient is
fraught with the unevenness of imperial power and statecraft. Inasmuch as
Alex avails himself of an oriental mystique to append his modernity, and
deploys this fantasy to create queer space in New York, he depends on an
imperial logic that would not allow bodies marked as outside the nation to
participate as sovereign subjects. So, though Nugent reimagines city space
through a redistribution of the sensible, he relies on more stable notions of
national and imperial space in order to produce an aesthetic vocabulary.
The drawing of a queer black aesthetics from the logic of empire also
betrays how Nugent valued and reiterates difference in his representa-
tion of interracial and transnational sexuality. This aesthetic vocabulary is

92 | Chapter Two
most potent when Nugent describes Alex’s flirtation and sexual encounter
with Adrian, a Latino man whose presence is foreshadowed in the passage
above by the sound of castanets. As Alex encounters his love interest on
the blue street, imperial logic dictates an aesthetic vocabulary that literally
renames his interest as an object, “Beauty,” at the same time as Alex be-
comes a sexual subject. This encounter holds a vaunted place in scholarly
circles because it marks the quintessential queerness of the text: a queer
encounter between queer bodies.57 The story’s description of the Latino
love interest, Beauty, was based on characteristics of the Mexican carica-
turist Miguel Covarrubias; Valentino, whom Nugent had met; Harold Jack-
man, a “handsome West Indian man about town”; Langston Hughes; and
Nugent himself.58 Thomas Wirth also suggests that Nugent had fallen in
love with Juan José Viana, the “scion of a prominent Panamanian family,”
while both worked at the Martha Washington Hotel.59 These sources dem-
onstrate how a multifaceted imperial logic of migration and mixing shaped
Beauty’s character. With Beauty a composite of multiple immigrants from
multiple empires, Nugent is clearly playing with the imperial logic of sub-
jecthood through queer sexuality.60 This imperial logic creates a contradic-
tory schema for Alex’s evaluation of Beauty. On the one hand, Alex loves
and appreciates Beauty; after all, beauty is the goal of aestheticism. On
the other hand, because Beauty is aestheticized, he is also objectified as a
means of Alex’s subjectivization. The work of the body as referent, then, is
quite slippery. It points both to queer acts, an imperial imagination beyond
the materiality of bodies, and to aesthetic claims to objects and sensuality.
The work of beauty itself is not universal or natural, but embedded within
imperial and civilizationist discourse. As Mimi Thi Nguyen observes, “we
can see how beauty as a measure of moral character and feeling, which has
a clear geopolitical dimension, also functions to regulate moral character
and feeling, especially as a geopolitical exercise addressed to the individual
and the collective as power’s problem and beauty’s mandate. . . . When
beauty is called upon to tell us something significant about the paths and
places that the good and the moral might be found, the partisan nature of
beauty’s perception becomes all too clear.”61 Nugent revalues the imperial
and racial other as beautiful, but this revaluation continues modes of dif-
ferentiation, so that what is marked as strange or outside of the ordinary is
materially and sexually fetishized. Imperial logic contextualizes this quin-
tessentially queer moment—poised between queer bodies and the trans-

Queer Modernities | 93
formation of those bodies into empire’s objects—on which Nugent’s cre-
ation of novel subjectivity stands.
Clearly, Nugent’s is groundbreaking work. It brings together two men of
color in the shadow of a racist, heteronormative state, creating a queer vo-
cabulary through language and aesthetics. Nugent thereby revalues racial-
ized bodies and immigration status as ways to cross boundaries and defy
social norms. He writes:

perdone me senor tiene vd. fosforo . . . Alex was glad he had been ad-
dressed in Spanish . . . to have been asked for a match in English . . . or
to have been addressed in English at all . . . would have been blasphemy
just then . . . Alex handed him a match . . . he glanced at his companion
apprehensively in the match glow . . . he was afraid that his appearance
would shatter the blue thoughts . . . and stars . . . ah . . . his face was
a perfect compliment [sic] to his voice . . . and the echo of their steps
mingled . . . they walked in silence . . . the castanets of their heels click-
ing accompaniment . . . the stranger inhaled deeply and with a nod of
content and a smile . . . blew a cloud of smoke . . . Alex felt like singing
. . . the stranger knew the magic of blue smoke also . . . they continued
in silence . . . the castanets of their heels clicking rhythmically.62

Nugent describes this first encounter in sensual detail, emphasizing color,

sound, warmth, and movement. The aesthetic vocabulary established
earlier in the story is mobilized here to describe burgeoning queer desire,
open to the artistically sensible. This encounter situates the immigrant in
the city as someone desirable and magical. In doing so, however, Nugent
insists on the repetition of certain distinctions that mark the exotic other—
linguistic difference, the sound of castanets, and native queerness—that
enhance, by contrast, an imperial masculine self.
Even with the revaluation of the immigrant in the city, the aestheticiza-
tion of Beauty’s body renders him more object than subject. Although Alex
is rendered as a thinking, sensitive mind who moves through the world
appreciating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that he gladly encoun-
ters, Beauty is something to be admired and appreciated, alongside the
other objects that together constitute Alex’s cosmopolitanism. Nugent de-
scribes their first sexual encounter: “as they undressed by the blue dawn
. . . Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being . . . his body was all
symmetry and music . . . and Alex called him Beauty.” 63 Though Beauty is

94 | Chapter Two
appreciated, he is also transformed from a body as signifier into an object
of “symmetry and music,” whose possession accents Alex’s sensibility as a
sophisticated observer and lover of beautiful things. Alex’s positioning re-
calls the place of the imperial collector, who moves through imperial space
gathering objets d’art and curios as a means to subjectivity. As Chandan
Reddy has written in regard to Larsen’s use of orientalist objects, “the dif-
ference between subjects and objects, persons and settings, political life
and its nonpolitical limit in the public sphere, as much as in the middle-­
class novel, can all be rendered as a difference between varieties of speech
and silence.”64 Nugent presents both imperial subjectivization and objec-
tification, using them here as limits to show that orientalist discourse can
create queer subjectivities for some but not for others.
“Smoke, Lilies and Jade” is deliciously complex. Nugent mobilizes im-
perial signs and symbols in ways that challenge and also uphold assump-
tions about spatial, embodied categories. Although he relieves bodies of
the burden of representation of identity, he sometimes relies on the struc-
ture of power he calls into question. Here it is useful to turn once again to
Rancière, who proposes the idea that “the arts [in ‘modernity’] only ever
lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend
to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them:
bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of
the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or
the subversion they can claim credit for rests on the same foundation.”65
We might therefore observe that the imperial logic Nugent relies on to draw
out difference, and revalue and relocate it as magical or beautiful, also pre-
dicts and delimits a political and aesthetic form built on that difference.
However, as we shall see, Nugent’s works do not always negotiate difference
thusly. Indeed, he also seeks to release difference from referential certainty,
and to engender instead a crisis of differentiation, through his particular
appetite for its signs and symbols.

Peripatetic Primitivisms and Orientalisms

Building on the work in the previous section, which demonstrates a crisis

of referentiality as queer identities become disinterred from queer bodies
and queer sex acts, this section figures the crisis of referentiality through
the ways in which imperial markers of primitivism and orientalism cohere
to queer bodies. Here I argue that the pragmatics of empire guided the

Queer Modernities | 95
modernist construction of queerness through the linking of empire’s ob-
jects and aesthetics to queer bodies, a practice that some artists and writers
of the Harlem Renaissance used to unveil the construction of race, gender,
sexuality, and national identity. As I have previously shown, the crossing of
national boundaries has long been imagined as a movement toward emerg-
ing queer subjectivity, or as a mechanism for producing spaces of queer
activity. In this section I focus on Nugent’s series of “Drawings for Mulat-
toes” and Thurman’s fictional rendering of Nugent in his novel Infants of
the Spring and suggest that these works disrupt—indeed, queer—the dis-
crete boundaries between objects and bodies and the boundaries that mark
identity categories.
With these objects of inquiry, I am particularly interested in how primi-
tivist and orientalist objects are made to cohere to queer bodies and queer
sexualities to generate a modernist aesthetic; and how in these works those
objects and bodies that occupied a zone of ontological indeterminacy en-
gendered a queer black aesthetic while still embedded in imperial logic.
Scholarship on race has often focused on how primitivism and orientalism
cohere to racialized bodies in particular, and how racialized bodies might
be gendered (for example, the feminization of African Americans) or sexu-
alized (the queerness of Asian men or the eroticism of Latina women).66
In contrast, I focus on how primitive and orientalist objects can be as-
sociated with queerness and queer bodies that defy racial, gendered, and
sexual classification. For example, in this crisis of referentiality, orientalism
and orientalized objects do not act as signifiers for Asian bodies, but for
queerness. Here, the distance that is carried within such objects—­marking
them as strange, granting them their exotic aura, and rendering them desir-
able—attaches itself to queer bodies to herald them also as strange, exotic,
and desirable.67 Additionally, because these queer aesthetic practices took
aim at the solidity of boundaries that marked identity categories, they did
not fall into the category of Afro-­orientalist works that spoke to needs for
alliance; rather, they worked to deconstruct the very categories of race on
which notions of alliance rely. These works demonstrate how queer aes-
thetics and artifacts—drawn from the representational regimes of British,
French, and U.S. empires; avant-­garde arts movements circulating within
and between these empires; and spaces of New York nightlife, such as
nightclubs, balls, operas—were brought together in new spatial and racial
arrangements to create a new queer black aesthetic practice that worked

96 | Chapter Two
through the detachment of primitivist and orientalist signifiers from stable
categorizations of bodies, objects, and spaces.
Nugent reimagines the relationship between the modern, the primitive,
the orientalist, fact, and fiction in Drawings for Mulattoes, a series of four
drawings completed for Charles Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz in 1927 (figs.
2.2–2.5). These images are among Nugent’s best known and most widely
circulated visual works. The title of the series indicates that he used mixed-­
race identity as a metaphor for cultural contact and the collapse of space
between the primitive and the modern, and the drawings are most often
read in this way. In them, Nugent deliberately confuses the placement of
the black primitive in a premodern Africa, the white modern in the urban
city, and jazz culture as the border between primitive blackness and white
modernity. That is, he holds up to scrutiny primitivism’s invocation of
blackness as belonging to Africa, outside of the United States, alongside
modernity’s celebration of blackness as defining the music and nightlife of
Jazz Age New York. Susan Gubar reads the series as depicting an “ethno-
genesis that moves from depictions of the primitive to images of civiliza-
tion,” but also as denoting an “illusion,” because “Africa is ‘always already’
represented through the lens of the downtown musical and uptown caba-
ret.”68 She draws out the multiple layers of meaning within the series, and
her reading asks us to consider the role of race and space in black aesthetic
practices. To this I would add that these drawings also sought to locate
gender and sexuality as central to these practices, particularly as empire
intersects the city and the city encompasses empire. Remarking on those
connections and connotations that bind perversion and pleasure to primi-
tivism and orientalism, including those that informed and formed sexo-
logical studies, Nugent reinterpreted the primitive as synchronous with
the modern to create a queer black sensibility—both like and unlike that
of the New Negro intellectuals—in the United States. Within these draw-
ings, Africa and New York—but also Asia, islands, plantations, nightclubs,
operas, and bodies—collapse time and space within two-­dimensional
frames, all appearing simultaneously. I argue that this series of images pro-
vides a queer of color critique of the formation of the New Negro and, like
the first figure in this chapter, does so by making use of the nexus of primi-
tivism, orientalism, and queerness as defining terms for a black modernity
under the auspices of empire.
Because these drawings have been reproduced and read extensively, I

Queer Modernities | 97
Figure 2.2 Richard Bruce Nugent, Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 1 (1927).
Courtesy of Thomas H. Wirth.

will address only the aspects of the drawings that lend themselves to this
queer of color critique. Like Gubar, I am drawn to the multiplicity of mean-
ings that proceeds from each image. The heteroglossia that composes the
context, language, and purpose of the drawings is mobilized by Nugent to
forward notions of the collapse of fact and fiction, of spatial distinctions,
and of racial boundaries as a means of creating a sexual aesthetic. All the
drawings blend elements of the primitive as aesthetic, referencing African
origins as mediated by stage dressing—a move that at once plays with the
assumed naturalness of black and brown bodies in jungles and the knowing
fictions of nightclub performance. These works thus signal the construct-

98 | Chapter Two
Figure 2.3 Richard Bruce Nugent, Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 2 (1927).
Courtesy of Thomas H. Wirth.

edness of race through the assemblage of its performance—of space, of

staging. Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 1, for instance, draws on Aaron
Douglass’s drawings of figures in primitivist backgrounds and thus refers
to the reclamation of Africa and the primitive as a way to signal a particu-
larly modern New Negro identity. But here the two-­dimensionality of the
columns also recalls a stage set with dancers appearing between the totemic
pillars. Rather than calling to mind simply African origins, the drawing also
benefits from the latest in stage design. Nugent’s drawing becomes a third-
or fourth-­order simulacrum of jungles that never existed, but that none-
theless carry swathes of meaning in their representation, including those

Queer Modernities | 99
that associate race, gender, sexuality, and geographical space through the
imperial imagination.
This reading, which denaturalizes the linkages between the categories
created through space, time, race, and artless or natural sexuality, becomes
important to a queer of color critique. Where blackness has been figured
as suspect within the U.S. national imaginary, its abnormality is generated
through naturalized meanings of these categories. In 1920 Sigmund Freud
noted that inversion “is remarkably widespread among many savage and
primitive races” and that it was also frequent “among the peoples of an-
tiquity at the height of their civilization.”69 These two moments of inver-
sion are present in Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 2, where Nugent rep-
resents queer primitivism and queer antiquity in the Janus-­faced image of
a black Greco-­Roman head and a white Africanized head.70 Again, while
the naturalistic palm trees recall the British Arts and Crafts Movement,
they simultaneously signify Africa, the tropics, the primitive, and Broad-
way stage sets. The buildings on the right recall Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and
the skyscrapers that distinguish the modern city, but in their flatness they
too call to mind the foreshortened span of the theatre stage.71 The collaps-
ing of multiple times and spaces in the image thus calls into question the
peripatetic place of inverted sexuality within the city by moving the primi-
tive and Grecian antiquity into the present and confounding bearings of
distance through newfound intimacy.
A similar collapse of time, space, and race occurs in Drawing for Mulat-
toes—Number 3. Here he combines a representation of an imagined Africa
or island locales through the primitivized figured rendered in black on the
left side with the modern city signified by the white figure on the right. This
simultaneity of time and space is further exemplified in the background to
this bifurcated figure: the left side holds a drawing of Constantin Brancusi’s
Endless Column, originally cast in metal, and the right side is a presenta-
tion of the intricate, naturalistic, and primitivist carvings and prints of the
British Arts and Crafts Movement, or perhaps first-order representations
of indigeneity rather than the British imitations of such. Combining these
elements, Nugent collapses differences between various continents and
islands, races, time periods, and aesthetics. Less obvious perhaps, would
be his re-­reading of the gendered body. While this body is feminine on both
sides of the centerline, does this mean that the sexed body that these gen-

100 | Chapter Two
 Figure 2.4 Richard Bruce Nugent,
Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 3 (1927).
Courtesy of Thomas H. Wirth.

dered referents point to is stable? What if we were to read the right side of
the body as a dancer in drag?
Nugent’s work also collapses the distance between the aesthetic, the im-
perial, and the urban through the presence of queer bodies throughout
the series of drawings. Some figures in the series, for instance, point to the
urban presence of queer bodies that inhabited balls, nightclubs, and caba-
rets. The center feminine figure of Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 2 and
perhaps the figure of Number 3 provide an example of queer of color cri-
tique by bringing together secondary sex characteristics that confuse gen-
der and sexuality. Seemingly female-­bodied on one side and male-­bodied

Queer Modernities | 101
Figure 2.5 Richard Bruce Nugent, Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 4
(1927). Courtesy of Thomas H. Wirth.

on the other, the figures fall in line with some sexological discourses about
the bisexual being natural. But this is not all that these figures might refer
to in their blurring. They, as well as the figures along the bottom of Drawing
for Mulattoes—Number 4, further conjure queer nightclub performances as
well as the clientele at masquerade balls in Harlem and Greenwich Village.
Webster Hall in the Village hosted functions such as the Bal Primitiv,
the Pagan Rout, and the Golden Ball of Isis, where men wore “only a small
skin that of a leopard or some such animal,” “oriental costumes,” robes
made out of tablecloths, or the attire of Egyptian slaves.72 One “prominent
feature of these dances,” another vice report noted, “is the number of male

102 | Chapter Two
perverts who attend them. These phenomenal men dress up in the most
prepossessing female attire simulating women so much as to defy detec-
tion.”73 These balls combined the cultures (and times and spaces) of the
primitive and the oriental with ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations,
using Enlightenment narratives of space and subjectivity to locate the ori-
gins of queer acts outside modern European civilization, on a temporally
and spatially distant link on the great chain of being. The balls thereby dis-
mantled this civilizational divide, albeit through a reading that respatial-
ized homosexuality or gender non-­normativity within the bounds of an
exotic Africa or Asia, or an always already fallen antiquity.
In many ways Drawing for Mulattoes—Number 4 departs from the first
three drawings in the series in that it introduces the Orient through an ob-
ject, an Asian mask. This drawing brings to mind another set of perfor-
mance references to the repertoire of the drawings: opera. With its rich ori-
entalist tradition, the opera stage already serves as a multiply referent site
of production across various empires. Number 4 relies on a visual vocabu-
lary similar to that of the other drawings in the series—positive and nega-
tive space, built and natural environments, and the costumed dancer who
straddles these divides—but this last drawing is compositionally queer. The
tidiness of spatial demarcation apparent in the first three drawings is gone.
The main figure on the left, a kerchiefed head, bleeds beyond the center
boundary line; the logic of the break in the figures at the bottom is gone;
and the balance of the trees, here used to define the upper corners, is hap-
hazard. Importantly, too, this piece introduces the notion of the Orient
into the space of the city’s nightlife through the figure of the orientalized
mask on the right side of the drawing. Tellingly, the Orient is represented
not by a person but by an aestheticized object that is juxtaposed and com-
bined with familiar images of black and white sensualities. These heads not
only double for the classical dyad of Comedy and Tragedy, but also for the
costumes worn by partygoers to masquerade balls, where orientalist en-
sembles were de rigueur. The musical notes above the central figures might
suggest a reference to the orientalist operas that filled music halls during
the Jazz Age—Aïda, Cleopatra’s Night, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot.74
For Nugent, the introduction of the Orient further weakens the logic be-
hind the black-­white binary and points to a queer aesthetic formed from
the knowledge regimes of British, French, and U.S. empires. Nugent ex-
tends the mobilization of heteroglossia in order to call into question the

Queer Modernities | 103
construction of particular boundaries, but these boundaries are embedded
within the logic of empire and the desire for a queer aesthetic that tran-
scends them.
This attitude toward the blurring of boundaries as a form of queer
black aesthetic practice is also evident in Thurman’s novels. In Infants of
the Spring, to which I now turn, Thurman manipulates the arts and allure
of the Orient, as displayed in objects that cohere to queer bodies, as a way
to deconstruct identity categories such as gender, race, and sexuality.75 In
this novel, Thurman locates in the character of Paul Arbian, a talented but
frustrated queer black artist modeled on Nugent, an orientalized fantasy
within the social context of Jazz Age New York.76 As will become clear, ori-
entalisms (including those adopted by the character for himself ) imputed
to Paul Arbian the quality of an outsider, and Thurman ends his novel with
Paul’s climactic suicide in tribute to Nugent’s love of music. That is, Paul
kills himself in a manner stylistically and aesthetically reminiscent of Cio-­
Cio San’s demise in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. First performed in 1904
at La Scala, in Milan, Puccini’s opera is a powerful orientalist text, usually
read as a tragic narrative about imperial contact between the tradition-­
bound East and the modern West, reiterating both the exoticism of Asian
femininity and the broader feminization of Asia. The opera was incred-
ibly popular in New York. By the time of the 1932 publication of Infants
of the Spring, Madama Butterfly had been staged every year but one since
its debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1906.77 Thurman’s use of
the opera again signals the work of orientalism across empires, but it also
serves to mark queer identity formation. The character of Paul Arbian lives
through aesthetic practices, and—in the manner of Oscar Wilde—his the-
atrical suicide becomes a grand performance of queer identity, where death
is presented as another form of transcendence.
Thurman’s use of signs and symbols of East Asia illustrates the com-
plexity of mixing cultures and race relations in Jazz Age Harlem, where
gender and sexual ambiguity and excess are expressed through an im-
perial vocabulary. Paul Arbian’s strangely ritualistic suicide in a bathtub
in a downtown apartment, surrounded by the accouterment of Japan, re-
flects not only the incompatibility of his sexual sensibility with the circle of
black artists in Harlem but also the usages of orientalisms to create those
racial and gender ambiguities that denoted his sexual alterity. Thurman
wrote Alva in The Blacker the Berry . . . as a biologically interracial char-

104 | Chapter Two
acter, but he conceived of Paul, the artist, as performatively interracial—­
creating his interraciality through dress, writing, comportment, and ritual.
As in other discourses of the time, the orientalized figure connoted a non-­
normative—and here, a refreshingly complex—sexuality. In this challenge
to the bounds of classification schemas, Thurman detached orientalist sig-
nifiers from Asia and Asian bodies. This mode of signification strained
the allocation of stereotypes as modifiers of specific bodies and spaces.
Although Thurman used these peripatetic orientalisms as a way to call at-
tention to the porous borders of selfhood, the imperial signifiers that he
employed nonetheless relied on particular notions of the Orient as fragile,
beautiful, feminine, and poised for death.
In order to understand Paul’s suicide and the gender and racial ambi-
guities that both led to his death and were created in its wake, it is neces-
sary to first explore the underpinnings of this character’s philosophy of
sexuality and pleasure. Paul describes his views in an idyllic dream near the
beginning of the novel, a dream that also foreshadows his death. He begins
the narration of his dream in a richly wooded Eden, a utopian environ-
ment, signaled through the kinds of inhabitants that occupy that space. The
reader knows, for instance, that uninhibited expression and indulgence
are encouraged here, as Paul names among this Eden’s inhabitants singing
birds and an “ivory body exuding some exotic perfume.”78 Here, the two
signs seem to be intimately interlinked: birdsong cascades down from the
trees to envelope the perfumed body below. Recounting more of the dream,
Paul observes a “complete merging” between himself and this other pres-
ence, pointing to his own “becoming,” through which race, gender, and, by
extension, sexuality are seen as processual. The presence that Paul senses
in this wooded space is his own transgendered body. In an Edenic environ-
ment of unconstrained creativity, he has a dream of his transformation into
a Japanese geisha. Because these tropes would resurface with Paul’s death,
we can surmise that the “ivory body” smelling of “exotic perfume” hints
at the orientalist nature of this presence. Such racial ambiguities are also
present when, in this dream, Paul grabs a “silken forelock,” an element that
at once conjures up an orientalist object (silk, in addition to the preceding
ivory body) with and in contrast to Paul’s difference. Paul’s African Ameri-
can body is effortlessly altered.
Importantly, Paul’s dream foreshadows his suicide (the two aesthetically
transformative moments bookend this story) at the end of the novel, and

Queer Modernities | 105
the endings of the dream and of his life both speak to the fragile and pro-
tean nature of aesthetic production, and also to the importance of bodies’
ability to transform themselves in terms of race and gender. His dream
ends with the “shrill scream of a frightened woman.”79 He had been asleep
beneath the stairway of an apartment house when a woman found him
dreaming there and shrieked with fear or anger. The scream, however,
also presages Paul’s rebirth as a transgendered and transracial being in
his dream. The woman screams just before Paul wakes. With his return to
reality, he must immediately run to avoid capture—up the stairs, over the
roof to the next apartment building, then down the stairs into the street—a
glimpse into the difficult life of a queer black bohemian.80 But the scream,
occurring before the end of the dream or as the end of the dream, also pre-
figures Paul’s final cry, a cry he makes as a woman when he commits suicide
later in search of another sort of transformation.
These shifting identities highlight the ways in which Paul’s sexuality de-
pends on the breaking down of boundaries—those between Eden and the
city, between life and death, between genders, and between races. Paul’s
proposal that race is a process of becoming is later misread by Stephen, a
sympathetic white man who has taken up residence in Harlem. The differ-
ence between Paul’s Edenic vision of novel subjectivity and Stephen’s read-
ing of Paul’s erratic behavior is indicative of the limits perceived in Paul’s
boundary crossing. Stephen notes:

Paul has never recovered from the shock of realizing that no matter how
bizarre a personality he may develop, he will still be a Negro. . . . He sits
around helpless, possessed of great talent, doing nothing, wishing he
were white, courting the bizarre, anxious to be exploited in the public
prints as a notorious character. Being a Negro, he feels that his chances
of excessive notoriety à la Wilde are slim. Thus the exaggerated poses
and extreme mannerisms. Since he can’t be white, he will be a most un-
usual Negro. To say “nigger” in the presence of a white person warms
the cockles of his heart. It’s just a symptom of some deep set disease.81

In Stephen’s description, however, it is clear that Paul is not performing

the role of “Negro” properly, showing that Stephen comprehends race as
stable and properly performable. For Stephen, Paul’s misplaced intent is
to become “a most unusual Negro.” Again, as with Alva in The Blacker the
Berry . . . , Paul’s racial ambiguity is conflated with queerness, as connoted

106 | Chapter Two
by the reference to Oscar Wilde. For Stephen, Paul’s non-­normativity is
created in part through the knotty combination of his great talent, his
“notorious” sexuality, and his helpless inability to be other than a “Negro.”
While Paul views himself as racially transgressive, Stephen enumerates
those aspects of Paul’s talent and personality (“the exaggerated poses and
extreme mannerisms”) as modes through which he simply fails to be prop-
erly black. So, though Stephen saw Paul as a transgressive being, Stephen’s
attachment to the permanence of racial categories imputes a differently in-
flected, negative connotation to such transgression. Furthermore, Stephen
reads Paul’s mobilization of orientalist signifiers in his dream as part of his
bizarre behavior, rather than as a subversive quality.
The crisis of referentiality that follows the peripatetic placement of the
Orient onto an unstably black and American body disturbs the equation of
Afro-­orientalisms with racial alliance or racial cooptation. Instead, Thur-
man’s work here in deconstructing the boundaries of race questions the
conceits that make alliance possible: the fixed boundaries of racial clas-
sification. Though mobile, orientalist signs and objects do not adhere
to Paul’s black body in the same way that they may be thought to mark
properly Asian bodies, from Stephen’s point of view. Instead, for Stephen,
Paul’s complicated racial performance is circumscribed by the very logic
of distance that makes the Orient strange in the first place. For Thurman,
though, Paul’s worldview is intriguing, and his mobilization of orientalism
is worthy of note in terms of how it exposes permeable racial boundaries.
In the scheme of the novel’s narrative, Paul’s transformation is both a failed
performance and a performance holding the performative effect of attach-
ing the Orient to queer bodies. Here, then, the work of detaching racial
signifiers from particular bodies implicates the system of race and, there-
fore, the system of differential valuation that rests on those categorizations.
Furthermore, the loosening of the elements of the racial sign system makes
room for the unbinding of the sexual sign system.
Therefore, through imperial logic the references to the Orient coincide
with non-­normative sexual choices. Paul’s dream, with its sensual orien-
talism, is a mobilization of notions of sexual excess, as is evident in the
responses that Paul receives from the audience to whom he recounts his
dream. These questions could easily be read as pure skepticism, as they
are couched in Thurman’s description of one listener named Samuel, an
equal rights political advocate who attempts to trap Paul with his cross-­

Queer Modernities | 107
examination. Samuel’s questions, however, work to validate Paul’s point of
view. Samuel first asks Paul if he did, in fact, have the dream. Paul replies
that he did. This exchange points out not the impossibility of the dream
but rather the reality of the dream, since Paul serves as its witness. Invit-
ing Paul to confirm the fact of the dream, Samuel inadvertently implies a
connection between Paul’s storytelling and his reality, a blurring that con-
tinues in his next question. Samuel asks whether the presence that Paul
had felt in the dream was male or female, to which Paul replies that he does
not know. Though from Paul’s viewpoint this gender ambiguity is Edenic,
even liberating, Samuel does not quite understand how such gender ambi-
guity might play a part in queer sensibility. In a hushed tone, Samuel asks
whether Paul had ever “indulge[d] in homosexuality.”82 Paul unblinkingly
answers “certainly,” profiting from Samuel’s slippages to also blur the dis-
tinction between what might have occurred in the dream and what hap-
pened in the real world.
Paul’s matter-­of-­fact admission of having performed non-­normative
sexual acts leads to the revelation of the interconnection, dependent on
imperial logic, between the expectation of gender and sex stability with
the definition of sexual object choice. Discomfited by Paul’s answers,
Samuel attempts to further determine, or manage, Paul’s sexual prefer-
ence since the gender of the presence in the dream is still in question.
Samuel’s assumptions demonstrate that common conceptions of human
sexuality were (and indeed are) based on the stability of gendered bodies.
For Samuel, there are homosexual acts performed between men, as in this
instance, and there are heterosexual acts performed between a man and a
woman. The introduction of gender ambiguity immediately calls into ques-
tion these set categories and classifications for sexuality. Paul’s purpose in
answering the questions as he does is to elude the trap of these categories
and classifications and to fashion instead a field of sexual variation. Samuel
presses his point, asking Paul whether he prefers sex with men or women,
and Paul closes the argument in opening up possibility: “I really don’t
know. After all there are no sexes, only sex majorities, and the primary
function of the sex act is enjoyment. Therefore I enjoyed one experience
as much as the other.”83 Paul’s—and, by extension, Thurman’s—language
here is sprinkled with references to sexological discourses. Indeed, part of
the weight of Paul’s answer, and thus its finality, comes from the scientific
tenor he employs to argue against fixed categories, which lends an air of

108 | Chapter Two
medical authority to his argument. Paul rejects normative heterosexuality
by claiming that there are not simply two sexes but a range of sexes, thereby
imputing the dominance of heterosexuality not to biological but rather to
imagined dimorphic sex categories. He also argues against heteronorma-
tivity in his assertion that the function of sex is pleasure instead of repro-
duction. Once this statement is made, Paul suggests that sexuality based on
genders is irrelevant to the great variety of sexual acts, including queer acts.
The closing scene of the novel brings the boundary breaking evident in
Paul’s dream together with the production of a lived queer black aesthetic
through the discourse of empire. Though the reader understands in these
passages that Paul had an erotic dream in which he meets a “presence” of
ambiguous gender marked as exotic and therefore erotic, the dream be-
comes legible as prophecy only with Paul’s suicide:

Paul had evidently come home before the end of the party. On arriving,
he had locked himself in the bathroom, donned a crimson mandarin
robe, wrapped his head in a batik scarf of his own designing, hung a
group of his spirit portraits on the dingy calcimined wall, and carpeted
the floor with sheets of paper detached from the notebook in which he
had been writing his novel. He had then, it seemed, placed scented joss-­
sticks in the four corners of the room, lit them, climbed into the bathtub,
turned on the water, then slashed his wrists with a highly ornamented
Chinese dirk. When they found him, the bathtub had overflowed, and
Paul lay crumpled at the bottom, a colorful, inanimate corpse in a crim-
son streaked tub.84

Paul believed that gender, race, and sexuality were mutable performances
and that through everyday acts, he might become whomever or whatever
he chose. For this final transformation, Paul clothes himself as a woman,
and as an Asian other. He drapes himself in a “mandarin robe” and a “batik
scarf,” one recalling China and the other Indonesia, a collocation of Asian
signs and objects that also reflects the complicated circuits of trade and cul-
ture throughout empire. Although batik fabric originates in Indonesia, it is
also associated with Africa through its travels along Dutch trading routes.85
It thereby becomes an artifact whose complex history unravels racial and
imperial encounters. The narrator notes that Paul had designed the scarf
himself, suggesting perhaps that Paul did not merely act out these identi-
ties but sought to inhabit them through his artistic labors. Furthermore, as

Queer Modernities | 109
Anne Anlin Cheng puts it so well, “what we believe to be surface may be
profoundly ontologically structuring.”86 Though Paul is clearly a collector
and as such occupies a position of power, he is not resistant to influence or
contamination from his objects. Indeed, the objects may be said to act on
him with a formal power, to transform him in the disconcerting encounter,
even to consign him to the status of another object in an imperial archive.87
The multiple referents for the suicide scene complicate the meanings
of Paul’s suicide, which then hover between life, death, subjectivization,
and objectification of the queer body. The manner of his suicide purposely
recalls Cio-­Cio San’s suicide at the tragic conclusion of Madama Butter-
fly.88 Like Cio-­Cio San, Paul was dressed in an ornate robe at the time of
death and used a knife in a ritual suicide. And both Cio-­Cio San and Paul
had dared to want the unattainable—in the case of Cio-­Cio San, a mutual,
loving relationship between herself and Pinkerton, a U.S. naval lieuten-
ant; in the case of Paul, a liberating world of sexual and gender variation
and expressiveness.89 Since the social and sexual excess of their desires
marked them as outsiders, their suicides are demanded by society. Un-
like the women who performed Salomé dances in the nightclubs to claim
another life, Thurman took the route of operatic convention and killed his
tragic heroine. The killing of a queer character as a resolution is a contro-
versial narrative tactic, of course. Cobb is wary of the tactic because it too
often relies on an “irrefutable cultural death logic of a world that would
prefer to see the queer’s literal death.”90 If we read Paul’s suicide as an aes-
thetic act rather than as an actual death, however, it is a delightful act of
transcendence, an exit into his Edenic dream and even into the lush world
of opera. For Thurman, I would argue, the instability of meaning making
is meant to be both part of that release into utopia and a beautiful tragedy.
The heteroglossia that creates intricate webs of meaning for Thurman
manifests itself beyond the world of opera. Paul confirms the connection
between his unattainable desires and Cio-­Cio San’s in the manuscript he
leaves behind. Like Paul’s gender ambiguity, sexual licentiousness, and
interracial becoming, his manuscript is also illegible. The carefully placed
sheets of paper lining the bathroom floor are destroyed when the tub over-
flows after Paul’s death. The only pencil-­written sheets that remain legible
are the title page and the dedication page. Paul had fittingly named his
manuscript “Wu Sung: The Geisha Man,” referring to his novel subjec-
tivity as well as his aesthetic provocations. (The title echoes that of a post-

110 | Chapter Two
humously published novella by Nugent, called “The Geisha Man,” which I
discuss in the following section.) Operating within his preferred range of
genders and sexualities, Paul is both excessive and queer, both a geisha and
a man. This reading is corroborated by the manuscript’s dedication:

To Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde’s Oscar Wilde

Ecstatic Spirits with whom I Cohabit
And whose golden spores of decadent pollen
I shall broadcast and fertilize
It is written
Paul Arbian.91

The character Des Esseintes from Joris-­Karl Huysmans’s Against the Grain
sought the rare and the perverse through sensation. He loved perfume,
music, painting, circus acrobats, oriental objets d’art, Salomé, and the study
of medieval Latin literature. Much like Paul, he was a sensualist enamored
of sex and art. “Oscar Wilde’s Oscar Wilde” denotes Wilde’s public perfor-
mance of self. In naming Wilde’s double, Paul contends that Wilde’s pub-
lic persona was a mutable, purposeful creation, a view echoed in Thomas
Wirth’s assessment of Nugent, who is Paul’s double (or vice versa): “His
real masterwork has been the living of his life.”92
In these instances, imperial logic works through signifying modes that
are often contradictory. Imperialism—which Homi Bhabha has noted func-
tions through ambivalence and racism, and which Stuart Hall has noted
often works through the possible doubleness of a single signifier—is able to
absorb and juxtapose seemingly contradictory signs and meanings in aes-
thetic practices.93 These practices are in fact established through the mo-
bility of signs and meanings. Using the Derridean construction of the sign
system—in which the signifier and the signified are detached, and multiple
meanings can be produced without destroying the integrity of the sign—
I argue that the various markers of empire can hold multiple meanings
without destroying the form of empire itself. Indeed, the multiple mean-
ings that are created through contradictory modes can produce a variety
of politics in the spaces of empire without calling into question the institu-
tions and ideologies that undergird it. Signs and objects meant to signify
the primitive or oriental other can be marshaled as evidence that people in
the imperial metropole are liberal because of their appetites for difference,
but those same signs and objects could also corroborate for others (also

Queer Modernities | 111
in the imperial metropole) the need for strict social control. For example,
multiracial dance halls, where people from all corners of U.S. empire might
mingle, could be construed as democratic spaces or as disciplinary ones.94
The multiplicity of possible readings demonstrates that complex ways of
reading the circulation of signs and objects are vital. In this instance, a par-
ticularly complex mode must be used to understand how these incursions
can happen without drastically changing imperial epistemologies.95

Deterritorialized Queer

The final section of this chapter moves from considering the deconstruc-
tive principles of this early version of queer of color critique through the re-
lationship of bodies and objects to thinking about them through Nugent’s
reconfiguration of the sensible, accomplished through a collapsing of space
between imperial sites. Paul Arbian’s novel, described at the end of Infants
of the Spring, was based on a novella that Nugent had actually written, “The
Geisha Man.” Though this novella was never destroyed by bathwater, it was
not published in the Jazz Age (like so much of Nugent’s work, an excerpt
was published posthumously). In “The Geisha Man,” Nugent introduces
Kondo Gale Matzuika, a queer mixed-­race character. In some ways, this
novella is a decadent descendant of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The opera
focuses on the doomed love affair between Cio-­Cio San and Pinkerton,
and the novella follows a character who has more in common with Little
Sorrow, their child. In this way, the story of Kondo Gale follows the con-
sequences of an earlier imperial contact. Although the story of Madama
Butterfly is the archetypical heterosexualization of the violent imperial con-
tact between the Orient and the Occident, Nugent recirculates this archive
of orientalized signs and symbols to produces a queer black aesthetic that
is also a partial epistemology of empire. Earlier in this chapter, I argued
that Nugent and Thurman, through the abstraction of racial and imperial
signifiers from bodies or acts, sought to reconfigure the sensible, inasmuch
as such signifiers come to transform and blur the relations between them-
selves as minor subjects of empire and the signs and symbols as objects
of empires. Because these artworks refer back to an imperial logic to pro-
duce and revalue difference, however, they operate to reinforce—and never
to escape, except through extreme measures—constitutive components of
imperial power. In “The Geisha Man,” Nugent attempts to break down the
solidity of an imperial spatial order as an ideological invention in itself. As

112 | Chapter Two
in Thurman’s work, this collapse of geographical scale is pursued through
the deconstruction of other borders as well—those of gender, race, and
sexuality—which makes this novella a provocative text for challenging im-
perial logic and its epistemological and ontological standpoints.
Nugent challenges spatial distance and distinction through a mode of
“deterritorialization,” a not-­unproblematic term that Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari describe in relation to practices of imperial signification.
“The signifier is merely the deterritorialized sign itself,” they lament, because
the sign can remain despotic even while detached from the original ob-
ject that influences its meaning.96 Deterritorialization has nonetheless been
adapted as a strategy for fouling the connections between signs and sig-
nifiers, between bodies and spaces and the meanings assigned to them,
though such a strategy often relies on existing schemas of difference. As
discussed above, some people can move out of the spaces of their significa-
tion with more ease than others. Commenting on this notion of deterritori-
alization, Caren Kaplan argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s “metaphysical
mapping of space can be read within the context of Euro-­American dis-
courses of modernism, emphasizing the benefits of distance and the val-
orization of displacement. Indeed, I would argue that their privileging of
‘nomadic’ modes relies upon an opposition between a central site of sub-
jectivity and zones of marginality. Thus their advocacy of a process of ‘be-
coming minor’ depends upon the erasure of the site of their own subject
positions.”97 Against the romance of travel and mobility, which is available
to some and not others, Kaplan thus critiques Jean Baudrillard for taking
up such a strategy in his postmodernist travelogue: “Thus, although Bau-
drillard’s America insists upon a radical deterritorialization from culture,
politics, and the social, its reliance upon a version of modernist exile poet-
ics produces a text that is laced with Eurocentric stereotypes and other
hegemonic representational practices.” 98 Nonetheless, for other scholars
deterritorialization remains a provocative strategy, precisely because some
people cannot avail themselves of its privileges. Building on Deleuze and
Guattari’s writings on “nomadology,” Victor Mendoza provocatively offers
a productive methodological impetus: “A queer nomadology . . . can track
the sexually, narratologically, and topographically wayward agent without
capturing it discursively through progressive signifying practices; and it
can account for the textual and material disruptions of nation-­state for-
mation and its official histories without positing these disruptions as in-

Queer Modernities | 113
trinsically antithetical to state hegemony. Ultimately, a queer nomadology
helps us imagine forms of resistance and critique that are not bound in
binary opposition to the progressivist ideologies and forms of domination
that postcolonial nationalisms often inherit from old colonial systems.”99
Mendoza’s methodological interventions imagine “politically wayward re-
sistance” in nuanced ways, tracking the enduring effects of imperialism and
colonialism without overdetermining these effects as omnipotent. In this
section, I combine Kaplan’s necessary warning and Mendoza’s hoped-­for
waywardness to think through Nugent’s collapsing of distances between
bodies and spaces in his queer of color aesthetic practice.
The story of the novella is aberrational, following Kondo Gale from the
red-­light district of Japan to the streets of Paris and, finally, to Jazz Age
Harlem. As he traverses these spaces, he searches for his mother’s lover,
his father, a man who has also been his lover—a man whom he desires
for more than one purpose and pursues around the world. Claiming to be
“in love with [his] mother’s lover,” Kondo Gale catches up with his father
in New York at a queer ball, where they renew their sexual relations.100
While father and son live together as lovers, the father becomes distant,
and Kondo Gale commits an ambiguous form of suicide, both fulfilling and
denying the promise of every opera: the undoing of the transgressive char-
acter as narrative resolution. Kondo Gale is given to the same fate as his
operatic foremother Cio-­Cio San, a death inspired by the distant return of
her white lover. This is nonetheless a productive repetition. As I suggested
about Paul’s death in Infants of the Spring, this kind of aestheticized death
is metaphorical, a refusal of the imperial order that desubjectifies bodies
that long for personhood.
In “The Geisha Man,” Nugent traverses geographies of scale—from the
imperial adventuring of the United States in Japan, through national dis-
courses of race via immigration, to corporeal and stylistic articulations of
gender and sexuality—in order to then interrupt hegemonic codifications
of space and sociality, distance and intimacy. I first address Nugent’s trou-
bling of gender and sexuality in his figuration of Kondo Gale. As a geisha
in Osaka, Kondo Gale resignedly acknowledges that “many men had bid
for me, for I was the loveliest maid of all. . . . [B]ut they never stayed after
they found I was . . . a man.” 101 Here Kondo Gale’s gender and sex appear
to be mismatched, but as the novella unfolds, we find that gender and sex
disruption is his ontological condition. Indeed, it is not always clear that

114 | Chapter Two
there exists for this character a stable, because biological, referent for sexo-
logical classification.
Nugent knowingly models his characters through the kind of gender
ambiguity that deconstructs the boundaries of identity by reconceptualiz-
ing the map of the sensible. After Kondo Gale is transported to New York,
he muses, “If only I had been born a woman! To dress in flowing silks and
silver and colors always, with a modish mannish look and gestures.”102 This
passage might be read as the revelation of natural sex categories (he is not
born a woman, therefore he is a man), but at the same time it challenges
the parameters of feminine self-­presentation. Schwarz marks this passage
as transgressive insofar as this professed hope does “not fit a ‘performance’
of maleness”; however, she delimits this gender subversion, noting that
“Kondo desires to dress in a feminine style yet wants to achieve a ‘modish
mannish look’ in which, as might be suspected, his masculinity remains
recognizable.” 103 The masculinity that Kondo Gale would achieve with this
“look,” though, would perform a racialized female masculinity. The idea of
being “modish,” as in “fashionable,” seems to indicate a performance of a
denaturalized masculinity.104 Indeed, the phrase “modish mannish look,”
recalls a famous line from Bessie Smith’s “Foolish Man Blues”: “There’s two
things got me puzzled, / There’s two things I can’t understand / that’s a
mannish-­acting woman and a skipping, twisting woman-­acting man.”105 In
Smith’s tune, the sarcastically delivered lines indicate the existence of pub-
lic behaviors that denaturalized ready connections between sex and gender.
Although Nugent’s description appears to present a masculine body that
cannot be denied (“If only I had been born a woman!”), this moment can
also be read as a refusal of the secured boundaries of or policed passages
between femininity, masculinity, and the body, providing queer alterna-
tives at every turn.
Such a reconfiguration of the sensible that here troubles the borders of
gender as these traverse the body can also be seen as troubling the borders
of race, particularly through the transactions between the proscriptive pro-
cesses of racialization and narratives of immigration that Kondo Gale en-
counters on arriving in the United States. As with Kondo’s gender identi-
fications, Nugent offers rough slippages between his racial identifications.
In the space of a few sentences, for instance, Kondo Gale claims both that
“I became a ‘New Negro’” and that he is “half Japanese and half white.” 106
These seemingly contradictory revelations, occurring shortly after his ar-

Queer Modernities | 115
rival in New York, demonstrate a fluid racial self-­image, differently in-
flected than a mixed-­race body might be. Rather than relying on biological
categories and heterosexual procreation to show that these distinctions are
always already unstable, Nugent opts instead for a sense of race that is mu-
table and not affixed to bodies. The writing of race in the novella, however,
also speaks to the difficulties of making such claims to deterritorialized
self-­image, in observing those practices that instantiate the incorporation
of immigrants into the prevailing U.S. racial order. That Kondo Gale be-
comes a “New Negro” thus speaks to modes of racialization that do not dis-
criminate between bodies of color but that only seek to mark those other
bodies in particular ways. Yet Kondo Gale’s initial impressions of New York
demonstrate further some of the disruptions possible to this racial order,
as all that is solid melts into air, and the static geography of the city—its
straight and narrow streets, its distinct neighborhoods—dissolve against
and into his senses. Echoing his earlier short story in his preoccupation
with sight and sound as space making, Nugent creates “polyglot dreams
and fantasies” to the beat of jazz rhythms—“An undulating hodgepodge
of color and forms. Forms and color on a spring Sunday. And a lamb-­like
March oozing with warmth and rhythm on Seventh Avenue. . . . Laughing
forms tinted with mad colors jumbled with jazz rhythm.”107 This passage’s
mad rush of colors that infect Kondo Gale’s perceptions and his means of
being also allude to the multiraciality of the city that he will experience, a
city filled with the “four beautifully modeled men . . . headless . . . headless
and beautiful . . . and one was red and one was black and one was yellow
and one was white . . . and each body glistened like lacquer . . . like satin
with a light cast on it”—the men he had dreamed of while still in Japan.108
This excerpt at once refers to multiraciality and recalls the aestheticization
and objectification of male bodies in Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.”
His reconfiguration of racial sense, then, is part of his queer black aesthetic,
which reaches back and forth across national borders.
The novella repeats the mobilization of signs and symbols through
which queer subjectivities are made possible in imperialist narratives of
modernity and cosmopolitanism, echoing writers—such as Wilde and
Huysmans—who collect and catalog objects of empire, though to a new
end. In New York this collecting and cataloguing includes those people
who make up the signs and sensations of the queer public—or counter-
public—of jazz culture. Although Thurman’s Paul Arbian hoped that he

116 | Chapter Two
might dress and undress himself in various bodies and identities, as prac-
tices of disruption, we saw that these leave behind a residue, what we might
consider a second skin. In “The Geisha Man,” such imperial vestments are
more difficult to leave behind. Nugent describes a ball scene:

The ball. We arrived late, and the dance floor was a single chaotic mass
of color. Abbreviated ballet skirts of pink, blue, silver and white danc-
ing with Arab sheiks in fantastic colors . . . Turks with bright ballooned
trousers, curled pointed boots and turbans with sweeps of brilliant
feathers and sparkling glass gems . . . pirates in frayed trousers, bloody
shirts, headbands, earrings and tattoos . . . houri girls . . . fashion girls
. . . Apache Indian, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese girls. One man re-
splendent in the third-­dynasty costume of a Chinese bandit king. Court
dresses of Louis XIV . . . hula girls and boys . . . clowns and deaths and
pirouettes . . . India temple dancers . . . evening gowns and the black
and white of full dress. Boys dressed as girls and simpering sadly. Girls
dressed as boys and bulging in places. . . . Bathing beauties and Greek
Gods. I recognized an Eastern prince as an Armenian acquaintance.109

Whereas these queer costume balls do reveal a mode of dressing up that

reinvigorates troubling narrations of modern and cosmopolitan subject-
hood, enhanced through real or symbolic travel through empire, Nugent
also points to the ball as a nexus that brings together migrants from all over
the world, a reflection of New York’s demographic composition at the time.
That is, although Nugent certainly reiterates some of the problematic poet-
ics of modernism, he also insists on the immigrant presence as agentive in
the creation of such public cultures. Caren Kaplan warns: “Neither politi-
cal refugee nor exiled artist, the immigrant, in such a mystified and unified
characterization, cannot participate in the terms of Euro-­American mod-
ernism and cannot be recuperated or professionalized in terms of cultural
production.” 110 It is therefore in the context of these terms that Nugent’s
ball names those outposts of multiple empires, U.S. and otherwise, while
also locating immigrants from those outposts within the imperial city, as
inhabitants and even innovators of its avant-­garde sensibility. The “Eastern
prince” who appears at the end of the passage, for instance, is Armenian;
and while Kondo Gale also dances with a “handsome Turk,” this ambigu-
ous naming leaves it unclear whether his dance partner is merely wearing
a Turkish costume or has indeed emigrated from Turkey.111 Nugent, at play

Queer Modernities | 117
with the confusion of signs and sensations reflecting the uneasy relations
between race and nation in the production of culture and space, reimag-
ines the immigrant as a necessary participant in the project of modernity,
as well as experimental cultures. At the same time, such unease is founda-
tional to these relations and must be considered within the logic of empire
that guides, in the words of Reddy, the “collision of diasporic groups and
U.S. space.” 112 Indeed, by the end of the novella, Nugent has made it clear
that these spaces are also patrolled and circumscribed by the same logic of
empire that makes them possible.
The tension between Kondo Gale’s collapse of boundaries between
spaces and bodies and the ready ways in which the state revises and re-
inforces those boundaries through surveillance, classification, and exclu-
sion, even as those borders threaten to waver and disappear, is structurally
similar to the ways that death can be read at the close of the novella. “All
women in opera die a death prepared for them by a slow plot,” reflects the
French feminist Catherine Clément, “woven by furtive, fleeting heroes, up
to the source, to the curtain-­raising, where, in words that are often trivial,
the death is fore-­shadowed.” 113 Not unlike Clément’s reading of trouble-
some, independent women in opera, queer characters cannot be allowed
to survive the end of fiction; their inevitable doom has been often cited
as a troublesome trope.114 Because of the operatic origin of “The Geisha
Man,” a death at the end of the novella is no narrative surprise, but Nugent
forestalls an actual death by following Kondo Gale through the city as he
meditates on death and its multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings.
Rather than killing off his character as a resolution, Nugent may be signal-
ing something other than an ending; indeed, this stream-­of-­consciousness
reverie lends ambiguity to the death of the character, and the death of his
love. “And then maybe death is only another existence in which one ‘lives’
and ‘dreams’ and confuses the two and decides that ‘death’ is the sleep one was
refused in that existence.” 115 Kondo Gale considers these and other possi-
bilities as he walks about the city—down Broadway, down Fifth Avenue,
past Child’s Restaurant, past the New York Public Library.116 His medita-
tions on death provide a map, coupling his sensual reconfiguration of the
city around him with the transcendence of death and thereby transform-
ing space and time. For Nugent, death becomes a way to refuse a particular
existence organized by “a policeman. . . . Two policemen. . . .” and “a Spe-
cial policeman,” as Kondo Gale observes near the end of his musings.117 As

118 | Chapter Two
in the case of Paul Arbian (perhaps Kondo Gale’s twin as well as Nugent’s
double), death becomes a dream of peace and continuity, eliminating the
body’s experience of the sensible in order to elude the disciplining presence
that produces and polices the spaces in which it moves or is denied move-
ment. Thus does Nugent hope to confound those categories built on the
certainty of distances between them—“Life or death or life and death or life
or . . .”—in order to transcend the social order that seeks to permanently
mark him as a particular body with a particular meaning and place.118
By the mid-­1920s, the United States had many colonial possessions and
imperialist contacts in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
As contacts abroad and at home, in the forms of new waves of immigra-
tion and an ignited imagination of these other spaces, forced a renegotia-
tion of national boundaries, other forms of identification were also called
into question. Collapsing the distance between the United States, Africa,
Asia, and the Pacific and confounding signifying practices of race and sex
in order to fracture an imperial imaginary of other bodies, Nugent created
a queer black aesthetic through the process of cultural contacts and mul-
tiple border crossings. He reimagined these contacts as sites for new con-
figurations of gender, race, and sexuality within New York and jazz culture.
Nugent produced a black queer aesthetic through two means. First, he con-
structed a queer iconography in the interstices of a primitivism as avant-­
garde culture, reclaimed from the modernist movements in both Europe
and the United States as particularly African and therefore the legacy of
African Americans. However, he constructed it not as modernity’s other,
but as its founding self. Second, Nugent mobilized preexisting notions of
the Orient—inherited from the European decadent queer canon, including
works by Wilde, Beardsley, Huysmans, and the orientalist operas of Strauss
and Puccini—to create a queer black aesthetic.119 In other words, Nugent
used an existing imperial logic to understand and also generate new sexual
and aesthetic formations. But while these contacts produced spaces of cre-
ation and renegotiation, especially in their reframing of primitivism as a
black modern, these formations also relied on exotic images of the oriental
other, found in both sexological studies and queer aesthetics, that repro-
duced an imperial logic. Indeed, queer identities were not created outside
of U.S. culture or empire, but through those cultural practices and ideolo-
gies. As a complex practice of repetition with a critical difference, Nugent’s
black queer aesthetic offers us a means of understanding the creation and

Queer Modernities | 119
circulation of modernisms and modernity, from the mixing of cultures and
bodies to the collecting of exotic objects and being collected in return,
through the logic of empire.
Nugent and Thurman, in his figuration of Nugent, identified the black
body as central to the emergence of modernism not just as spiritual object
but as an author and innovator. At the same time, Nugent and Thurman
reconfigured this black body as what Rancière calls a “quasi-­body,” not
an organism but “blocks of speech circulating without a legitimate father
to accompany them to their authorized addressee,” to “introduce lines of
fracture and disincorporation into imaginary collective bodies.” 120 Nugent
and Thurman follow a tack advocated by many contemporary scholars
in attempting to release the burden of representation from actual bodies,
understanding the formation of categories as a creation that could be
modified, rectified, or defied. In their attempts to imagine new epistemo-
logical, ontological, and sensible fields, some of their strategies fell within
the bounds of imperial logic, while others challenged the grounds of that
logic along the geographies of scale that help constitute it. In the follow-
ing chapter, I continue this inquiry into the complexities of subject making
through orientalist discourses.

120 | Chapter Two
 Chapter Three

Orienting Subjectivities

P
“ alesteena,” belly dancing, Salomé, snake charmers and
sheiks—such orientalist signifiers were used to fashion self-
hood and agency among diverse populations of artists and
performers in Jazz Age nightlife. The resulting performances
often betrayed a desire for national belonging through the par-
ticular ingress presented by the emergence of the United States
as a world power, pursued through an implicit (or sometimes
explicit) correspondence between crossing gender, racial, and
sexual boundaries and the imperial license to tour and travel.1
However, not all those who sought to fashion for themselves
claims to imperial selfhood through such crossings did so uni-
formly, or easily. In the examples that follow, people attempting
to reach longed-­for forms of selfhood as archivists, experts, or
sexual progressives through contacts and encounter with Arab
forms faced distinct barriers and possibilities because of im-
perial logic.
This is the first of two chapters that reimagine the timeline for
U.S. contact with the Arab world through the heuristic device of
comparative empire studies. Most scholarship begins to tracks
U.S. involvement in West Asia and North Africa following World
War II, when—in the aftermath of Europe’s devastation—the
United States established a more powerful geopolitical influence in the re-
gion. Such a timeline follows the work of Edward Said, who remarked in
1978: “Since World War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab-­
Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a figure in American popular
culture, even as in the academic world, in the policy planner’s world, and in
the world of business very serious attention is being paid the Arab.”2 This
chapter, however, observes that orientalist performances of West Asian
and Arab signs and symbols were plentiful in the Jazz Age. Furthermore,
these performances drew on the prevalent logic of empire, borrowing racial
and sexual cues from European imperial lexicons such as the British writer
E. M. Hull’s novel The Sheik, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, Richard Burton’s trans-
lation of The Arabian Nights, and the operas of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard
Strauss. Adapted from British and French cultural works, these orientalist
performances, made possible by multiple empires, generated much more
than derivative stereotypes of Arabs (though these too were in evidence).
Rather, the performances created new means for fashioning a U.S. imperial
selfhood through economies of distance and intimacy with Arab bodies
and their signs. In this regard, I draw on Melani McAlister’s relocation of
“epic encounters” between West Asia and the United States to an earlier era,
in order to argue that an imperial archive was marshaled across national
lines to manifest dreams of Enlightenment selfhood for—in this chapter—
those not acknowledged as full, self-­possessed subjects in domestic orders
of race and gender.3
Many postcolonial scholars have noted, and earlier chapters of this
book show, that by the early twentieth century orientalisms of one sort
or another had become a means for claiming and creating Western sub-
jecthood.4 In Jazz Age New York, the answers to questions of cultural pro-
duction raised by imperial logic thus hinged on spatializing strategies for
rendering such claims and creations. To some degree, the outcome appears
obvious. Orientalist performances (and their policing) relied on cultural
forms and practices generated by the uneven and violent relations of power
and knowledge production undergirding empire and imperial imaginaries.
In particular, siting desire and sexuality in orientalist performances often
provided a way for Western subjects to orient themselves.5 That is, in as-
signing both desire and danger to the other, the West might come to know
itself, though in the absence of Asia and Asians, the story of power remains
indeterminate; part of the fantasy wrought through orientalisms is the be-

122 | Chapter Three
lief in Western dominance. This knowledge formation is twofold. It marked
a desire for self-­possession, enacted through an achievement of agency de-
pendent on imperial logic and the spatialization of race; it also marked a
desire for the other, to collect and to catalogue its signs and forms and thus
to assert mastery in the name of preservation or guardianship. Timothy
Mitchell argues that the Western imaginary of the Orient fathoms the other
as a series of commodified gestures, whether appearing in museums, fash-
ions, educational literature, or, in this instance, the cabaret: “Everything
seemed to be set up before one as though it were a model or picture or
something. Everything was arranged before an observing subject into a sys-
tem of signification, declaring itself to be a mere object, a mere ‘signifier’
of something further.” 6 In Jazz Age New York, that “something further”
was manifold, as men and women sought to become recognizably modern
subjects within the U.S. racial and gender order through well-­trod routes
of imperial travel and touring, archiving and appropriation—­sometimes
of versions of the others’ movements or energies. These replacements both
assumed a geographical and cultural distance between nations and na-
tional bodies and sought to collapse that distance through empire’s often
forceful “intimacies of four continents” in order to claim power and per-
sonhood at home in the imperial city.7 Although of course orientalisms
are brought to bear on Asian bodies, this chapter continues the previous
chapter’s focus on how orientalism, as a mobile sign system, also made
meaning for non-Asian bodies. For instance, white women in the imperial
city center might perform Salomé dances, mastering Arab dance forms to
secure their places as collectors and archivists of an orientalist repertoire.
But these white women’s success in claiming subjecthood through imperial
practices of knowledge could be temporary, especially in performances of
these dance forms in the speakeasy, where male clients might be invited to
imagine themselves as collectors as well. When the dancers performed the
movements of an Arab other, they might find themselves “arranged before
an observing subject,” turned into “mere objects,” an orientalist “‘signifier’
of something further.”
Part of the work of this chapter is to understand how these strategies
operated in Jazz Age New York, but I will theorize not just about the prob-
lems inherent in availing oneself of orientalisms to fashion an imperial or
cosmopolitan subjecthood, but also about the limits of such operations
contained within subjecthood’s own logic. As this chapter’s themes inti-

Orienting Subjectivities | 123
mate, the performance of orientalisms does not necessarily secure full
subjecthood, even if the performance relies on the imbalance of power
supposed by imperial structures of knowledge. Therefore, part of this re-
thinking of peripatetic orientalisms relies on the reference to space in their
usages. That is, in addition to economies of distance and intimacy, in what
other frames might we consider these movements? If, as Yutian Wong ar-
gues, “In the case of Orientalized bodily practices, Asian bodies are not
necessary for their continued existence,” then how do we conceptualize
what orientalism means as it travels across national and racial borders?8
Here I turn to Sara Ahmed and her conceptualization of “orientation,” a
complication of orientalism as directional, national, and sexually prox-
imate. In Queer Phenomenology, she productively brings the imperial quali-
ties of orientalism together with the intimate practices of the body: “We
could even say that Orientalism involves a form of ‘world facing’; that is, a
way of gathering things around so they ‘face’ a certain direction. By think-
ing of orientalism as a form of world facing, I want to suggest that orien-
talism also involves phenomenal space: it is a matter of how bodies inhabit
spaces through shared orientations.” 9 Ahmed’s use of orientation, then,
is useful for thinking through the semiotic and geographically relational
aspects of staging orientalist performances, and how these performances
both strive for sexual subjectivity and circumscribe agency through their
wielding of imperial logic.
In this chapter’s discussion of performances of Salomé and sheiks, I
consider how the performers position themselves vis-­à-­vis these orienta-
tions, how each might embody a politics of space as particularized subjects
through their “world facing,” toward and away from the Orient. Although
performances and artistic renderings of the Orient certainly call to mind
debates about cultural appropriation, this chapter remarks on such ap-
propriation to understand these performances and renderings as gener-
ating heterogeneous claims to signification and selfhood. In this chapter,
I build on Ahmed’s notion of “orientation”—a multivalent concept that
describes ideological orientation toward the East; physical orientations,
both embodied and geographical; and sexual orientation—to understand
the creation of imperial, but not necessarily abstract or ideal, subjectivities
through orientalist narratives and tropes. Holding all these relationships in
tension helps us understand the myriad usages of orientalisms. It further
suggests that different bodies might have qualitatively different relation-

124 | Chapter Three
ships both to the signs and symbols of the Orient, here denoting West Asia,
and to space and power in the United States. That is, I am interested in the
possibilities of and limitations to fashioning imperial subjecthood through
these enactments, and the performative effects of their orientations.
This chapter considers the uses of these peripatetic orientalisms for re-
configuring sexual subjecthood in four parts, each examining a variety of
musical and dancing performances, as well as artistic and novelistic ren-
derings. The first considers orientalist performances by and about West-
ern white women, whose collecting and staging of orientalist dance forms
often fell into a subjectivity gap between imperial selfhood and embodied
interpretation. The useful but also troubling intimacies between imperial
logic and African American performance is the concern of the second part.
Black women were marked in advance of the orientalist performance as
racial others, and this marking determined their ability to access narratives
of imperial selfhood through such performances. Black dancers had to ac-
count for their racial bodies’ narration of their performances; some per-
formances then were described through the collapsing of distances—where
Africa could be West Asia, and Arab women could be black women—while
others were seen as suggesting the performer’s similarity to women in-
habiting other parts of the world’s empires. The chapter’s third part returns
to Richard Bruce Nugent, to consider queer mobilizations of Arab signs
and symbols in paintings and performance, particularly for feminine or
ambiguous gender possibilities. The usages of the term sheik as a descrip-
tion of aberrant characters, both to condemn and to celebrate them, is the
concern of the fourth and final part. Though the figure of the sheik was
characterized by sexual excessiveness and moral shortcomings, conjuring
up this figure in Jazz Age New York nonetheless implicated diverse sexuali-
ties and racial identifications. This chapter thus follows the argument that
“orientations” toward the Orient produced a range of gendered, sexual, and
racial subjectivities in the United States. In this way, the Orient adhered to
bodies in performance—a sort of “kinetic energy, being in time,” 10 in the
act—and to some more than others.

Archive and Repertoire

White women performers of orientalist dance forms found themselves in a

tenuous position between the archive and the repertoire, and it is in this gap
that claims to imperial subjectivity both were formed and failed. According

Orienting Subjectivities | 125
to Diana Taylor’s brilliant study, the archive contains “supposedly endur-
ing materials” that resist change and “sustain power.” 11 The repertoire, in
contrast, consists of embodied practices and “enacts embodied memory.”12
Taylor explains that “the repertoire requires presence: people participate
in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being
a part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in
the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The
repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.” 13 Tay-
lor’s argument in The Archive and the Repertoire shows that although these
two forms of creating and transmitting knowledge overlap, the archive is
aligned with the West’s push to know and thereby to dominate new spaces
and peoples, while the repertoire is associated with the non-­West—those
spaces and peoples imagined to be the objects of imperious ways of see-
ing rather than the purveyors of it. Indeed, in writing about the archive,
Jacques Derrida notes that it connects command and law, the “jussive” and
“nomological principle.” 14 In other words, the archival act bespeaks and
naturalizes authority over something through laws of naming and classi-
fication. This power over something, however, does not always prevail be-
cause the performers’ tenuous subjectivity is built through too intimate a
connection to the Orient and to the objects being collected, which, in per-
formance, include their own bodies. In these instances, it is not always pos-
sible either to distinguish between what is being named and classified and
who is doing the naming and classification, or to speak to the complicated
meanings created through the mobilization of the Orient as a polyvalent
trope in a mutable archive.
In this first section of the chapter, I examine white women’s perfor-
mances of an Orient most closely associated with Islamic and Arab move-
ments and positions, including a song about American women travelers
in Palestine, “The Dance of the Seven Veils,” and other performances of
Salomé. In these performances, drawn from intimacies between empires
(those of Britain, France, and the United States), white women sought
to narrate themselves as authorities over Arab cultural forms, collecting
dances and songs to demonstrate their imperial selfhood through exper-
tise and self-­possessed sexuality. As Ahmed notes, “the Orient provides the
object, as well as the instrument, that allows the Occident to take shape,
to become a subject, as that which ‘we’ are around. . . . The reachabil-
ity of the other, whether the Orient or other others does not mean that

126 | Chapter Three
they become ‘like me/us.’ Rather they are brought closer to home, but the
action of ‘bringing’ is what sustains the difference: the subject, who is ori-
entated toward the object, is the one who apparently does the work, whose
agency is ‘behind’ the action.” 15 For these performing women, “bringing”
the Orient home was an imperial activity—collecting its objects, mastering
its forms, producing and ordering new knowledge about the Orient—and
undertaking it would grant them imperial subjecthood. I argue, however,
that for them the distinction between imperial subject and imperial object
often became blurred. Because they also embodied these oriental forms in
movement, slippages occurred between the collection of performances, or
the archiving, and the actual performances, or the repertoire. Thus, these
white women were often read doubly through imperial logic—as authori-
ties from the West, but also as women from the Orient. Their performances
sometimes racialized them as orientalist objects and activated in audience
members and vice investigators a disciplinary or dominating orientation.
I consider first Frank Crumit’s rendition of “Palesteena,” a Tin Pan Alley
ditty recorded in 1920 that introduces the difference that orientalism makes
in music.16 This musical exoticism, achieved through tones and chords,
operated as an effect through which a song’s performers sometimes iden-
tified with and sometimes opposed themselves to the Orient. Power and
selfhood were at stake in either formulation. “Palesteena” tells the story
of a white woman traveler who performed in the Orient as a musician, a
story similar to those told in other songs about dancers such as “Becky
from Babylon” and “Rebecca (Came Back from Mecca).” 17 “Palesteena”
describes a complex relationship between the imagined Occident and the
imagined Orient. Meant to poke fun at Western women who traveled to
the Orient and adopted its cultural peculiarities, or who took up orien-
tal performances without leaving the United States and thereby “found”
themselves, the song’s narrative depends on multiple and simultaneous
registers of imperial logic. The song follows Lena, a girl from the Bronx,
who travels to “Palesteena” and finds success as a concertina musician. Her
terrible performances—“She awfully played one song / She played it all
day long / Sometimes she played it wrong”—nonetheless thrilled the igno-
rant natives. A civilizational divide clearly produces a primitive, backward
Arab population and, even through one of its worst representatives, an
urbane and modern United States. Though this is a familiar story in some
respects, its details require further investigation. This story of travel con-

Orienting Subjectivities | 127
jures up multiple gendered, racial, and sexual identifications, all of which
are simultaneously activated and limited by way of the encounters and ex-
changes within the story. Forgoing an explication of the distinction be-
tween real and imagined contacts, I want to understand the consequence
of contact through its friction—described by Anna Tsing as “the awkward,
unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across differ-
ence,” a moment of fettered, though unpredictable, possibility.18 That is, I
want to understand the generative gap created between Lena’s collecting of
Arab culture and her performance of it.
It is important to consider the specific musical forms that portray this
contact, both to find clues as to how the ciphers of contact are created
and to understand how racial and national signs and symbols are mobile
and translational, detachable from the objects they purport to describe and
capable of assigning new meaning to bodies that usually possessed other
national or racial identifications. In Crumit’s “Palesteena,” the juxtaposi-
tion of Western and orientalist musical modes throughout the song assert
that the aesthetic judgments of the former are superior to those of the latter,
reinforcing the deficiencies in the musical abilities of the Palestinians (as
described by the lyrics). The song musically illustrates the frictions of con-
tact. Mixing Tin Pan Alley progressions and orientalized countermelodies
and themes, it creates a sense of Western dominance—but that dominance
is incomplete. In other words, the music itself is an allegory for the clash of
contact and the changes that result. Unlike the major pentatonic scales that
were meant to recall East Asia, major scales augmented with a flatted third
suggested West Asia and North Africa. This is true in “Palesteena”: though
the chordal progression of the song followed standard American pop con-
ventions—1–4–5 with an occasional relative minor third—the major scale
would sometimes be augmented with a flatted third. The extra note existed
outside of the standard scale, an example of how racialized codes took the
form of excess within the logic of the music. It is also important to note
that the flatted third was a note that mimicked a minor scale; in this sense,
the orientalized measures had a weaker tone than the themes played in a
strictly major scale. This difference produced a recognizable scale that sig-
naled West Asia, the same scale that might be recognizable in the familiar
cinematic mise-­en-­scène in which a charmer coaxes a snake out of a basket
with a simple recorder, a tune popularly known as the “Swamee Song.” As
one might expect, and as juxtaposed against this exoticized scale, the mo-

128 | Chapter Three
ments used for the major scale during “Palesteena” are moments in which
the lyrics present an imperial narration of the Orient. Through this melding
of musical themes, their interdependence troubling a clear distinction be-
tween scales, we might first observe that the imagined Orient is a Western
production. We might also note, however, that this musical composition
subsequently informs the uneasy achievement of selfhood by Westerners
like Lena. On the one hand, Lena may imagine herself as achieving an im-
perial agency through her travels. Furthermore, the natives of “Palesteena”
appreciate her musicianship as masterful. On the other hand, Lena’s per-
formances are awful according to the higher, more sophisticated standards
of home (and to the narrator). This negotiation, then, spells out the power
and the limit of Lena’s search for imperial subjectivity through oriental-
ist performance. Even as the song muddles boundaries, and anxiously so,
it resolutely marks West Asia as always inferior to the United States, even
though—or even because—it might provide the potential for white West-
ern women’s mastery or achievement of selfhood.
Lena from “Palesteena” traveled abroad to revel in the sights and sounds
of an exotic locale, but she need not have wandered so far from home.
Displaced and replaced, oriental tropes could be mapped onto other geo-
graphic locations closer to the imperial metropolis, as well as onto its
racially diverse dwellers. I consider next orientalist performances of so-­
called Salomé dances by white—and, in subsequent sections of this chapter,
black—women and men in Manhattan nightclubs. Popularized following
the controversial ban of Richard Strauss’s Salomé at the Metropolitan Opera
in 1907, Salomé dances were titillating exercises.19 Here, deviant sexuality,
a pathology associated with the Orient, could be flaunted for the purpose
of perverse entertainment. In this way, Salomé dances became staples of
burlesque theatre and cabaret floorshows. Though contemporaneous de-
scriptions of these dances are unfortunately vague, Salomé dances seemed
to involve sinuous movements either identical or very close to what were
elsewhere called Hawaiian dances and the hoochy coochy, usually varia-
tions on belly dancing and the shimmy.20 The key difference was not move-
ment but costuming; Salomé outfits referenced fantastical Arab themes,
made popular through the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”21 These dances and
connections between white women’s performance, African American ex-
pressive culture, and the Orient were made in cabarets and dance halls, as
well as more formal settings for performance such as the Ziegfeld Follies.22

Orienting Subjectivities | 129
The hoochy coochy was popular in the Jazz Age at least partly because the
dance had been performed in the United States for so long. For example, at
the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago women attracted viewers while
belly dancing outside the Egyptian, Persian, and Algerian exhibits, raising
eyebrows and objections just audible over the roar of crowds.23
Because the Salomé dance was a sensual one, many scholars argue that
white women achieved a sense of affirmative sexuality and feminine agency
through its performance. The dance, according to these scholars, became
a mode of both personal exploration and social rebellion against the gen-
dered restrictions on both sexuality and women in American (and Euro-
pean) society.24 Indeed, Gaylyn Studlar argues that dance in and of itself
“was associated in the early twentieth century . . . with feminine desire to
escape bourgeois domesticity’s constraints and to create other, transforma-
tive identities that were convergent with those qualities of the New Woman
that disturbed social conservatives. Thus, dance played on the imaginary
Orient’s symbolic value to Westerners as a place where personal identity
is liminal, where identities are lost, transmuted, recovered.”25 Such a bold
claim to sexual selfhood through dancing Salomé, however, was secured
through a less bold claim to imperial personhood, which was dependent
on the mastery and domestication of otherness. This is an orientalism that
must make actual Asian and Arab bodies disappear, with the traces left be-
hind becoming immobile objects set within the Orient and brought over-
seas in the dances and other performances that allow non-Asian women
to first displace—an imperial prerogative—and then inhabit their alterity.
Racial, class, and national differences all become commodities through
which Western consumers, either the female performers or their usually
male audiences, might differentiate themselves as rebels, cosmopolitans,
outsiders, or individuals. Using travel as a means of escaping the circum-
scription of their lives, the performers nonetheless reinforced through per-
forming their superiority and freedom in being able to pick and choose
orientalist accouterment—or, more concisely, reiterate their imperial be-
longing—as evidence of an adventurous, mobile spirit. Thus, white women
performers’ claims of sexual subjectivity depended on their distance from
actual Arab women, a position from which they could perform Arab dances
via expertise and mastery rather than natural ability. The logic of consump-
tion and imperial distancing that guided the performances, however, also
set their limits.

130 | Chapter Three
 In the same historical discourses that describe these salacious staples
of New York nightlife, civilizing the Orient could easily become corrupt-
ing of the Occident in general, and the female performers in particular. As
nightclubs and other performance spaces mobilized orientalist signifiers,
in some cases as a challenge to social and sexual respectability, disciplin-
ing institutions took notice. These spaces, like many others discussed in
previous chapters, were surveilled by the police, civic-­minded vice organi-
zations, city legislators, and other instruments of the law enforcement sys-
tem. The imperial logic that located these spaces for negotiating multiple
identifications—as Western travelers, like Salomé—also became evidence
that these spaces required supervision. Certainly, the experience of enter-
ing the orientalized nightclub deliberately mimicked an imagined experi-
ence of entering a harem, offering the male patron as traveler the symbolic
privilege of imperial penetration. Although the sign of the harem signaled
release and freedom for some female dancers, and their allure and sexual
availability for male patrons, for the vice investigator it demanded sur-
veillance and censure. About such multiple positionings, or orientations,
Ella Shohat usefully observes: “The intersection of colonial and gender
discourses involves a shifting, contradictory subject positioning, whereby
Western women can simultaneously constitute ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’
identity and alterity. A Western woman in these narratives exists in a re-
lation of subordination to Western man and in a relation of domination
toward ‘non-­Western’ men and women. The textual relationality homolo-
gizes the historical positioning of colonial women who have played, albeit
with a difference, an oppressive role toward colonized people (both men
and women), at times actively perpetuating the legacy of Empire.”26 The
police surveillance provides a clue that the bounds of sexuality were being
stretched. At the same time, though, the modes of empire circumscribed
how much those bounds could be altered. Through policing and imperial
logic, then, women’s sexuality was demarcated and delimited, emerging
unevenly through bodies in performance.
One 1919 performance reported by a Committee of Fourteen investiga-
tor reiterated that proximity to the perverse Orient—even if just in spirit,
not in body—might trigger contamination. According to this report, one
number at the Coconut Grove, a Pacific island–themed rooftop club off the
south end of Central Park West, featured a bevy of exotic beauties dressed
as, among others, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Carmen, and Salomé, women

Orienting Subjectivities | 131
the investigator describes as “The Vampires.” 27 Here, the audience was
treated not only to a number of exotic, and no doubt titillating, West Asian
and North African costumes, but also to a cast of characters that immedi-
ately calls to mind the many films of Theda Bara—the original silent screen
vamp, around whom swirled rumors of mysterious, Arab origins28—as well
as some of the most famous women of opera. Indeed, all these characters
had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in the last decade, where
they also vamped their ways across the stage, enticing men with abandon
and meeting their inevitable deaths.29 Just as wayward women were pun-
ished in opera’s conventions, so were women performing in nightclubs.30
Though white women performers strove to break the bounds of gendered
performance by reclaiming their sexual agency on stage, such possibili-
ties as the imperial circuits afforded also involved dangers—a proximity
to racialization, the creation of a kind of intimacy across imagined bodies
and continents.
These women, like archivists, may have collected orientalist signs and
symbols and produced from them new performances of imperial femi-
ninity, but in doing so, they also drew the attention of authorities. These
epic encounters writ small on the stage engendered new vocabularies of
surveillance through these women’s performances of their repertoires.
That is, the remapping of imperial tropes through the dancers’ defiance
of sexual propriety was not lost on audience members or vice investiga-
tors. Those tropes that rendered Salomé performances sexually liberating
also informed circuits of sexual surveillance. Consider this vice report, in
which the entrance of scantily clad performers incited a raucous reaction
among the nightclub’s patrons: “old men rapped on the tables with their
little hammers given by the management, mouths hung open and tongues
out in amusement, apparently at the wonderful beauties.”31 Certainly we
might note that the women performing defied sexual conventions; but im-
perial discourse shaped this defiance. If their performances of sexual trans-
gression were made possible by the Western expansion of rule into the Ori-
ent and relied on an imperial geography that designated some bodies and
spaces as available for conquest, it should not be surprising that conquest
also informed the performances’ reception.
In this repurposing of imperial registers of both unbreachable dis-
tance and volatile contact tinged with desire, cabaret and nightclub per-
formances disrupted boundaries between performers and patrons, mov-

132 | Chapter Three
ing along geographies of scale to draw analogies between veil-­clad white
women and uncivilized lands and primitive peoples. These spatial recon-
figurations, bringing the oriental other into the West’s sphere of influence,
created a frisson of forbidden intimacy between performers and the audi-
ence. Floorshows would often occur in an open area without a stage, be-
tween tables.32 Patrons were not required to remain in their seats during the
entertainment; they might be standing at the bar or dancing themselves.
Indeed, patrons often interacted directly with the performers, both during
and after the performances. A vice investigator’s report from 1919 testifies
to this interaction and its sexual nature:

Then May Leslie came out as Salome, with a few beads on, 99–100%
naked, and did a “vamp” wiggle “hoochey koochey” which elicited this
from Ed Wynn, “May, for God’s sake, don’t do that” at the same time
endeavoring hard to control himself from seizing her. It was a great
sex appeal for the sexually impotent old birds present. They applauded
noisily. She continued to “hootch” whereupon Ed says, “May, for God’s
sake, be reasonable, be reasonable, don’t do that” (meaning the “entic-
ing” wiggle). Finally, Ed takes off his coat in sheer desperation, unable
to control himself any longer, then eventually has to leave the stage be-
cause no longer controllable. Some rot!

The investigator offered his own reading of Ed Wynn’s comments:

It amounts to as much as this, “If you keep that up, May, I’ll have an
orgasm in my trousers”; or else, “I’ll have to rape you May, if you don’t
stop it.” It was crude stuff and hardly worthy of a place such as this
or any place. It was evidently suggestive—it was everything saving the
___?___ in plain words.33

The perception that these women performers were readily available for
sexual activity may have been heightened because they had adopted and
embodied racializing signifiers of sexual transgression. Indeed, the come-
dian Ed Wynn’s pleas of helpless rapaciousness, typical banter between
the master of ceremonies or comedian and the hoochy coochy floor show,
invited other patrons to identify themselves as imperial conquerors. The
forbidden intimacy of cabaret and nightclub entertainments not only dis-
rupted boundaries between performers and patrons by drawing on the im-
perial logic of conquest and contact, but it also promised further danger off

Orienting Subjectivities | 133
the dance floor. Ahmed’s multiply signifying notion of orientation is useful
in drawing connections between ideologies that mark the Orient, bodies
that mark the Orient, and sexual orientation, but here these multiple refer-
ents do not necessarily work in concert with one another. The ideologies
that mark orientalized bodies as sexual also mark the women performers,
who might share in those ideologies (indeed, the show is entertaining be-
cause of the exoticization of their bodies through costuming and naming)
but are also prey to them. Here becoming sexually objectified is part of the
entertainment. Reformers and vice investigators warned that the sexual
improprieties of the stage show would not stay within the performance;
they warned women away from the stage, and from public spaces in gen-
eral, because the nightlife would not just foster their moral degradation—
one of these rapacious patrons unable to distinguish between performance
and reality might subject women to further, irreparable violation.34
Thus did orientalizing have both selective but also perhaps unintended
consequences. If white women sought and accessed what Said calls an
“ephemeral ‘positional superiority’” through their usage of oriental signi-
fiers—mapping these onto their own bodies and movements to defy sexual
convention and bourgeois respectability—they were not the only ones.35
The same imperial discourses that gave them these alternate images of un-
tamed femininity also produced accompanying narratives of masculine
conquest and penetration, of unruly dangers (men who would not be able
to help themselves) and civilizing imperatives.36 Though the shows con-
tinued to have semilegal status, their allusions to and analogies with the
Orient raised warning flags among dismayed community members and
suspicious vice investigators, for whom the dancers’ performances of even
fake oriental sensuality were as dangerous as the real thing.
As archivists and performers, mastering but also moving through
their repertoires, these women occupied a precarious position. Just as
they sought to exercise an imperial expertise, they were marked as pos-
sibly criminal and sexually aberrant. In their embodiments, however, we
could argue that these white women represented a threat to the construc-
tion of imperial masculinity that presumes a solo command of law, Der-
rida’s nomological principle. Part of this imputed failure, or challenge, be-
gins immediately in the epistemology of the archive itself: the archive of
dances and songs that these women sought to perform. Derrida’s reading of
Freud is instructive here. Commenting on the phallogocentrism of Freud’s

134 | Chapter Three
creation of psychoanalytic archives, Derrida writes: “Well, he perhaps in-
scribes, perhaps (I am indeed saying perhaps), as if he were signing his
name, a discreet but energetic and ineffaceable virility: we the fathers, we
the archons, we the patriarchs, guardians of the archive and of the law. I say
perhaps, because all these questions remain as suspended as the future.”37
Derrida reminds us that the creation of archives and the ordering of knowl-
edge is understood as a masculine preserve. Women performers—dancers,
choreographers, and singers—challenged the naturalization of these cate-
gories of knowledge production even as they narrated their subjectivity
through their wielding of imperial logic. Modes of gender disciplining,
however, also mobilized imperial logic in order to foreshorten the careers
of these would-­be archivists.

Black Salomé

As New Women and New Negroes, informed by social movements that

sought to claim full personhood for them, black women in the United
States and Europe also adapted orientalist performances of imperial femi-
ninity at the beginning of the twentieth century. In James VanDerZee’s
photograph Dancer, Harlem (fig. 3.1), for instance, a young black woman
poses in the customary elements of orientalist costume. Her loose-­fitting
harem pants and elaborate beaded belt are made for the lithe movements
of belly dancing. The translucent material draped over her arms evokes
veils that simultaneously hide and reveal what lies beneath. But though
these performances drew on a vocabulary of orientalist signifiers similar to
that used by white performers, and attracted like forms of sexual surveil-
lance, these were nonetheless dances with a difference. For black women,
the peripatetic Orient rendered their bodies through racial otherness and
spatial distancing in immediate and intimate ways.
The black woman performing Salomé had a more precarious claim to
empire than a white performer. Although black women too invoked an
imperial positional authority in their performances, the civilizational dis-
tance between the metropole and the empire appeared much more in-
discreet. That is, their black bodies were sometimes read, and sometimes
presented, as already too intimate with those spaces of primitiveness and
darkness, as already enclosed in the exotic genealogies conjured forth in
these dances. The boundaries that marked the spatial arrangements of em-
pire were blurred at the site of blackness. Black women’s claims to Ameri-

Orienting Subjectivities | 135
Figure 3.1 James VanDerZee, Dancer, Harlem (1925).
© Donna Mussenden VanDerZee.

can imperial personhood were therefore circumscribed, and the women

were denied access to discourses of mastery and expertise and ascribed as
the racial other, always already in advance of their performances. Thus,
although I do not argue that a natural affinity existed between women and
men of color in the United States and women and men in colonial sites, I
do believe that such affiliations, given the transatlantic histories and criss-
crossing routes of empire—or those intimacies across continents, to call
on Lowe once again—were sometimes chosen, sometimes given, and very
often applied for various purposes.38 These affiliations did not guarantee
one set of meanings, but many possible ones. Racialized preconceptions
were only one of many that formed the heteroglossia that situated black
women’s Jazz Age performances.
Already rendered vulnerable through legal and social means (including

136 | Chapter Three
Jim Crow, poverty, and prejudice), black women and their performances
of the Orient could be interpreted through both domestic racism and im-
perial logic. Although working-­class white women endangered their white-
ness through performance, black women’s bodies, already marked through
racialization, became the locus of discourses of empire as they entered the
gap between the archive and the repertoire. That is, black women’s sub-
jectivity, as apprehended through the mastery of an orientalist archive of
performance, could be read a priori as part of that archive itself, as always
already intimate with the forms found there. Thus do disparate readings of
black women’s orientalist performance—on the one hand, enacting affini-
ties between people of color in the United States with the peoples of the
Orient and, on the other hand, naturalizing a harmony with these perfor-
mances because their ancestors may be imagined to have come from those
same regions of Africa and West Asia—rely on this confluence of domestic
racism and imperial logic.
This mode of racialization is marked through a spatial understanding of
the racialized body as existing outside the U.S. nation. Ahmed brings this
reading to bear in describing whiteness as “proximate”: “While ‘the other
side of the world’ is associated with ‘racial otherness,’ racial others become
associated with the ‘other side of the world.’ They come to embody dis-
tance. This embodiment of distance is what makes whiteness ‘proximate,’
as the ‘starting point’ for orientation. Whiteness becomes what is ‘here,’ a
line from which the world unfolds, which also makes what is ‘there’ on ‘the
other side.’ ”39 For these black women, racial otherness already assumes a
distance that is read back on the orientalist performances as a naturalized
spatial logic. That kind of national distance enables exoticism and foreign-
ness to cohere to the bodies of women of color differently than they cohere
to the bodies of white women. These narratives attach themselves to black
women in advance of the performance because these women are assumed
a priori to belong to these discourses of empire.
The stage star Aida Overton Walker was perhaps the most famous black
performer of the twentieth century to dance Salomé both in the United
States and in Europe, and as such she makes an excellent example to use
in exploring the construction and limits of subject making through orien-
talist performance.40 From 1907 to 1914, as a choreographer and performer
of this feminine orientalism, Walker exemplified the confusion over racial
boundaries inherent to such a performance. She strongly identified with

Orienting Subjectivities | 137
West Asia and North Africa, even changing her name from Ada to Aida,
after Verdi’s famous opera character.41 Daphne Brooks characterizes Walker
as “at heart a cultural nationalist,” interested in pan-­Africanism (extended
in the case of Salomé to include Palestine).42 In her brilliant study of early
American black women performers, Brooks imagines Walker’s Salomé per-
formance as having “transformed the subjectless, dancing female body into
a stylized figure who was narrated by the dancer herself.”43 Through the
lens of pan-­Africanism, Walker’s bid for a modern, black feminine sub-
jectivity can be interpreted as mobilizing imperial logic differently. Rather
than creating a narrative of travel that depends on a racial distance between
the performer and the body proper to this dance, Walker’s performances
collapsed (or perhaps skipped) such distance and its accompanying im-
perial spatialization through a specifically racialized identification with the
character of Salomé. Although this kind of identification illuminates the
multiracial makeup of West Asia and North Africa, it does so at the expense
of making Arab women disappear altogether. In a sense, this uneven iden-
tification again depends on an imperial discourse of epistemological and
even ontological dominance, with the erasure of Arab and Asian women
as “subjectless” and the recovery of their geographies done in the name
of black feminine agency in the United States.44 As Jayna Brown argues,
Walker could “remain American” in her performances, “distancing herself,
as a modern dancer, from association as a hyper-­sexualized primitive.”45
As such, Walker introduces us to the complicated mix of subject making
and narratives of race, empire, femininity, and performance.
Although Walker may have identified with Salomé through pan-­
Africanism, her performances also highlighted further axes of intimacy
and distance between constructions of Arab and U.S.-­based black femi-
ninities. Walker performed a particular orientalist fantasy of Arab femi-
ninity, but her blackness (like white women’s whiteness) was not erased as
part of the performance. In fact, her blackness gave her both more credi-
bility as a “legitimate interpreter of native dances” and more reason to ex-
plicitly distinguish herself from this national other, this oriental primitive.46
The slippages between Arab foreign bodies and black domestic bodies,
was guided by what Hazel Carby describes as a social imperative to police
black women’s bodies, which were characterized as “sexually degener-
ate and, therefore, socially dangerous.”47 Thus Walker’s performance was
necessarily vexed: it simultaneously signaled a racial alliance with people

138 | Chapter Three
involved in colonial struggles against empire and a craftswoman’s corre-
spondence with white choreographers and modern dancers. That is, her
pan-­Africanist politics created certain anticolonial modes of alliance, but
her insistence on her own hard-­won expertise over oriental forms brought
her in line with white modern dancers. “Her art,” Brown argues, “was the
result of training experience and talent, not instinct or nature. Her Salome
was part of her larger argument for stage performance as a respectable pro-
fession for artistically inclined ‘intelligent and talented’ black women.”48
As was the case with white dancers like Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham,
for Walker an imperial distancing between the body of the performer and
the bodies of actual Arab women (for whom such dancing might be imag-
ined as a natural inclination) created claims of both expertise and respect-
ability. At the same time, Walker differed from women such as St. Denis
and Graham: her blackness was called on (by herself and others, at differ-
ent times) to reinscribe the authenticity of her racial performance of the
oriental other—another order of imperial intimacy, born of histories of
contact that are also histories of violence, that informed her success but
also demanded an insistence on a distinctly American selfhood.
Though black women dancers such as Walker wielded forms of Ameri-
can exceptionalism, they nonetheless were caught in the mesh of multiple
empires’ intimacies, racisms, and histories of rule. At the juncture of an
always already transnational domestic racism and the imperial logic of the
Orient, black women were marked as strangers in advance of their per-
formances, the distance between the heart of empire and its outposts inti-
mately inscribed on their bodies. “Strangers are not simply those who are
not known in this dwelling,” writes Ahmed, “but those who are, in their
very proximity, already recognised as not belonging, as being out of place.
Such a recognition of those who are out of place allows both the demar-
cation and enforcement of the boundaries of ‘this place’, as where ‘we’
dwell.”49 As this type of stranger, black women in their performances cre-
ated a dialogue within this national story that sometimes changed it, some-
times reiterated it, but always marked their bodies as spaces of negotiation,
discipline, and creativity.

Queer Ciphers

As an apparently elastic signifier, Salomé also informed modernist modes

of queer subjecthood. Salomé (and Arab womanhood in general) as a peri-

Orienting Subjectivities | 139
patetic orientalist signifier, could take on multiple meanings to critique the
construction of race, gender, nationality, and sexuality, particularly where
these identities depend on one another. To illustrate this form of critique,
I turn to three drawings by Nugent. As shown in the previous chapter,
Nugent worked both with and against the grain of imperial logic to find
queer possibilities. Indeed, his creative labors often remapped imperial
logic onto black bodies to secure queer subjecthood. To do this, Nugent
collapsed geographies of scale and space to bring closer empires’ multiple
racial others, in something like a queer intimacy between continents. Al-
though white and black women were often caught in the gap between ar-
chive and repertoire, finding there the limits of self-­creation, Nugent situ-
ates the act of fashioning subjectivity in another breaking point. Imagining
bodies and spaces in new ways, Nugent assumed that these were always
simultaneously predetermined and undetermined. Queer renderings of the
Orient, then, rely on and reiterate the exoticism of the national stranger but
play with the expectations created through imperial logic to critique the
imagined stability of identity categories.
As the previous chapter demonstrated, discourses and performances of
queer sexualities often depended on diverse imperial histories in their for-
mulation. Jazz Age images and performances of Arab signs and symbols
also drew on European histories and maps, following from earlier queer
cultural productions such as Oscar Wilde’s rendering of Salomé and André
Gide’s depictions of sexual tourism in The Immoralist, borrowing across
empires long before more modern forms of queer tourism.50 In Desiring
Arabs, Joseph Massad assembles compelling arguments about queer de-
sires for Arabs, outlining queer sexual ontologies and genealogies of queer
Europeans in the Muslim world. Massad notes that Richard Burton de-
scribed versions of queer sexualities as “repugnant to English readers” in
the essays in his 1885–86 translation of The Arabian Nights. Simultaneously,
the “Stotadic Zone” marked a fascinating queer geography of Arab lands
and the Orient for Burton and the “Orientalist and Anthropologist” to
whom he addressed his essays.51 Beyond these scholars, however, the cir-
culation of Burton’s text also provided queer artists in the United States,
such as Nugent, with a vocabulary for defining, expressing, and coding
their own sexualities. In the Jazz Age, artists like Nugent might tap into the
European genealogy of such renderings in order to establish alternatives to
racial and sexual discourses available in the United States.

140 | Chapter Three
 One of the ways in which these alternatives are brought to the fore is
through understandings and misunderstandings created by notions of veil-
ing. If the use of veils signals exoticism, eroticism, and mysterious femi-
ninity, than the redeployment of the veil to critique the markers of those
categories—female, racialized, foreign bodies—also contrasts the stability
of those categories with their constant construction. The three drawings I
call on here perform this kind of work by playing with Salomé as an ori-
entalist queer signifier. In 1928 Nugent published a drawing in Harlem:
A Forum of Negro Life titled Salome: Negrotesque I (fig. 3.2). Nugent was
inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s 1895 Salomé,
but in this drawing he also seems to produce new discourses for Salomé
based simultaneously in queer European and in African American signi-
ficatory practices. The literary critic Nina Miller makes connections be-
tween multiple modes of signification within the African American con-
text when she argues that “Nugent’s drawing targets both the theatrical
and the feminine ideal in renaissance discourse, but his ‘Negrotesque’ is
more than doubly devastating, for she exploits mercilessly the contradic-
tion at the ambivalent core of racial uplift: that between bourgeois dignity
and public display.”52 I enjoy Miller’s suggestion here of a doubleness of
meaning, and I would like to suggest a third possibility—that, in refer-
encing the figure’s sexual lasciviousness (also understood at times as a lib-
eration from bourgeois propriety and the politics of respectability), the
drawing also produces and works through the queer potential of Salomé.
Like many of Nugent’s drawings, this rendering of Salomé is produced
through mixed-­gender characteristics. In this portrait of the “Dance of the
Seven Veils,” much of the gender ambiguity rests on the veils and their mul-
tiple significations. The veil as an imperial signifier for the Orient conjures
sensual beauty, social liberation, and sexual anticipation. Writing about
Verdi’s Aida, Said notes that in considering the case of colonial Egypt, “the
Orient as a place of promise and power is very important.”53 The promise
in so many of the performances of Salomé is the revelation of the body as
a site of sexual sanctification. The promise, however, can rarely fulfill the
thrill of anticipation—the removal of the veil, and what is uncovered, does
not always match what is promised. That is particularly true, in this in-
stance, where the promise is of sexualized power over the veiled bodies. For
Nugent, the veils conceal exactly the parts of the body that interrupt and
anticipate heterosexual fantasies of the Orient. In the drawing, the lanki-

Orienting Subjectivities | 141
Figure 3.2 Richard Bruce Nugent, Salome: Negrotesque I (1928).
Courtesy of Thomas H. Wirth.

ness of the limbs gives the figure a sense of androgyny, and it is what is or
is not beneath the veils that tell the story of gender, and, by extension, the
remarking of the imagined viewer’s sexuality. For instance, the placement
of the veil draped over the shoulder obliterates one breast entirely (there
is not even a suggestion of the other breast beneath it), and the genitals,
visible through the veils, are also ambiguously rendered as possibly a penis
with a pudendum or testicles. The removal of the veil, in this instance,
would negate the promise of the dance—the promise of a feminized, sexu-
ally available Orient. Rather, the revelation of a gender-­queer body, while
still depending on a desire for an exotic perversity, disrupts the hetero-

142 | Chapter Three
sexual presumption that usually accompanied performances of the “Dance
of the Seven Veils.”
The drawing further portrays Salomé with a mask-­like face (perhaps an
echo of Picasso’s discovery of Africa, or rather the primitivist art move-
ment, shown in his 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). The mask, like the veils
that trail and waft about the body in Nugent’s drawing, may in fact hide
more than it reveals. Although the veils make gender and sexuality mysteri-
ous, and the possible revelation of the body tantalizing, the mask arguably
does other work. Miller suggests the mask signals that “Nugent weighs in
as more [an] international modernist than a citizen of Harlem.”54 Rather
than arguing for one over the other, I am interested in the operations of
such a spatial distancing that would distinguish between the international
and Harlem as distinct spheres, when it would appear that the two were
well acquainted. Nugent and Wallace Thurman were well known as critics
of the often-­restrictive forms that racial uplift took within the New Negro
movement. The literary critic Stephen Knadler points out that, according
to Thurman, “it [was] those most adamant in promoting racial purity who
are secretly subverting the color line at night by acting on their ‘natural im-
pulses.’ ”55 To Nugent and Thurman, in lively disagreement with the New
Negro’s call for a respectable black masculinity to disrupt the color line,
it appeared that black masculinity’s queer potential might disrupt that
racial order as well. This is also hinted at in the title of Nugent’s draw-
ing. The “grotesque” suggested by the title may refer to the Theatre of the
Grotesque, a performance and poetry movement occurring at the time in
Italy. This movement questioned both positivism and naturalism in theatre
and preferred irony and the macabre. It might have led Nugent to rethink
the supposedly natural relationship between race and racial performance.
When removed, then, the mask may reveal a black body, but there is no
reason to assume what that blackness means in advance. Furthermore, the
placement of the mask throws into confusion what lies beneath, even after
its removal and the revelation.
The question of masculinity, literally as a cipher in this drawing, adds
further dimension to the mask in another fashion. Like some of Nugent’s
other work, it includes in its numerous referents queer life in New York
City. The drawing refers to the masked balls that took place in Harlem
and Greenwich Village, which often attracted several hundred participants.
These balls, elaborate affairs in which men and women often wore masks

Orienting Subjectivities | 143
and revealing costumes, were spaces notable for their queer displays.56
One vice reporter noted that the attire was “bizarre and grotesque” and
that “usually the less [there was] of costume the better.” The reporter ob-
served that “Egyptian costumes are very popular with just the diaper effect
and the rest of the body painted.” Such exotic, orientalizing costuming
was hardly the only notable aspect of the balls. The reporter continued:
“One prominent feature of these dances is the number of male perverts
who attend them. These phenomenal men dress up in the most prepos-
sessing female attire simulating women so much as defy detection. They
wear expensive gowns, employ rouge[,] use wigs and in short make up an
appearance which looks for everything like a young lady. These men sel-
dom dance with others save men and with each other. These are the com-
monly known ‘fairies.’ ” 57 The queering effect of dress certainly played a
part in Nugent’s portrayal of Salomé. Dressing in costumes fit for cabaret
and nightclub stages was not unusual at such cosmopolitan events as the
balls, and Nugent’s reference to them broadened the range of masculini-
ties that could be performed in support of the racial justice. Removing
the mask may reveal more intimacies, then, between both continents and
bodies than many other New Negro intellectuals would have hoped for.
In 1930 Nugent offered another performance of Salomé, or an alternative
to it. Although again relying on imperial discourses of the sexual excesses
of the Orient, Nugent here suggests further modes of queer identification
through orientalist signification. Certainly Salome: Negrotesque I suggests
national cross-­dressing, and Marjorie Garber observes that the adoption
of (imagined) Arabic dress affords an opportunity to explore the bounds
of gender, because of the circulation of both androgyny and femininity
produced through such orientalisms.58 But in this next set of paintings,
Nugent moves away from Salomé as an increasingly commonplace signi-
fier for queer identification—for instance, Oscar Wilde was photographed
in drag as Salomé—to explore other forms of queer identification through
orientalist signifiers. Perhaps because Salomé was so embedded within
modernist queer male iconography, even as it explored cross-­gendered
representation, it was necessary for Nugent to move to other Arab char-
acters in order to imagine modes of queer female (and cross-­gendered)
identification. In a series of nudes, Nugent explores the queer potential of
other orientalized feminine figures—in which all the veils are dropped. In
Untitled [Two Women] (fig. 3.3) and Naomi and Ruth (fig. 3.4), Nugent ex-

144 | Chapter Three
Figure 3.3 Richard Bruce Nugent, Untitled [Two Women] (1930).
© 2002 Thomas H. Wirth.

plores the homoeroticism of a biblical tale set in an ancient Palestine. In

Untitled, the physical intimacy of the bodies appear in stark contrast to
the solo nature of Salomé’s “Dance of the Seven Veils.” This painting re-
calls more closely the twining (or twinning) of two bodies on the dance
floor at, for instance, a spot for queer nightlife like Harlem’s Lenox Ave-
nue Club. The painting’s indistinct lines fail to demarcate where one body
begins and the other ends, marking sensuality and the intimacy of broken
boundaries. The women’s almond-­shaped eyes are emphasized by theatri-
cal makeup, while the ambiguous drawing of the genitals again questions
the boundaries of gender and sex, even as the painting’s subtitle repositions

Orienting Subjectivities | 145
Figure 3.4 Richard Bruce Nugent, Naomi and Ruth (1930).
© 2002 Thomas H. Wirth.

the bodies as “Two Women.” Rather than insisting on an affirmative recla-

mation of race and gender (relied on by racial uplift discourse), this paint-
ing references notions of sexual excess so often connected to the Orient in
order to celebrate the transgressive possibility of queer desire without re-
course to bourgeois respectability. Likewise, in Naomi and Ruth, the two
bodies are shown in intimate relation to one another, body contours over-
lapping, hand to breast. Drawing again on the gendered play that exotic,
erotic visions of the Orient offered Western audiences, Nugent offered an-
other sort of cross-­gender identification, a type of queer color line.
Nugent’s artworks call into question the completeness and fastness of

146 | Chapter Three
the orientalist archive as something that can be collected and then called
on. Whereas the performers of the previous sections derived authority
from this archive, Nugent’s drawings suggest objects or forms that would
complicate the archive’s genealogy, that undo its structuralist signification.
Nugent’s works call to mind Derrida’s pronouncement that “anarchiviz-
ing destruction belongs to the process of archivization.” 59 By rendering
the archive itself as an assemblage marked by race, gender, the foreign,
the strange, and the mysteries of the harem and its attendant sexualities,
Nugent introduced a queer chaos into the meaning-­making schema of the
archive, but it is a chaos that does not foreclose the possibility of the ar-
chive itself. Rather, his drawings make visible the contradictory structure of
the archival project, and thus of imperial logic. For Nugent, the potential to
manipulate and transform the meanings and forces found in the imperial
archive can make possible the creation of queer of color subjectivities at
exactly the point where they are to be controlled: a vexed, yet productive,
archival project.

Sex and the Sheik

A similarly complex knot of space and race, gender and sexuality, can be
seen in performances of Jazz Age masculinities through the use of the word
sheik in songs, films, and literature. In this section, I focus on manifesta-
tions of Arab masculinities and the movements of Arab masculinity across
heterogeneous bodies. As with performances of Salomé, the work of mark-
ing people with the name sheik could be mobilized for distinct signifying
purposes, though each relied on the imperial logic of distance and inti-
macy. Reproducing the imperial logic of British orientalism (interestingly,
sometimes British imaginings were of French colonial Algeria, so the layers
of colonialism and imperialism are manifold here) the mania for sheiks
in U.S. popular culture of the early 1920s produced a variety of domestic
masculinities marked through empire and orientalism. Perhaps the most
popular rendering of the term came with the 1921 release of Rudolph Valen-
tino’s famous film The Sheik, based on the novel of the same name by the
British writer E. M. Hull.60 Numerous lyricists and composers responded
to the film’s tremendous appeal with songs such as “Burning Sands: An
Answer to ‘The Sheik’” (1922) and perhaps the most popular and endur-
ing Tin Pan Alley “sheik” song of the period, “The Sheik of Araby” (1921).61
The term was also used in newspaper reporting (as discussed in chapter 1)

Orienting Subjectivities | 147
and novels such as Carl Van Vechten’s popular and controversial novel
Nigger Heaven.62 The kinds of masculinities represented through images
and narratives of sheiks, like those of the femininities connected to Salomé,
worked across diverse bodies and for various purposes. Once again, the
meanings ascribed to orientalisms resisted stasis both in terms of referents,
signifiers, and implications.
Although these references to sheiks were based on an imperial logic of
racialized gender and sexual difference, in popular usage sheik produced
heterogeneous masculinities in its interaction with domestic discourses of
race and gender. Sheik masculinities were infused with a strange desirability,
but such allure carried positive and negative significations contingent on a
racial order. For instance, white men reorienting themselves toward imag-
ined Arabians might simultaneously claim and conquer the oriental other’s
erotic powers.63 For them, to be named a sheik did not necessarily imply
the forfeiture of imperial personhood, though the name could, at times,
be used to censure aberrational sexual practices like queerness. For men
of color (and masculine women), however, sheik pejoratively modified, or
reoriented, masculinities perceived to be in need of disciplining because
of racialization. Though the name might also impart erotic power to these
bodies of color, such doubled racialization meant that the imprint of Arab
masculinities would cohere distinctly from black masculinities. Orienta-
tions toward the Arab other thus circumscribed racialized masculinities;
representations that named men of color sheik did so through the lens of
distance, making them once again national strangers. Finally, like orien-
talist femininities, orientalist masculinities facilitated queer identification.
In all these instances, orientations toward the Arab other are fraught with
affiliation and subjugation, desire and domination. Furthermore, the dis-
tinctions redrawn through naming people sheiks helped reinforce the tre-
mendous distance between empire’s subjects, at home.
Popular songs often presented Arab men as sexually voracious and espe-
cially coveting white women. The men’s appetites could be figured both as
highly attractive, and as sexually overaggressive. Following elements of The
Sheik’s plot, the Tin Pan Alley ditties “The Sheik of Araby” and “Burning
Sands: An Answer to ‘The Sheik’” tell of a fantastic seduction of a white
woman by a mysterious Arab man. Both songs tell the story of a dash-
ing Arabian who kidnaps and seduces a white woman against the allur-
ing backdrop of the desert, palm trees, and the open sky. The cover of the

148 | Chapter Three
sheet music for “The Sheik of Araby” directly reflects the film’s influence,
showing a racially ambiguous “Arab” man scowling over a supine blonde,
who gazes adoringly at him. The combination of the lyrics and music con-
jure an aura of strangeness that here played out a peculiar form of sexual
seduction, wherein the sheik captures his bride by singing to her and in-
stilling in her both fear and longing. Presumably, as in The Sheik and E. M.
Hull’s novel, the woman is a stranger to the desert lands over which the
sheik rules, but as his consort, she will join him in governing it. In his ren-
dition of the song, the Harlem pianist Fats Waller intones in the chorus:
“You’ll rule this land with me, ’cause I’m the shook, the shake, the Sheik
of Ar-­a-­by.”64 Although “Burning Sands” is written as a feminine fantasy
(though with queer potential)—“Across the burning sands, there waits my
Arab man / Beyond the coral strands, I’ll share his caravan”—“The Sheik
of Araby” is written from a first-­person perspective, in which the singer
adopts the voice of the sheik himself. The song thus proffers to the non-­
Arab man a fantasy of an uncivilized Orient, where he might exercise un-
restrained power as a conqueror of exotic lands and an irresistible ruler of
all women. Similarly in Andy Razaf ’s lyrics for “He Wasn’t Born in Araby,
but He’s a Sheikin’ Fool,” the song’s main character, “Sam of Birmingham,”
is described as being a sheik so sexually attractive that he has “more work
than he can do,” and the song explains that though “he don’t know what a
harem is, . . . every lover [says] he knows his biz.”65 Here, the sheik is re-
imagined in the U.S. context, with the South taking the place of the exotic.
Such double entendres as “he never rode a camel, but he sure can ride a
mule” place this hypersexualized sheik within a firm geographic and racial
imaginary particular to the United States and its recent history of black
migration from South to North. The sheik, then, remains a stranger come
to town, and one with magnetic sexual power. Black and white men may
have employed similar strategies for producing their subjectivity through
this imperial logic, but their outcomes varied because of domestic histories
of racialization. Indeed, references to the film strengthen just such a fan-
tasy of imperial conquest. Near the end of the film, the sheik is revealed to
be European by birth, an origin story that functions not only as a soothing
disclosure of his essential civilizational being (through whiteness) but also
as the natural justification for his rightful place as conqueror. The songs’
themes thus bring the conquest of territory together with sexual conquest
as the core of imperial governance.66

Orienting Subjectivities | 149
 If imperial thinking produced the Orient as both morally aberrant and
erotically alluring, it also informed the uses of sheik as a mobile signifier
for sexual pathology in the United States and in contexts of racialization.
It is for this reason that the term sheik was often attached to men known
for their womanizing. When used to describe desirable white men such as
Valentino, the name became a declaration of his virility, the bare traces of
the term’s racialization only occasionally spilling over into public displays
of sexual excess. Attached to the bodies of black men, however, the name
could tap into and reinforce existing U.S. discourses about race and aber-
rant masculinity through comparisons with pathologies ascribed to em-
pire’s racial degenerates. In the prologue of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven,
for example, Anatole Longfellow, a regular participant in Harlem’s nightlife
who is also known as the Scarlet Creeper, is referred to as a sheik. Marked
as a narcissistic dandy through his elaborate dress, the Creeper also falls
outside the bounds of bourgeois respectability. “Was there another sheik
in Harlem who possessed one-­tenth his attraction for the female sex? Was
there another of whose muscles the brick-­pressers, ordinarily quite free
with their audible, unflattering comments about passers-­by, were more
afraid?” the Creeper muses.67 These rhetorical questions point to both
his threatening virility and his awesome manliness, channeled through
his proud and supposedly perverse claim to the orientalist signifier. But
the Creeper appears in the prologue of the book because of a suggestion
made by the Harlem Renaissance novelist and physician Rudolph Fisher to
Van Vechten, a white man: Fisher told the author that his original opening
painted too idyllic a view of Harlem, that it was “too pro-­Negro.”68 As a
consequence, Van Vechten changed the novel’s beginning to feature more
prominently his black villain, the Creeper, who is demonstrably abhorrent
and aberrant, in part through his extravagant modes of dress and oriental-
ist self-­naming.
Thus established in the opening scenes as a no-­good Lothario, the
Creeper operates as a foil to the middle-­class aspirations of his opposite,
the writer Byron Kason. Interestingly, Kason is also referred to as a sheik by
his romantic interest, Mary Love, but the term has a different meaning in
his case. For the Creeper, sheik points to excess and aberration; for Byron,
it initially signifies his attractiveness, though by the end of the novel he
is also criminalized. The shared name sets these characters up as foils for
one another, as two examples of doomed African American masculinity.

150 | Chapter Three
At the end of the novel, both are involved in a nightclub gunfight that cul-
minates with Byron being arrested for shooting a man who, unbeknown
to the police, had already been shot by the Creeper—who escapes into the
night. The Creeper is both more terrible and more successful than Byron.
Although his aberrant masculinity is not to be celebrated within the novel’s
arc, his version of sheikhood is more threatening, and more trenchant,
than Byron’s. As illustrated so well in the final scene of a life-­and-­death
struggle in a Harlem nightclub, the multiple meanings of the name point
to tense negotiations over the ways in which African American sexuality
and masculinity were being produced, controlled, and fetishized through
discourses activated by their particular intimacies with empire.
Like Salomé, the naming of sheiks might be used to signal queer iden-
tities and sexual and sexed practices, particularly through the use of dress.
Knadler connects the figure of the “sweetback” with that of the “sheik
dandy,” arguing that “constitutive of the sheik’s performance in 1920s
Harlem was already an inner division, one that manifested itself in both
a gay permissiveness and virulent homophobia.”69 Like other attempts at
creating modern subjecthood through imperial logic, these performances
were vexed, and their outcomes mixed. The imperial logic that guides the
multiple formulations of sheik also helps forge the indeterminacy of the
Creeper’s dandified dress. As dandies, men sporting carefully chosen out-
fits could drift into a manner of “‘feminine’ social performance,” existing
“in the space between masculine and feminine, homosexual and hetero-
sexual, seeming and being.”70 The liminality of this figure also offers a com-
mentary on the “politics and aesthetics of racialization and identity for-
mation.”71 The orientalist aesthetic performance or narrative of being a
sheik pointed to subject formations that were filled with multiple arrange-
ments of identification. Loosening the predetermined nature of oriental-
ist performance—those readings that imagine the relationship between
the Occident and the Orient as stable and hegemonic, and the appropria-
tive performance of the Orient as tied to specific bodies, meanings, and
outcomes—opens the range of possibilities, even those queer ones, to the
staging of orientalist discourses.
In this figuration of the sheik dandy, the play between femininity, as
marked through race and nation, and masculinity, also as marked through
race and nation, provides an example of when and where the inhabitants
of the modern city might enter into an imperial discourse to fashion new

Orienting Subjectivities | 151
possibilities for domestic queer identification. As Knadler shows, Thur-
man’s, Nugent’s, and even Wilde’s performances were not the only queer or
gender-­queer performances to borrow the vestimentary vocabulary of the
Orient to explore the boundaries of racialized genders. These performances
popped up around the city at balls and nightclub shows and on city streets.
Another example can be found in Julian Costello’s snake dance in drag, as
part of a performance suggestively called “The Valley of the Nile,” reported
in the pages of Variety. The article mentions that Costello appeared “very
feminine” in his costuming, but that his arms were “quite muscular,”72 dis-
turbing his seamless transition into the oriental feminine and producing
an oscillating order of gender presentation. Costello’s performance thus
produced another iteration of queer masculinity, though one that was still
dependent on oriental signifiers to carry out the difficult labor of disturbing
gendered and racial norms. His body—marked simultaneously as mascu-
line, through primary and secondary sex characteristics and musculature,
and as feminine, through movement and orientalism—disrupted dimor-
phic sex presentation. Furthermore, his body—marked simultaneously
as black, through bodily characteristics, and as Asian through orientalist
movement and, presumably, dress—confused the racial order of things by
making the boundaries of race indeterminate. In these ways, the Orient
was used to navigate gender, racial, and sexual prejudices by calling into
question the solidity of the categories on which the wielding of power rests.
Such uses of an oriental aesthetic demonstrate that the imperial logic
of distance and intimacy could be marshaled for competing interests. The
sexual excess of the Orient was often mobilized to signal moral decay, or
at least a very different moral order than that of the civilized, bourgeois
West, but of course this decay could be interpreted differently by dissimi-
lar groups and for numerous purposes. For nightclub owners, performers,
and patrons, as well as for some artists and writers, the loosening of gen-
dered and sexual strictures as signified by allusions to the sensual Orient
was immensely profitable, sexually liberating, voyeuristically pleasurable,
and a political project of critique, respectively; but, for reformers, vice in-
vestigators, and politicians, such claims of affinities with the Orient sig-
naled a degradation that was moral and social, even physical in terms of the
body as well as the neighborhood or community, and it urgently required
policing. All these positions afforded figurations of modern personhood
through imperial registers, if even some were more fleeting than others,

152 | Chapter Three
and even if they revealed different and unequal forms of such personhood
for various groups of New Yorkers.
The orientalist archive described by the types of performances and art-
works found in this chapter is an archive existing without stable referents.
This simulacral archive refers not to the bodies of people of the Orient—
which are disappeared, re-­placed, and replaced—but, rather, to fantasies
of the Orient that prompt viewers to rethink colonial and imperial inven-
tions for a multitude of purposes. The rendering of these orientalist fan-
tasies does not act simply as appropriations of Asian culture, aesthetics,
or performance; instead, these simulacral depictions destabilize referen-
tial apparatuses and the meanings produced through them, demonstrating
that there was nothing fixed to appropriate in the first place. The meanings
of the Orient are always already constructed, and the meanings attached
to the Orient are also mobile. Involved in this reformulation of the power
inherent in representation are two notions: first, that racial, national, and
sexual representation is always already a fantasy; and second, as a result the
appropriation of such representations does not constitute simply power
over them. As seen in this chapter, the appropriation could be about cre-
ating power for white people over people of color in domestic space or
over racialized bodies abroad, but it could also mean the reracialization of
bodies at home, the power of subjectification for bodies of color and queer
bodies, or the application of queer meanings to the gendered, raced, and
sexual body. The many meanings ascribed—sometimes simultaneously—
to these performances may rely on an imperial logic of otherness, exoti-
cism, and spatialization, but the significance of the performances shows
the contradictions inherent both in aesthetic production and the making
of empire.

Orienting Subjectivities | 153
 Chapter Four

Dreaming of Araby

I
n Irving Berlin’s Tin Pan Alley song “Araby,” the singer croons
about “dreaming of Araby,” where the narrator, presumably
male, proclaims, “everything is oriental” and where he might
meet a fair maiden beneath a palm tree. The second verse con-
cludes: “Oh, how I wish I was there!”1 The structure of the dream
is instructive in thinking about orientalist discourses. The narra-
tor of a dream is present in two worlds, here both fictional ones,
but of varying fictional orders. The first world takes place in the
present, perhaps on a stage in the setting of a nightclub, or in a
modern city apartment, for those playing the song on a piano
at home. A dreamed-­up Araby constitutes the second world.
Here unfurls an Araby concocted and mastered by journalistic
accounts, movies, songs, and other figurations of a mysterious
East, and the song moves seamlessly between the reality of New
York and speculations regarding an Orient outside the bounds
of the city and nation. Though the United States did not have
a direct colonial relationship to these regions in the 1920s and
1930s, its geopolitical interest and imperial influence were none-
theless expanding into West and Central Asia and North Africa.
Perhaps not coincidentally, and as seen in the previous chapter,
lavish Hollywood studio productions such as The Sheik and The
Thief of Baghdad featured exotic settings, erotic costuming, and fantasti-
cal tales populated by enslaved princesses, kidnapped aristocrats, irresist-
ible princes, and rapacious sultans.2 Meanwhile, thrilling stories about in-
trepid Western explorers and scholars, including the British archaeologist
and Egyptologist Howard Carter, circulated in popular U.S. magazines like
National Geographic, informing scientific knowledge production and racial
thinking about West and Central Asia and North Africa.3 Berlin’s “Araby”
breaks down the distinctions between these fictional, studied registers and
New York, where the song was performed. In so doing, it collapses the
space between this imagined Orient and places like a Manhattan night-
club. Despite a lack of direct rule, then, imperial discourses about this Ori-
ent “over there” were nonetheless transported “home” in endless ways—in
popular and educational literature, newspaper accounts, exhibitions, films,
and, as we shall see, more songs, performances, and dreams.
Even as the spatial logic of empire describes these places as separate, at
a great remove from center and civilization, these cultural artifacts point to
intense connections between the places. As demonstrated by the scholar-
ship of Lisa Lowe and Ann Laura Stoler and the artwork of Yinka Shonibare,
imperialism creates connections—or what Lowe calls intimacies—between
continents, thus obscuring the boundaries between geographic designa-
tions and social groups, between colonial histories and civilizational imagi-
naries.4 Stoler eloquently argues that such connections were purposefully
elastic, creating similarities and triggering complicities: “Colonial officials
both created and called up a set of transnational equivalences between
‘their’ indigent Europeans and those elsewhere. What was produced was
less often viable social policy than anxious efforts to identify an elusive
social category available for cross-­colonial comparison. Not least, these ad-
ministrative recitations bear witness to how analogies were fashioned, and
how the casual narratives that tied racial membership, class belonging, and
impoverishment accumulated, gained, lost, and regained credibility when
they were cross-­referenced and (re)stored.”5 The kinds of references across
various colonial spaces that are described by Stoler played a part in gener-
ating images of the Orient for New Yorkers. This chapter draws connections
between empires, or would-­be empires, to show how imperial logic travels
across constructions of space and distance that are meant to divide some
groups and to bring others into proximity in order to make sense of, im-
plicate, or reinforce relations of power through reference, metaphor, and

156 | Chapter Four
analogy. At the same time, these stories and their effects produced more
than what was intended—often, clearer divisions between rulers and sub-
jects—generating anxious slippages between spatial and social categories
of nationality, race, and sexuality.6
Where the previous chapter brought peripatetic orientalisms visited
on domestic subject formations into focus, this chapter considers the mo-
bility of place markers across geographies of scale as a way to both regulate
racialized sexualities in Harlem and expand colonial projects in western
North America. Working from the international scale to the most intimate
scales of sexualized bodies in Harlem and then back out to new U.S. colo-
nial projects, the chapter explores space’s collapse, in which imperial logic
could be used to control racialized populations and their sexual practices
and to lend credence to New Yorkers’ roles in furthering contemporary
colonial forays into the California desert.
The scope of people identifying and identified through or against ori-
entalisms was large: white men and women regularly consumed exotic ac-
couterment, décor, and performance as part of nightlife; black men and
women reimagined their place in a domestic racial order by mobilizing
stories and signs of places beyond the U.S. border, though not the U.S.
reach; and indigenous peoples of Western North America were imagined
through peripatetic orientalist rubrics that justified the acquisition of ter-
ritory and resources by the U.S. state. Thus the reordering of racialized
knowledge that was produced in art and entertainment had effects well
outside of cabarets, nightclubs, and art galleries; and the stakes were high
in these racial reorderings, including the right to inhabit space within the
city, the rights of citizenship, and the rights to nationhood. These imperial
imaginaries were made manifest in the cabarets and nightclubs of New
York City as promises of exoticism and in the stated reasons for the surveil-
lance of those places, as sites of criminality and pathology. As seen in the
previous chapters, because orientalisms and their signifiers are dynamic
and mobile—attached to particular bodies but also detached from them
because they are so often imaginary—the music, movements, and accou-
terment of West Asia could easily be reproduced by and importantly on the
bodies of cabaret and nightclub performers, as well as the material spaces
of New York. Trappings alluding to the mystique of the Orient, borrowing
from West, Central, and East Asian and North African themes, enticed cus-
tomers with their creation of distant lands for closer inspection. The Hotel

Dreaming of Araby | 157
Martinique, for example, had a room downstairs called the Omar Khyyam
Room, after the author of the Rubaiyat. A Turkish restaurant at 146 Riving-
ton Street held cabaret shows, the Egyptian Garden at 105 Second Avenue
catered to a Slavic and Polish clientele, and Harlem boasted the Old Lybia
on 139th Street.7 Indeed, spatial discourses inspired by empire building
and circulating through music, art, and performance produced a sense of
civilizational entitlement to enter and conquer—both abroad and at home.
The narration of space as something that could be collapsed made for
a variety of juxtapositions in popular discourses of Araby in New York.
Harlem, for example, might become Araby (for better or worse), New
Negroes might nationally identify with Egypt and resituate it in nightclub
settings, and the elsewhere that Araby represents for New Yorkers might
be displaced onto the U.S. West. Across diverse cultural sites, the aesthetic
of the Orient interpolated both subjects and objects through changing nar-
ratives of space, fabricating imperial and sexual divisions such as seer and
seen, explorer and explored, with the promise of travel and the observa-
tion of others’ bodies. Concurrently, those divisions and the meanings in-
herent in their creation might be tried out, broken, or reiterated. Whether
an article describing the intimate interior of a speakeasy, or a recording of
Sophie Tucker singing “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” each representa-
tion demonstrates how the signs and symbols of empire circulated within
domestic cultures of travel (to a Harlem nightclub, for example) to pro-
duce imperial subjecthood—though that was differentially distributed, as
observed above—and create complexly racialized contexts for conquest.8
Furthermore, these representations did not just legitimate existing social
hierarchies, though they often did this, too. They also concretized new divi-
sions as well as what Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson call
“heterotopic” through stories and analogies of racial or sexual deviance
that were used for various purposes.9 In examining the language of travel
and conquest from these entries into and replacements of an imagined
Orient, I focus first on how imperialist fantasies provided a racial vocabu-
lary for domestic colonialism. That is, the mutability of signs and symbols
of the Orient provided references for containing and displacing racialized
populations imagined to be unruly, sexually deviant, and dangerously un-
civilized. Second, I explore how narratives of racial affinity across disin-
tegrating geographic boundaries could produce a variety of meanings for
black subjecthood within jazz cultures. Last, this chapter moves out into

158 | Chapter Four
new imperial spaces, where the imperial logic of nightlife itself traveled,
as New Yorkers toured beyond the city and into the West, catalyzing the
forcible acquisition of new territory. These various uses of spatial narrative
were related to a multiplicity of strategies to defy control, police popula-
tions inside the city and out in the empire of the West, and imagine new
visions of sexual intimacy and alterity.

“Ain’t Nothing Like the Orient in Harlem’s Araby”

Joyce Carrington’s September 1928 illustration on the cover of the Crisis—

the official magazine of the naacp, founded and published by W. E. B.
Du Bois—features a New Woman, a New Negro (fig. 4.1). Posed before a
pyramid, a palm tree, and sand dunes, a light-­skinned black woman sports
a flapper’s bob and wears modernist jewelry meant to evoke an African
past. This image taps into the complicated territory of Africa as a sym-
bol, at once primitive and civilized, that circulated to various effects dur-
ing the Jazz Age. The image of foreign lands here operated as a marker
of an imperial self-­possession. The art historian Caroline Goeser, for in-
stance, argues that Carrington’s illustration provides a way for African
American women to participate as modern subjects: “Circumventing the
stereotypes of the mammy or the tragic mulatta, women illustrators often
created images of sophisticated brown-­skinned African American women,
whose fashionable clothing and hairstyles marked them as fully engaged
with modern consumerism and beauty culture.” 10 The art historian Amy
Helene Kirschke furthers this reading of the image, calling the figure in the
illustration a symbol of “a universal woman of the diaspora.” 11 Indeed, the
figure’s cosmopolitanism is recognizable not only through her primitiv-
ist jewelry and modernist look, but also through her ability to tour Arab
lands. Such tourism, though, is suspect in some respects and in need of fur-
ther questioning. This woman, dressed as though to head out to a Harlem
nightclub rather than to visit the Egyptian pyramids, is thereby rendered
out of place. The illustration may leave the viewer wondering how this
woman has transported herself to Egypt, or even if she has done so. A
third possibility might be to think of the woman as belonging to an Egyp-
tian modernity, where she inhabits the space of her nation while wearing
the hairstyle and jewelry of an international jazz culture. Because jazz is a
contact zone, and because intimacies between continents might be found
there, this image might also figure a collapse of distance: Harlem in Egypt,

Dreaming of Araby | 159
Figure 4.1 Joyce Carrington, cover illustration for the Crisis,
September 1928. Courtesy of Crisis Publishing Co., Inc.,
the publisher of the magazine of the naacp.

Egypt in Harlem. As one space and another are counterposed, juxtaposed,

and superimposed, the multiple readings of a drawing such as Carrington’s
demonstrates the manifold methods of employing the spatial narratives of
an uncanny Orient to denote the character assigned to space itself, as well
as to signify subjectivity, the topic of the previous chapter.
This section focuses on the orientalization of the space of Harlem and
the variety of meanings and reactions engendered from the replacing of a
fantastic Orient into, onto, and in contrast to this Manhattan neighbor-
hood. The orientalist signifiers that mapped moral perversion and sexual

160 | Chapter Four
freedom onto the bodies of cabaret and nightclub performers in New York
also worked to remake the space of Harlem, whose vibrant and semilegal
nightlife was sometimes imagined through an affinity with “Araby.” The
joining of polyphonous jazz, pleasure, and policing in spirited spaces of
nightlife accommodated sexual exploration for residents and nonresidents
alike, as well as internal colonialism in the form of increased scrutiny and
moral outrage. With the entire neighborhood opened to intense surveil-
lance from police, vice investigators, and journalists, traffic in oriental-
isms often came to emblematize fights over public space, both for those
who sought to disrupt the social order and for those grimly dedicated to
maintaining it. Making Harlem over as a colony through orientalist ob-
jects, narratives of space, and imperial logic helped justify the role of inter-
nal colonialism in a context of actual and metaphorical colonialism, where
the usage of Arab signifiers augmented and activated domestic discourses
of disorder and danger. Internal colonialism, in the form it took beginning
in the 1960s, is often associated with racial repression in the form of eco-
nomic injustice and political underrepresentation. In this section, I extend
this kind of analysis to emphasize discourses of sexuality and connections
between internal and external colonialism. The collocation of imperial
space and New York City space frequently marked Harlem as foreign in
a language that reflected the neighborhood’s proximity to imperial space,
and spatial discourses of aberrational race and sexuality further designated
Harlem as a tourist destination, a place to have a good time, a space for cre-
ative endeavors, and a region requiring acute regulation.
The connections raised by renaming Harlem within a colonial context
also tied the neighborhood to the need for policing. This is one impor-
tant way the link to internal colonialism comes into play. Internal colonial-
ism is often discussed as a metaphorical way of describing race and eco-
nomic relations in the domestic sphere (often reiterating an imperial logic
of domination, even as those making these assessments fought schemas of
domination), but examples from the 1920s demonstrate how ties to colo-
nial discourses produced reasons to control the population based on ideas
of civility and incivility. The French writer Paul Morand, for instance, de-
scribes Harlem as “almost an outlying suburb, given over to Negroes and
foreigners.” 12 His comment creates both distance and distinction, resitu-
ating Harlem as a strange landscape at the edge of civilization proper.
Writing of Harlem’s precarious standing as close to, but irrevocably dis-

Dreaming of Araby | 161
tant from, the imperial metropole, Morand suggests that this community
teetered on a precipice: “Standing erect at the street-­crossing, symbolic of
white civilization, the policeman keeps his eye on this miniature Africa;
if that policeman happened to disappear, Harlem would quickly revert to
a Haiti, given over to voodoo and the rhetorical despotism of a plumed
Soulouque.” 13 This description of policing Harlem’s inhabitants—inside
the geographical boundaries of New York City, but outside its civilized so-
ciety—is made sense of through colonial analogies, and here, notably, a
French writer chronicles Harlem through the lens of French colonialism
in Haiti. Through such analogies, Harlem became a strange land marked
by imperial rule and also imperial travel, construed as an exotic destina-
tion outside of some denizens’ everyday life that could be visited, con-
sumed, and left behind, for Morand’s text is a travelogue, and this descrip-
tion means to incite curiosity and draw readers into the space of Harlem.
The appearance of the police protects these travels, both real and imagined,
into darkest Harlem. Thus understood as an imperial outpost where visi-
tors might meet natives, for the purposes of this book, it is a contact zone
where copresence precipitates interactive and improvisational encounters.
If Harlem was often already understood as belonging to a racial order be-
yond white Manhattan, this use of imperial aesthetics, with its metaphors
and allusions, supplemented, enhanced, and reiterated Harlem as a locale
for activities at the razor’s edge of illegality and degeneracy.
I argue that internal colonialism is indeed a useful metaphor, especially
with regard to black and, as we shall see by the end of the chapter, indige-
nous populations within and without the United States. I am interested
in internal colonialism, but I want to be careful not to reproduce the im-
perial logic that often guides its usage as a hermeneutic device, assum-
ing that the power of the colonists is predetermined as repressive rather
than productive. To understand this, it is useful to turn to Linda Gordon’s
reading of internal colonialism. Gordon narrates the origins of the concept
of “internal colonialism,” which arose from the Marxist tradition and was
used to describe the economic exploitation and political disenfranchise-
ment of a racial population within a polity, rather than across its borders.
“Internal colonialism,” she argues, “was above all a metaphor, calling at-
tention to similarities between classic colonialism—in which countries of
the global north occupied and exploited ‘Third World’ developing regions
and peoples—and intranational relations of domination in which exploi-

162 | Chapter Four
tation coincided with racism and national chauvinism.” 14 In the United
States, civil rights activists and black nationalists (as well as Latino/a and
indigenous nationalists) used the concept to claim affiliations between
their movements and national liberation struggles around the world, and
U.S. sociologists notably adopted the concept in the 1960s and 1970s to de-
scribe the continuing disenfranchisement of African Americans, especially
in the inner city, to emphasize that U.S. racisms and “colonialism of the im-
perialist era” both “developed from the same historical situation and that
racism and colonialism shared basic components.” 15 As Gordon observes,
the concept originally treated racism as an economic phenomenon, but its
application can include cultural or ideological forms of dominance. In this
regard, I follow Gordon’s example to reclaim the term from Marxist eco-
nomic determinism (and other analytic failures of its original conceptual-
ization, which Gordon enumerates) through feminist and queer of color
critique, and I use it to understand that the strength of racial discourses
is their mutable and movable components, as well as to comprehend the
concept’s gendered and sexual imbrications, in contingent and contiguous
intimacies with empires. I also use internal colonialism to understand com-
parative empire and to allow linkages within a single empire across oceans
or borders, which may help us consider again the concept of jazz as a con-
tact zone. Internal colonialism not only denaturalizes national boundaries
as proper and inevitable, but it also allows us to recognize that some racial-
ized others are already contradictorily considered enticing, decadent, un-
desirable, and immoral strangers to the national polity.
The image of Harlem as a domestic colony provided part of its appeal
as a travel destination for those seeking entertainment, sex, and alcohol.
Indeed, the entertainments sought by Harlem’s visitors also reinforced
notions of Harlem as colony. David Levering Lewis notes that Broadway
musicals played a large part in producing Harlem as an exotic destination
for cosmopolitan white audiences. Shows like Dixie to Broadway in 1924,
with its interracial cast, and the interracial and blackface hit Lulu Belle, of
1926 “sent whites straight to Harlem in unprecedented numbers for a taste
of the real thing.” 16 Similarly, Irving Berlin’s 1929 hit “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
remarked on the popularity of touring Harlem for white tourists, to see
“the well-­to-­do up on Lenox Avenue . . . / On that famous thoroughfare
with their noses in the air.” 17 The lyrics prompt tourists from elsewhere to
view Harlem through the lens of curiosity, describing the neighborhood

Dreaming of Araby | 163
as detached from the doldrums of ordinary city life and otherwise full of
exotic entertainments: “If you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to,
why don’t you go where Harlem flits?”18 The blackface character Lulu Belle,
from the Broadway musical, also makes an appearance in the song: “That’s
where each and every Lulu Belle goes / Every Thursday evening with her
swell beaus / Rubbin’ elbows.” If read intertexually, Lulu Belle is a white
woman who wants to gallivant with the city’s black population, and, being
the subject of the song, she represents a break in both gender and sexual
norms as a woman out on the town with men encountering interracial
populations. Although performed in a playful tone, the lyrics also explore
the possibility of going native as a part of the trip to Harlem—­participating
in a salaciously interracial and queer sexual culture spiked with alcohol,
free love, and hot jazz—before a return to civilization south of 110th Street.
Like other tourist sites, Harlem was noted for its cultural and social pecu-
liarities, seen through a racialization that created an apparently delightful
confusion around its particular versions of civilized norms of race, gender,
and sexuality.
The remapping of orientalist space onto Harlem had many uses, and
Harlemites themselves also participated in making Harlem strange, and a
little queer, to establish Harlem both as a spot of pleasure and importance.
“Harlem has been called the Mecca of the New Negro,” remarks Wallace
Thurman in one of the many essays he wrote in the persona of a native-­
informant tour guide, “Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture
of a Popular and Interesting Section.” 19 Likewise, Alain Locke’s The New
Negro anthology was originally published as a special issue of the Survey
Graphic titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.”20 The fact that Mecca—
the holiest site in the Islamic world as well as a bustling, exotic metropo-
lis—might be used to make sense of Harlem suggests how such orientalist
lenses activated and augmented domestic forms of spatial racialization.
Renaming Harlem Mecca exhibits the neighborhood’s cosmopolitanism,
as a place from which important new arts movements might emanate. It
also equates Harlem with an ancient and holy civilization, both as a marker
of refinement and as an early connection between politically aware black
activists and Islam. New Negro intellectuals, then, mobilized the idea of
Mecca as a part of the project of racial uplift in the United States.
In a delightfully less dignified manner, Harlem’s musicians and com-
posers also took up the task of comparing and siting Orientalized space

164 | Chapter Four
in the city. As an example, in May 1924, with Fats Waller in control at the
piano, Porter Grainger recorded “In Harlem’s Araby,” leading the listener
through various spaces in Harlem, rendered “mysterious” by its associa-
tion with, and possession of key qualities of, “Araby.” Grainger, in declar-
ing, “Ain’t nothing like the Orient in Harlem’s Araby,” marks a distance
between Harlem and the Orient (where they are not alike), and simulta-
neously collapses the ideas around these two types of spaces by placing
the Orient in Harlem. In considering this second meaning, the song thus
transplants Araby into Harlem (though not necessarily all of Harlem). It
accomplishes this through a narrative lens of travel in the first verse: “Oh
New York is so mysterious / New York is so delirious / Just runnin’ round
to see the sites / But friends you ain’t seen nothing yet / There ain’t a place
you can get a thrill like Harlem late at night.”21 As in “Puttin’ on the Ritz,”
the song’s narrator acts as a tour guide, introducing downtowners (or out-­
of-­towners, or even other Harlemites) to the thrilling, titillating sights and
sounds of Harlem. Making the space of Harlem strange and appealing, the
song references the exotic Orient to describe Harlem’s lively music culture
and its denizens: “In Harlem’s Araby / The funniest things you’ll see / Yes,
sheiks that do not live in tents / Jamming all night to pay their rent. . . .
the dancers never move their feet / But shake from head to toe.” “Harlem’s
Araby” is filled with orientalized characters familiar from floorshows and
novels, the sheiks and belly dancers who inhabit the spaces of nightlife and
lend an exotic flavor to its goings-­on. It additionally presents such spirited
music making and dancing as characteristic of the unrestrained, alien Ori-
ent, resignifying jazz life as belonging to a less civilized (Harlem’s) Araby.
The theme of travel as well as an orientalized culture (albeit closer to
home than Asia or Africa) fuel the popular reception of queer subcultures
of Harlem, interpreting these through the strangeness of the Orient for
the tourist in New York. Grainger sings: “Oh they’ve got women just like
men. / Girls they acting like brothers. / It’s hard to get along with them so I
prefer the others.” As in the drawings by Richard Bruce Nugent examined
in previous chapters, the excessive, aberrant sexualities associated with the
Orient make a queer turn. After Grainger notes the presence of female
masculinities, he resolves this transgressive scene with the queerly ambigu-
ous claim of preferring “the others.” This stanza posits a tension between
the trappings of tourism and the creation of a modern queer subjectivity.
The stanza sets up queerness as a curiosity, available for viewing by folks

Dreaming of Araby | 165
interested in witnessing the unusual and exploring the wild life of Harlem,
including bizarre displays of race, gender, and sexuality. Although actual
queer acts that take place in Harlem may hold a different valence, because
the song uses its narrative structure to introduce outsiders to a bizarre cul-
ture, the point of view expressed in the song resembles that of a tourist
tract promoting the space of Harlem in parallel to an exotic Orient. At the
same time, the song’s narrator is a kind of native informant, establishing
a particular racial and sexual identity through the metaphors of space; his
participation in the life of Harlem is presented matter-­of-­factly, even if it is
aberrational. The guide’s knowledge and experience in this form of sport-
ing life collocates orientalist ontologies and epistemologies with those of
the racialized populations of Harlem in a manner that speaks to the joy and
pleasure to be found in an imagined Orient as well as that in Harlem, and
to the place of the black population of the United States in an international
cosmopolitanism.
This displacement of boundaries and proprieties did not go unnoticed
by police, vice investigators, and journalists—those interested in securing
their careers through the naming of moral and legal curiosities. To explore
negative reactions to these forms of sexual expression, I turn now to an
article by Edgar M. Grey from 1927 titled “White Cabaret Keepers Conduct
Dives,” which argues that the white invasion of Harlem brought with it a
decadent and orientalized immorality to the neighborhood. Grey worked
variously as a journalist, an editor, and briefly as the general secretary of
the Universal Negro Improvement Association.22 In these roles, he often
espoused the rhetoric of black respectability, and the article on cabarets
was no different, recounting a journey into the recesses of Harlem, moving
readers first into a racialized section of the city and then into the close, fan-
tastic, and orientalized space of a cabaret interior. The description of this
journey is rendered in terms of imperial power, remapping colonial dis-
course onto the city as a means of disciplining the local black urban popu-
lation. Grey vividly maps this imperial logic onto the space of Harlem to
restructure a racial order within the United States:

A visit to the raided flat, then under police guard, disclosed a palace
indeed. Here was a single room, large enough to be comfortable, deco-
rated with the pictures of naked women and men in poses which smelt
of the horrible stench of sex perversion; there, in another corner of the

166 | Chapter Four
 room were couches of varying sizes, covered with the most costly silks,
of varying hues; in the centre of the lay-­out, rose as from a fairy back-
ground, a fountain plant, from which sprang, as if by magic, a flow of
perfume over the nude body of a woman. Around this fountain were
strewn costly and imported rugs, of every pattern and description, and
on these the dope addicts gathered to revel in the dreams of unrealities.
In still another room, were couches decorated with multi-­colored
lights and a large colonial bed-­stead, with a large covering canopy, with
electric lights at each corner, flaring forth as at a grand bazar [sic]. At
the one side of this bedstead was a step-­platform, garnished with silk
ribbons of all colors and on each step a dimmed electric light, covered
with tissue paper. In addition to these were drinking outfits of various
sorts and the police say that when the raid was made these were the hard
and fresh smell of liquors. At the door, of the palace, one was met by a
flunky in Oriental garb who, questioned one as to one’s business and di-
rected one to a reception room where the “Sultan” soon arrived to make
arrangements.
The patrons of this dive were white men, and rich, who sought the
great fire-­eating gift of black folk to the American scene: Sex served sci-
entifically, garnished with Jazz, and washed down by poisonous liquors
and more poisonous drugs. These are numerous in Harlem. They are
run in conjunction with cabarets; they are part and parcel of the general
business ventures of the white invaders of the community who come not
to raise the moral standard of the community, but to destroy it. Not that
they are charged with any duty to raise morals of the colored youth, or
even keep it at its original level; but surely a community so helpless as
not to have the ability to drive these immoral kings and dukes from its
confines, is surely weak indeed.23

Writing from a liberal reactionary impulse, the author re-­creates colonial

structures within cabaret space, disempowering, disappearing, and disap-
proving of black urban populations, even when advocating for their pro-
tection and uplift. As Stoler argues, such racializing discourses “may serve a
reactionary political agenda or a reformist one.”24 Extending Stoler’s asser-
tion that racializing discourse is polyvalent in its mobility, I explore here
an example of a politically reactionary article. It makes use of many im-
perial tropes to prove its point: colonial power relations, orientalist ob-

Dreaming of Araby | 167
jects to signify sexuality, and the relocation of jazz as an orientalized dis-
course that supports exotic eroticism. Although the article avails itself of
these imperial themes to make its argument, the presentation of evidence
also speaks to the fun and allure of these types of spaces. I argue, then,
that although the article has a politically reactionary agenda, its reaction-
ary discourse produces the acts that the author claims to want to curtail.
In this way, the work of political discourse is not an either-­or proposition,
either reactionary or reformist; rather, the article produces a multiplicity
of meanings simultaneously by playing with the impulse to dichotomize
political discourse.
As a proliferating metaphor and a profound analogy for making sense
of a complex array of racial interactions occurring in Harlem, colonialism
provides a civilizationist logic for the control of racialized populations in
the United States and offers new ways to look at people of color as out-
side the flow of Americanness proper.25 The taxonomy of giving characters
in the Harlem scene names from orientalist imaginations—white tourists
as “immoral kings and dukes,” there to visit “the ‘Sultan’ ” and “a flunky
in Oriental garb”—remaps Harlem as a colonial landscape and thereby
restructures race relations in the city. Through this colonial metaphor,
Harlem’s community is positioned as weak, helpless, and in need of con-
trol; and though the kings and dukes may be immoral, they nonetheless
are of the ruling class, able to choose their own course. The white visitors
from outside Harlem, however, are neglecting their duty of civilizing and
uplifting—the “white man’s burden” of Rudyard Kipling’s famous colo-
nialist poem transplanted to a “heart of darkness” different from Joseph
Conrad’s. Though the article states that it is not the visitors’ “duty to raise
morals of the colored youth,” it is still clear that the author expects them to
do so to some degree. As part of the rewriting of race relations in the city
through colonial metaphors, the article reinforces a blend of domestic and
imperial logics of white governance over bodies of color. This other form of
colonization—not as civilizing mission but as destructive tourism, encour-
aging and exploiting the worst elements of human society—is demonized
in this article, which castigates “the general business ventures of the white
invaders of the community who come not to raise the moral standard of
the community, but to destroy it.” Instead, in this denunciation, the colony
of Harlem becomes the outlandish playground of the colonizers, a place
where they can shed the trappings of civilization and vest themselves in an

168 | Chapter Four
exotic, fantasy underworld, as described later in the article. For its author,
this is unacceptable.
Imperial logic also underpins assumptions about sexuality and power,
inherent in the article’s description of the “palace,” built through the in-
clusion of orientalist objects that mark the space as sexually immoder-
ate. The metaphorical Orient is at once manageable and unmanageable,
able to be consumed but overflowing with the ever-­present threat of un-
controllable sexuality. The author describes an excessive collection of ori-
ental objects such as perfumes, “costly and imported rugs,” and “costly
silks” that transform the cabaret space and evoke sensual experience in
what the article calls “palatial dope dens, harems of prostitution, [and] gin-­
palaces.”26 These catalogued items demonstrated the commodification of
the Orient, with luxurious accouterment that could be traded, possessed,
and controlled spread over floors, couches, and walls. Through this itemiz-
ing, the article makes visible that which is usually constructed as invisible,
echoing descriptions in article after article, vice report after vice report, and
police statement after police statement. These spaces are public but nar-
rated as invisible, hidden, and off the beaten path. This constructed invisi-
bility lends the space the mysterious air of exoticism, making it a foreign
and enticing territory. But although the space of the cabaret is contained
by both city regulations and physical walls, its foreign nature threatens to
break through these bounds. The article itself is a performance of the ten-
sion between allure and repulsion, as the voyeuristic description betrays
the author’s desire to consume the Orient, a desire momentarily resolved
in the language of management. Seductive but also overstimulating, this
space is imagined as being on the verge of breaking free of its bounds and
overpowering its visitors’ rational faculties with an orientalist contagion.
The orientalist objects present at the scene of the cabaret speak both to
the sexual variety available to the Harlem community and to the author’s
desire to enforce strictures on this community. Again, the author uses the
logic of imperialism to prove that the sexuality afforded by this orientalized
space is aberrational and in need of censure. To complement the “pictures
of naked women and men in poses which smelt of the horrible stench of
sex perversion,” the author mentions the presence of couches and, more
vividly, a “large colonial bed-­stead.” Although beds and couches might
have been seen as sexual in any club, the special context of orientalism
added to both the allure and the danger of the furnishings. Describing the

Dreaming of Araby | 169
bed “as at a grand bazar” betrays the sexual economy at work in the article.
The imperial logic used to describe the club’s interior also transmits par-
ticular sexual fantasies about the consumable bodies of women of color
for the white kings and dukes who frequented the club. Even if the actual
bodies offering sexual pleasures at the scene were not women of color, the
use of colonial metaphors nonetheless makes it possible to play out this
colonial fantasy, assigning to the club, the people in it, and the people in
the neighborhood surrounding it a place on this imperial map. The orien-
talist trope of incivility—here imagined through sexual excess—is used to
demonstrate the inappropriateness of certain intimate relationships on the
domestic frontier. Simultaneously, the loving details and attention paid to
these sexualized objects demonstrate the power they have to attract visitors
and even the author, exerting a possibly irresistible compulsion.
The construction of space is more than just the built environment and
decorative furnishings. Music also fills and shapes space, speaking its own
language of signification, hailing bodies into its own moral order. Interest-
ingly, the music that signals the Orient is jazz; here, modes of Orientalism
merge with existing racial discourses to inform musical meanings. That is,
the connection between illicit sexuality and the Orient is congruent with
existing ideologies that link black sexuality and jazz. The article reports that
the clients “sought the great fire-­eating gift of black folk to the American
scene: Sex served scientifically, garnished with Jazz, and washed down by
poisonous liquors and more poisonous drugs.” The elements placed in re-
lation to one another in this passage make the assigned character of Harlem
residents visible through a series of mixed—and mixing—­metaphors. The
sexual energies assigned to “fire-­eating . . . black folk” constitute an irre-
sistible threat to white patrons, and the colonial vernacular of going native
warns of the danger. (“Sex served scientifically” also recalls sexological hy-
potheses imputing to blackness a deviant, and unsentimental, sexuality.)
Black Harlemites, according to this view, inhabit a space of moral depravity
and sexual and consumptive overindulgence doubly marked through
blackness and orientalism, race and imperialism. Like the illegal drugs and
alcohol flowing freely there, which are imagined to be critical to the orien-
talist sensibility cultivated through the décor and the costumes, the music
of jazz filtering through the club suggests the aberrant sexuality of strange,
uncivilized others. This linking of the orientalisms to blackness directs us
again to the doubled labor the article accomplishes, naturalizing sexual and

170 | Chapter Four
social chaos through colonial metaphors to demand the control and neces-
sary civilizing of orientalized black bodies in Harlem.
Although the article’s express intent is to point out the depravity of the
white invaders of Harlem, the author’s reliance on imperial metaphors
places the white interlopers and black residents in a tension-­filled relation-
ship of internal colonialism, replete with hierarchical power differences.
This narration of power in Harlem’s clubs constitutes white subjects as
often amoral, but also as powerful and charged with moral obligations,
while black Harlemites are seen as acquiescent, easily corruptible, and un-
civilized—not unlike empire’s others. The rewriting of black space through
colonial signs and symbols positions Harlem as empire’s outpost, needing
surveillance and control, justifying intervention and racialized manage-
ment. Thus imperial logic collapses the distance between internally and
externally colonized peoples. Jazz cultures, as contact zones, lead some
people to enjoy their entertainments and others to decry the interracial,
sexualized mixing that is inherent in these aesthetic and spatial construc-
tions of modernity. Those discourses and practices that structured ven-
tures in West Asia and elsewhere, here move along geographies of scale to
enforce civilizing narratives of surveillance and control over the neighbor-
hood of Harlem and its wayward populations.

Egyptomania

In “Jazzonia,” Langston Hughes connects the participants in a cabaret

scene—a jazz combo and a dancer—to characters from West Asian and
North African history: Eve and Cleopatra. As “six long-­headed jazzers
play,” a “dancing girl whose eyes are bold / Lifts high a dress of silken
gold,” writes Hughes.27 Hinting at Egyptian connections in describing the
musicians as “long-­headed,” a reference to visual representations of an-
cient Egyptians, he begins to spin associations between domestic moder-
nity and a distant African past. The dancing girl, imagined at once as sexual
(lifting her dress) and majestic, has inherited a great transnational history
that lives on in her body, clothes, and movements. Hughes compares her
bold eyes to those of Eve, and her gold dress and beauty to those of Cleo-
patra. In doing so, he retells the narrative of forced diaspora that marks
the present state of African Americans as less a pathology than the result
of others’ assumption of the role of rulers, including primogeniture, that
creates juridical rights and, ultimately, a historical context for black sub-

Dreaming of Araby | 171
jectivity that reaches across centuries and continents. The site of jazz, then,
becomes a place for understanding the intimacies of continents and, as we
shall see in this section, for negotiating black subjecthood.
In this section, then, I investigate the purposeful collapsing of time and
space as a way to both promote and deny black subjectivity through the
circulation of ideas about Egypt. If Harlem was often made legible through
the colonial metaphor and imperial analogy brought home, then domes-
ticated colonialisms also circulated throughout empires’ intimacies. The
previous section focused on orientalist fantasies that collocated the space
of Harlem with the space of an imagined Orient, and this section takes up a
slightly different register of contact: the interaction between domestic jazz
cultures as an ideological contact zone and the contemporaneous archaeo-
logical exploration of Egypt. In the 1920s Egypt rose to prominence in
the international imaginary, as Britain’s colonial properties struck out for
national independence around the globe and new scientific discoveries of
ancient advances in the region attracted the world’s fascinated attention.
A particularly contested site because of its historical role as an alternate
seat of civilization and progress to ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt be-
came a vehicle for constructing modern selfhood for African Americans
through a claim to an enlightened past. As Kirschke notes, the New Negro
movements of the early twentieth century turned to Africa to excavate
old connections and forge new affinities: “Although Africa encompassed
many different cultures, W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, wanted to connect
readers to the entire continent. This included North African and Islamic
regions which also suffered under colonialism and foreign rule.” 28 Pan-­
Africanism as a strategy depended on building affiliations with all the colo-
nized peoples of Africa, including its Arab populations. Sometimes these
affiliations included insistent claims that Africa was the seat of the mod-
ern;29 other, equally invested arguments described Africa as an archaeo-
logical wonder firmly located in antiquity. These latter discourses about
Egypt were often composed in and circulated from the privileged perspec-
tive of explorers, imperial travelers who considered themselves masters of
the lands and cultures of the past. In some cases, this ostensibly scientific
perspective, forged in the crucible of imperial conquest, lent powerful sup-
port to a logic of control over black (and indigenous) populations at home.
Although the preceding section considered the usage of orientalist sig-
nifiers and colonial analogies about a distant “there” to demarcate and

172 | Chapter Four
control urban space and racialized bodies “here,” this section moves with
the back-­and-­forth circulation of Egypt in the U.S. imagination. Stories
and fantasies about Egypt were important for assembling a wide range
of spatial relations between populations in the United States, on the one
hand, and populations past and present in North Africa, on the other hand.
Works like Hughes’s “Jazzonia” made direct links through the collapse of
time and space between Egypt’s ancient high culture and Harlem’s contem-
porary jazz urbanity. In other cases, Egypt denoted the historic reach and
power of the British, who had thoroughly trumped these ancient empire
builders, and discourses and images of their reach and power could be mo-
bilized to shore up racial hierarchies in the United States. In this section, I
compare the visual works of the African American painter Aaron Douglas
with “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” a song recorded by Sophie Tucker,
a popular Russian-­born American singer and actress. Both artists produce
figurations of Egypt, but each embody distinct psychic and political econo-
mies of identification. The former pursues racial affinity, while the latter
seeks to conjure up a racial distance. But this difference takes another turn:
even as these distinct figurations betray different intentions and identifi-
cations, together they reference and rely on an imperial logic that informs
the relationship of the United States to Africa, its peoples, and its resources.
As Ella Shohat has argued, Egypt and its figures, notably Cleopatra and the
pyramids, have provided a testing ground for racial and national pride.30
Ultimately, these works create different places for race in the U.S. context,
yet together they provide an imperial logic for the appropriation of other
lands and other peoples, for other purposes.
Like Hughes, Douglas made a concerted effort to link Harlem’s burgeon-
ing jazz scene with Egypt’s ancient high culture. These connections moved
along the orientalist history of art movements like Art Deco, the histories of
heterogeneous African populations (both orientalized and tribalized), and
African American modernity. In a 1926 series, Douglas illustrates a black
genealogy that creates a path from Egyptian elegance to the grace notes of
jazz and the blues. In the first image I consider, the Krigwa Players Poster
printed in the Crisis in May 1926, the orientalism of Art Deco style is re-
interpreted as what the art historian Richard Powell dubs “Afro-­Deco.”31
This subtle shifting of Art Deco from its orientalist origins into an aes-
thetic form describing a racial project of black uplift capably demonstrates
the ability of orientalist signifiers to reattach themselves to other bodies

Dreaming of Araby | 173
and modern political movements. Douglas’s poster certainly encapsulates
a pan-­African sensibility, featuring instantly recognizable Egyptian icons
such as a sphinx and pyramids flanking a central figure with a masklike
face and hoop earrings, and a river running along the bottom of the poster.
Brought together, these iconic images present what Goeser calls “a pastiche
of visual symbols that tells the reader to see black American origins quickly
as both tribal African and Egyptian.”32 Thus, the drawing illustrates mul-
tiple layers of colonial and imperial discourses, here repurposed to illumi-
nate the power of U.S. jazz cultures vis-­à-­vis a proud African past.
This poster also works as a referential key to the symbols that Douglas
mobilized in many of his other illustrations in the rest of 1926. For example,
the sphinx and the masklike face are repeated in the cover art he drew for
fire!!.33 Here, in the words of Goeser, “Douglas visually conveyed the inte-
gral linkage between the ‘tribal’ and the ‘civilized’ faces of Africa.”34 Douglas’s
work in both the Krigwa Players Poster and the cover of fire!! demonstrates
a refusal to choose a singular origin story for black populations in the United
States. Instead, these illustrations depict heterogeneous connections to mul-
tiple African pasts and, via anticolonial struggles and archaeological excava-
tions, to the present. At stake for Douglas in these images is the modernist
vision of an ontological and epistemological sense of blackness as creative
and majestic. The use of orientalisms to give additional significance to the
work of the younger generation of Harlem’s artists modifies the meanings of
blackness at home through affiliation with, rather than distance from, “out
there.” Indeed, the Orient is again collapsed into Harlem.
Another of Douglas’s illustrations to use an Egyptian visual vocabulary
is Play de Blues (fig. 4.2), which accompanied Langston Hughes’s “Misery”
in Weary Blues, his 1926 book of poems. As in the cover of fire!!, Douglas
uses some of the graphic icons in the Krigwa Players Poster. Here, the wavy
river lines from the bottom of the Krigwa Players Poster are transformed
into the reverberations of blues music emanating from the piano. The
singer reaches up, entering the musical stream. Douglas creates a hetero-
logic relationship between blues musicians and Africa: the heads of the
performers here are inspired by Dan masks from the Ivory Coast,35 and
through the river as a trope connecting continents and eras, he links Egypt
and New York. These illustrations depict a deep and profound exchange
across the black Atlantic—in which U.S. black artists are influenced by an
African and Egyptian past—and demonstrate that these same artists are

174 | Chapter Four
Figure 4.2 Detail of Aaron Douglas, Play de Blues (December
1926). Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas,
Museum purchase: Helen Foresman Spencer Art Acquisition
Fund, Lucy Shaw Schultz, 2003.0012.05.

the ones rendering this Egyptian past. Thus Douglas relies on a particularly
modernist formulation, one that determines that Egypt can be known but
that is also aware that the Egypt being presented is a creation of the mod-
ern artist. Indeed, the stakes of black internationalism and black cosmo-
politanism, as represented by Douglas, depend on this connection to Africa
and deliberately erode the distinctions between multiple pasts and multiple
presents. The collapse of time and space occurring in Douglas’s illustrations
comes from a cosmopolitan aesthetic—though it is one whose restrictions
racialized peoples in the United States could not outrun—and that ambiva-
lence creates a visual language describing a heterogeneous, creative, and
modern black subject in the United States.

Dreaming of Araby | 175
 The construction of black subjectivity was policed by other interests,
which mobilized the language of an orientalized Egypt in order to make
their case. News of explorers’ findings in Egypt influenced aesthetic pro-
duction in the United States by people like Hughes and Douglas, and it also
made a splash in the world of popular music. In November 1922 Howard
Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamen, the boy pharaoh. The ar-
chaeological find caused waves of excitement around the world, including
New York City, whose Metropolitan Museum of Art partially funded the
expedition and provided logistical support during the excavation. There-
fore, though Egypt had most recently fallen under British influence, U.S.
citizens also participated in colonial fantasies about Eastern ancient cul-
tures and Western scientific expertise. The following year, Sophie Tucker
recorded “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” a Tin Pan Alley song that took
Carter’s dig as a starting point for a fantasy about the psychological and
sexual life of an Egyptian pharaoh.36 In this popular ditty, the same sym-
bols that could be so powerfully mobilized by Douglas to produce a ma-
jestic black genealogy are used for very different purposes. Although the
song included some of the familiar oriental signifiers that had appeared in
nightclubs and cabarets, it also drew on newspaper reports of the tomb’s
unearthing to create an affinity between the singer and the archaeologist,
both figures who might be understood as collectors of artifacts and, in this
case, as shapers of international and domestic relations. To do this, “In Old
King Tutankhamen’s Day” demarcates at least three lines of distinction be-
tween the United States (and, by logical extension, Europe) and Egypt:
first, the music itself makes an aural difference between continents; sec-
ond, the lyrics reify oriental sexual difference; and third, the song invites
its listeners to mimic the archaeologist, to unearth the past’s curiosities
and catalogue Tutankhamen’s possessions. Although it is this third line of
distinction that I focus on in this reading of Tucker, it is important to note
that taken together, the music and lyrics weave a tale of the ancient roots
of the Orient’s aberrant sexualities together with an imperial justification
for control of its land, resources, and bodies. Here another past intrudes on
the present: it is significant that Sophie Tucker made her name at the end
of the nineteenth century as a “coon shouter,” performing in blackface.37
Jayna Brown observes that Tucker “shaped her stage persona against and
through versions of racialized femininity,” even after leaving her blackface
performances behind.38 It is in this way that her performance of “In Old

176 | Chapter Four
King Tutankhamen’s Day” bound together colonial fantasy and racial min-
strelsy, oriental signifiers and U.S. domestic cultures, in new configurations
of mimicry and scorn.
The musical modes in the song tell a story of contact, where Western
might is naturalized and orientalization marks the collapse of space and
historical time. In untangling the song’s condensed themes of racial hier-
archies and imperial logic, I discuss first the demarcation of this civiliza-
tional distance through Tucker’s juxtaposition of musical modes: a domi-
nant mode that is meant to represent the West, and a minor mode that is
meant to represent the East. As in “Palesteena,” Tucker’s tune relied heavily
on a flatted minor third in order to demarcate the Orient and highlight its
difference from the Occident. The song opens with a variation on the re-
frain along the major scale and then sinks into its first orientalized mea-
sures, repeating a sequence of B, D flat, and D in the key of B major, the D
being the third. The use of this half step between D flat and D builds both
anxiety and anticipation—anxiety at the coming of the unknown, and an-
ticipation at the prospect of finally seeing and knowing. This sequence is
repeated throughout the song, usually at vocal breaks. As a marker of con-
tact, the use of the minor third is juxtaposed with a straight major scale,
which signifies for the listener the difference between the Orient and the
West. The vocal melody relies solely on the major scale, denoting the cru-
cial difference between the surveyor and the surveyed, between Tucker’s
world and King Tutankhamen’s. The major scale is standard and a rela-
tively strong mode, but the excessive use of the flatted third, because it
mimics the minor scale, gives the Egyptian other a sense of weakness and
exoticism. As described in the musical relationship of the major and minor
orientalized modes, the West is “knowing,” with a colonial eye, and the Ori-
ent is set up to be seen.
Following these musical impressions of contact, the song’s lyrics rely
on a sexual exoticism, previously instantiated through the recollection of
tropes already familiar to nightclub and cabaret audiences. So, as with the
music, the lyrics confound the time and distance between contemporary
audiences and ancient Egypt, just as archaeological digs are contempo-
rary, political, and embedded in the past. The song, for instance, mentions
“1,000 dancing girls” who, with “lots of hip hip hooray,” would “move and
move and move, but never move their feet.” The listener is put into the
position of viewing Tutankhamen viewing these ancient belly dancers, a

Dreaming of Araby | 177
doubled position of lascivious voyeurism (because such words conjure up
Salomé, Hawaiian dancing, the hoochy coochy, and other exoticized per-
formers who could be experienced more immediately) as well as one that
claims a distant, historical remove and a way to enter the world through
its doubling of the style of modern cabaret, nightclub, and Broadway per-
formances.
This collocation of ancient Egypt with New York’s sexualized nightlife
in the song emphasizes an identification with the whiteness of the West
and its ability to collect and know the Orient, even as it indicates the plea-
sures of nightlife. What is distinct about Tucker’s tune is its affinity for the
archaeologist as an arbiter and producer of imperial taxonomies—the song
directly references Carter’s discovery: “They opened up his tomb the other
day, and just with glee, / they learned a lot of ancient history”—and how
this affinity is brought to bear on racial hierarchies at home. The fight to
control the past was being waged not just in Egypt, over the tomb’s con-
tents and significance, but also in newspaper accounts, popular songs, and
everyday debates. Recorded within a year of Carter’s discovery in Luxor,
Tucker’s song relied on the same narrative devices that filled newspapers re-
porting on the shared U.S.-­British discovery and the subsequent fight to re-
move the tomb’s carefully itemized contents from Egypt. This removal was
intensely contested in diplomatic skirmishes between Egypt, Great Brit-
ain, and the United States. According to Timothy Mitchell, “the discovery
coincided with Egypt’s winning partial independence from the British
military occupation established in 1882, and provided the new nationalist
government with a powerful expression of the nation’s identity.”39 As an
expression of its new semi-­autonomy under indirect British rule, the Egyp-
tian government retained control of 50 percent of the discovered items. The
United States inserted itself into this tug-­of-­war under the auspices of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times, using the accumulative
logic of Western expertise, argued: “The Metropolitan Museum authorities
owe it not only to themselves but to science to use every endeavor to secure
the intervention of the American government with the Egyptian Govern-
ment with the object of preventing abolition of the present law under which
such excellent research organization has developed in Egypt.”40 It is within
the context of these debates that the song emerges and becomes part of the
conversation. The premise of the song, then, was based in part on the con-
trol of national resources in and expertise about Egypt, and thus the song

178 | Chapter Four
reflects ideas that depend on the glorification of Western civilization and
the naturalization of the rule of whiteness over the racialized populations
of the world.
It is through these Western epistemologies that the song forwards ar-
chaeological, archival, and public display projects. It mimicked the news-
papers’ narrative revelation of artifacts emerging from the tomb with its
own inventory of the goods and possessions that one might find in the
royal tomb of King Tutankhamen. Just as Carter stunned the crowds
gathered around the archaeological dig by bringing out objects like vases
filled with perfume, Tucker sings about “gold and silverware / From big
hotels of every land and clime,” robes, and “the first fig leaf that Adam gave
to Eve.” This list, though comical, invites the listener to share in the culti-
vation of expertise through the discoveries made in the excavation. The un-
veiling of these artifacts also provides an entry point for understanding the
stakes involved in producing a story of these objects. (For example, a New
York Times article, arguing for the release of artifacts to the United States,
notes that the finds “confound many former beliefs” about the history of
Egypt’s rise and fall.41) The song, then, describes a contest for ownership
not only of artifacts but also of history, its meanings, and knowledge of how
it might apply to contemporary populations.
As demonstrated to radically different effect in Douglas’s artwork,
Tucker’s song also suggests that high stakes were involved in the control
of Egypt’s history for African Americans. The connection between con-
trol of Egypt’s legacy and America’s “Africans” is made clear in the final
verse of the song. Here, assumed affinities between black people in the
United States and the people of West Asia and North Africa are mobi-
lized to imagine a disciplinary racial regime informed by imperial logic
for domestic affairs. This logic dictated an “imposed relationship to em-
pire, an imposition that persists even as the categories and relationships
themselves shift.”42 Though originally released on Okeh Records, a label
known for its “race records,” the song asserts particular restraints on mod-
ern black subjectivity, wrought through orientalisms. Turning sharply away
from Egypt and Tut’s tomb, the lyrics move to the relation of blacks in the
United States to this tale of Egyptian pharaohs. “Why Sam from Alabam’,”
sings Tucker, “would not run one, two, three / or what a mark he’d be for
old Mark Anthony.” This couplet references another popular song of the
time, “Lovin’ Sam.” “Lovin’ Sam” describes a ladies’ man, more effective

Dreaming of Araby | 179
than even Rudolph Valentino’s sheik: “Lovin’ Sam, he’s the sheik of Ala-
bam / He’s a mean love makin’, a heartbreakin’ man!”43 But the swagger
and virility afforded to black masculinity via orientalisms in this earlier
tune (pathological and dangerous as it is) is trumped in Tucker’s song.
“Sam from Alabam’” is a second-­rate lover in comparison to Mark A ­ ntony,
the Roman general. Bridging the centuries to imagine Sam from Alabam’
and Mark Antony as contemporaries, the song finally cautions African
Americans not to make too much of their Egyptian roots, since Egypt had
been defeated by Europe’s military, masculine prowess in the ancient past.
Even as the treasures and marvels of early African civilizations were being
uncovered, the song reminds the descendants of Africans to “know their
place” on the civilizational pecking order: they had been conquered in the
past and remain conquered in the present. The promise of this distant land,
these ancient wonders, should not be interpreted, the song warns, as an
opportunity for black people in the United States to claim power and pres-
tige for themselves.
The collapse of time and space set the scene for racial affiliation across
continents and eras. Affiliation, however, also could be read through mul-
tiple valences. The work of Hughes and Douglas used connections to Egypt
as a way to mark an honored past that lived on in the present, in scenes of
jazz cultures inflected by the importance and majesty of past civilizations.
As such, these affiliations promote associations with the wondrous ancient
societies of West Asia and North Africa that carry over into the present day,
are embodied by musicians and dancers, and ring out through the sound
of jazz horns. Understanding this as a rhetorical technique, other people
made the same connections, but mobilized them in entirely different ways.
This song resituates the contemporary African American population at the
mercy of the white conqueror Mark Anthony to reinstate a racialized social
order in the United States. The song, then, falls into line with the forms of
internal colonization that were discussed in the first section of this chapter,
though in this section, I have tried to show that modes of power were not
absolute, but that imperial logic provided sometimes competing narratives
of subjectivity that appear to go unresolved. These examples demonstrate
how the collocation of space and time could be used to contest black sub-
jectivity, and that the mobilization of orientalist narratives neither guar-
anteed nor automatically denied these modes of subjectivity; rather, these

180 | Chapter Four
discourses occurred concurrently as a way to map contemporary debates
about and instantiations of subject making.

New Conquests

Whereas the first section of this chapter considered the touristic fantasy of
Araby in Harlem to produce modes of both pleasure and regulation, and
the second section explored the mobilization of orientalist figurations of
ancient Egypt as appearing contemporaneous with modern domestic jazz
cultures as a way to contest black subjectivity, this final section takes up
the task of thinking through how the kinds of narratives that appeared
in the first two sections might be mobilized to justify and naturalize con-
tinuing imperial projects for New Yorkers. This approach, I believe, illu-
minates a different set of stakes in the circulation of colonialist discourses
and imperial logic, where the colonial common sense suggested by aes-
thetic production can be seen to move from the metropolis into the west-
ern geographies of North America. Jodi A. Byrd presciently reminds us, “As
metropolitan multiculturalism and dominant postcolonialism promise the
United States as postracial asylum for the world, the diminishing returns
of that asylum meet exactly at the point where diaspora collides with settler
colonialism.”44 In order to take seriously the claims that imperialism has
affected the inhabitants of New York, I think that it is necessary to under-
stand how imperial logic might then circulate outside the bounds of the
metropolis. Throughout the 1920s, cosmopolitan New Yorkers were being
hailed as world travelers, whether closer to home in Harlem or abroad in
farther-­flung territories. The figure of the tourist, like that of the archae-
ologist, was central to the modern management of “foreign” lands, bodies,
and resources. But the orientalisms that rendered Harlem’s nightclubs and
cabarets exotic destinations could also be deployed in other struggles to
civilize primitive regions of the United States in its avid expansion. As an
example of these ways of enticing New Yorkers to visit different destina-
tions, I turn now to a 1923 booster tract for the “sophisticated tourist of the
nineteen-­twenties” authored by J. Smeaton Chase and provocatively titled
Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun.45 Published in New
York, the volume sought to lure the discriminating traveler to the Cali-
fornia desert.46 The tract appealed specifically to East Coast adventurers,
pointing out that “connecting closely with Palm Springs is the main stage-­

Dreaming of Araby | 181
road across the desert, by which you may go down the valley as far as you
like—or on to New York, for that matter.”47 In doing its part for Califor-
nia boosterism, the publication adapted some orientalist tropes familiar to
New Yorkers. The reference to the desert as “our Araby” explicitly recalls
cinematic images of West Asia, but in doing so it also creates a contain-
ment imperative for the indigenous populations of western North America.
Like the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the idea of “our Araby” thus clari-
fies for us the fact that the distance between the domestic and the foreign
is ideological. Weaving these two narratives together, the tract drew on the
imperial logic of orientalized signs and symbols to further entrench U.S.
empire in the country’s western territories. If the first two sections of this
chapter speak to the complex productions of orientalisms in the city and
the price and limitations of internal colonialism, this final section reminds
us that these colonial fantasies compelled the continuation of the violence
of conquest.
Considering the instructive details of Chase’s volume on Palm Springs
reveals how imperial logic is mobilized and furthered in ways that resonate
with the circulation of orientalist parables in New York. Our Araby dreams
of the California desert through orientalist signifiers conjuring up both a
paradisiacal Holy Land and a nationless, and thus premodern, “Araby,”
contrived through the popular cultural imagination by purposefully calling
on orientalist films and religious texts. The tract thus intersperses biblical
language with more secular visions of West Asia throughout its pages. In a
chapter on amusements, Chase lures his readers with breathless reports of
the film shoots around Palm Springs. He notes that this little village, with
its exciting promise of pristine sands and green hills, has been “headquar-
ters, so to speak, for Algeria, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, India, Mexico, a
good deal of Turkey, Australia, South America, and sundry other parts of
the globe.”48 In a clever sleight of hand, Chase blurs the line between an
original and its copy, substituting the former for the latter in frank admi-
ration of its staged authenticity, writing that being in Palm Springs pro-
vides the “more exciting firsthand experience of seeing [the films] made,
the thrill of the real thing.”49 The California desert, then, stands in for the
imagined Orient of the films, a doubled geographical destination for those
who loved watching Valentino in The Sheik and who might picture them-
selves in his place, or in his arms, in the same simulacral landscape. Be-
cause Hollywood imagery reduces “Araby” to the desert, and the desert is

182 | Chapter Four
“presented as the essential unchanging décor of the history of the Orient,”
an Arabic desert is essentially interchangeable with one in California.50 This
U.S. desert provides additional scenery as the untamed site of the wild West
and is thus “associated with productive, creative pioneering, a masculine
redeemer of the wilderness.”51 Here the romantic and religious lure of the
desert is mobilized to entice settlers to uncivilized regions of the U.S. im-
perial expansion. The text, then, acts in an imperialist manner to justify the
repopulation of the area with tourists who might be willing to stay on in
town through the fantasies created in films, novels, and floor shows.
Echoing concerns over the management of neighborhoods like Harlem
and multiracial spaces like dance halls that are focused on sexuality, race,
and gender transgression, the booster tract employs other narratives of
spatial regulation that also result in the circumscription of racialized popu-
lations. Our Araby appeals to scientific curiosity and exploration, as well as
land management and the new conservation movement, as a way to justify
conquest. Chase notes that “the American tourist expects to have Nature
served up in up-­to-­date fashion, and Uncle Sam may be trusted to com-
ply, in due time,”52 connecting the desires of the tourist-­explorer to the re-
sponsibilities of the nation-­state. Chase muses about trips to canyons and
other points of natural interest, spending a considerable amount of space
detailing the novel flora and fauna of the desert landscape, even as he as-
sures readers they will be able to survive both the rugged terrain and its
inhabitants.53 Operating in this manner not unlike an imperial archive, the
publication thus functions as a Baedeker for budding experts on the region.
Thus do “colonial narratives,” as Shohat notes, “legitimize the embarking
upon treasure hunts by lending a scientific aura.”54 Here the scientific au-
thority of the tract attests to the civilizing powers of potential tourists as a
form of anticonquest—a supposedly innocent, bloodless conquest done in
the name of science, not greed.55 But as many scholars have shown, land
management and conservation were not distinct from, but vital to, the mis-
sion of empire and its coercive bids for control of lands and resources. Here
the management of space, even at the level of the desert environment, can
thus be manipulated to justify a civilizing mission with the result of con-
trolling and displacing indigenous populations.
The racial logic of Our Araby is a complicated one, for Chase not only
refers to the Orient but also plays on existing U.S. racial mythologies of
the country’s westward expansion, referencing—while also absenting—­

Dreaming of Araby | 183
indigenous cultures and the Mexican ranchera population in order to make
his pitch. This was not an unusual spatial juxtaposition of the deserts of
North America and those of the Maghreb. As Brian Edwards notes, re-
garding later incursions into North Africa, observers identified “a frontier
aspect to the desert landscape and sometimes elaborate comparisons of the
Maghreb to the American Southwest.”56 For Edwards, this means that the
renarration of space could be mobilized to make African conquest seem
more palatable.57 Interestingly, this juxtaposition could work in reverse as
well. The conquest implied in Chase’s section on the scientific management
of land becomes explicit when he suggests the replacement of indigenous
bodies with those of tourists. Furthermore, he examines current legislation
that would enable the appropriation of native lands. In regard to going
native, here seen as a way to replace one population with another, Chase
carefully notes that “our village is bisected by the Reservation line, which
thus makes a geographical division of the population,”58 but he later dis-
allows this national and racial border. The methods that Chase employs
are related to those discussed by Shari Huhndorf in Going Native. Writ-
ing about the changing American mythos in the late nineteenth century,
Huhndorf argues: “Mounting social change caused many European Ameri-
cans to ‘remember’ Native American life with nostalgia. Indians, now safely
‘vanishing,’ began to provide the myths upon which white Americans cre-
ated a sense of historical authenticity, a ‘real’ national identity which had
been lacking in the adolescent colonial culture.”59 Huhndorf describes an
imperial ambivalence, one that simultaneously embraces and seeks to con-
quer the natives of America. A similar management of race and imperi-
alism is exhibited in Chase’s tract. What might appear at first glance to
be a narrative tension between happy division and productive intermin-
gling does not, after all, negate the potential of white mastery in the re-
gion; rather, it strengthens the claim for that mastery. On the one hand,
the volume invites readers to the hot springs “as bygone generations of Ca-
huillas have enjoyed” them, an enticement to live like the natives once did
(notably, the natives that the tourist might emulate are imagined to be long
dead).60 This rhetorical move replaces indigenous bodies with those of New
Yorkers through a narrative of affiliation, in a way similar to the kinds of
racialized entertainments that had women dancing in orientalist costumes
on urban stages. On the other hand, Chase assumes that the land needs to
be settled—attracting settlers is the purpose of the tract, after all. Rather

184 | Chapter Four
than affiliation, this argument depends on the production of difference
between the indigenous population and the would-­be tourist. Addition-
ally, Chase pointedly links the settlement of the land with the conservation
of nature, a move that can happen only through the removal of existing
populations, an argument that makes sense particularly in light of legisla-
tive moves that had recently occurred. To reassure potential tourists and
settlers of the inevitability of settlement, the tract moves to a discussion of a
bill in Congress to preserve tracts of land in the area around Palm Springs.
However, the bill’s authors had not yet accounted for the fact that the land
was not controlled by the U.S. government, but was part of the Agua Cali-
ente Reservation.61 Though the bill did not directly provide for appropria-
tion of the land, Chase was hopeful that some sort of appropriation would
eventually occur, even if it were left up to “citizens in general to provide the
money, in an amount to be determined by the Secretary of the Interior, for
purchase of the Indians’ rights. This, it may be hoped, will not long delay
the bill’s coming into operation.”62 The tourist-­explorer, then, was invited
to both enjoy the peaceful California community and help settle the region,
wresting the land from the care of its indigenous populations.
The vision of Araby floating through the dreams of would-­be tourists
and patrons of nightclubs produced unique intimacies and recalibrated
distances between bodies, as well as producing modern mythologies and
allegorical translations between continents. The colonial racial classifica-
tions that circulated in song, dance, and tourist tract also created connec-
tions and comparisons between imperial enterprises abroad and race re-
lations at home, allowing Harlem to be described as a lawless colony and
Our Araby to imagine California as both foreign territory and a site for
natural domestic expansion. But the hegemony of an imperial imaginary
in U.S. popular culture nonetheless produced differential access to imperial
selfhood. Moving along geographies of scale, the terms natives and sheiks,
invaders and civilizers, slaves and explorers were transactional and mobile.
Depending on the array of discourses brought together, they acted as terms
of endearment, warnings of danger, and modes of access to modern subjec-
tivity, resources, and land.
This chapter has taken up the collapse of colonial space, domestic space,
and space marked as ripe for annexation, using texts as diverse as Tin Pan
Alley songs, widely published drawings and poems, newspaper debates
over the ethics of archaeology, and J. Smeaton Chase’s Our Araby. The

Dreaming of Araby | 185
intertextuality of these cultural artifacts demonstrates that the logic that
guided aesthetic production not only emanated from imperial modes but
also lent itself to furthering and continuing the violence of imperialism. In
this way, imperial logic and its effects reached through these texts, tying
them together to be used for a common purpose. That is, that rather than,
say, culture shaping and reflecting contemporary ideologies, imperial logic
pervaded meanings of power; negotiations over identities; and fights over
land, space, and place, from the large to the small across these kinds of dis-
cursive productions. Because of its antithetical modes, imperial logic could
be mobilized as a way to discover personhood, rationalize the policing of
racialized populations, or naturalize the further expansion of empire. As
a result, imperial logic created, through these contradictory means, the
grounds for understanding geographies of race and sex and, thus, the tur-
bulent construction and variable meanings of subjectivity across bodies,
neighborhoods, and nations.

186 | Chapter Four
 Conclusion

Academic Indiscretions

I
n Imperial Blues, I fixate on unfixing boundaries that divide
fields and objects of study and on configurations of space and
identity. In short, my project continues with and alongside
scholarship that rethinks the epistemological and ontological
grounds for American studies, shifting the conversation across
disciplines, archives, and geographies. The joining of interests
and objects across disciplines, I argue, forces a certain aca-
demic indiscretion, a productive faux pas performed along the
grain of institutionally discrete disciplines. Part of what disci-
plinary indiscretion has granted me is a way of thinking about
how colonial desire travels back home in the form of migrating
bodies—material but also ideological bodies, in which imperial
logic helps determine sexual, gender, and racial formations in a
place like New York City.1 Because ideas and objects travel back
and forth across the presumed lines of cities and nations, metro-
poles and colonies, the other of the U.S. nation-­state might be
found at home, in your neighborhood, or in your bed. These
thoughts can be dangerous if we imagine that the people we will-
fully refuse to acknowledge abroad, the people on whom our
countries visit violence, might have an effect on us here. Our
continued imperial work abroad might in fact be connected to
social inequalities at home because of the ideologies we embed ourselves
in to wage war, because of our wartime economy, because of the austerity
measures we pursue in the name of security and freedom. In these ways,
visiting theories of how sexual conquest in the colonies might predicate
sexualized power relations in New York’s Jazz Age can become dangerous
even in the present. At stake in my conceptualization are the ways we imag-
ine power in the formation of subjectivity, and how we might then proceed
in our scholarship to examine the history of sexuality, national belonging,
ideas that separate home and abroad, and the violence of imperial action.
One of the devices I have found useful in pondering these questions is
imperial logic, which also orients contemporary political schemas of em-
pire. In thinking through the unfixing of boundaries, interdisciplinary
scholarship has begun to ask a different set of questions about the dis-
creteness of boundaries. The idea of imperial logic is indebted to Kan-
dice Chuh, who frames her scholarship as contending with the “nature
of language and knowledge” and as “investigating the structures of power
and meaning that give rise to identity and difference as national and racial
epistemes.”2 Keeping this in mind, the relationship between racial (as well
as sexual and gendered) epistemologies are indelibly linked to national
ones. The construction of these categories domestically is linked to how
the nation as image and apparatus travels abroad in its shows of economic
and military might, and how those imagined as outside of the nation-­state
are imagined at home. In thinking through the stakes of these types of
connections, Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, in their
introduction to Strange Affinities, argue for a comparative analytics to ex-
amine the “changing configurations of power in the era after the decolo-
nizing movements and new social movements of the mid-­twentieth cen-
tury demand that we understand how particular populations are rendered
vulnerable to processes of death and devaluation over and against other
populations, in ways that palimpsestically register modalities of racialized
death but also exceed them.”3 I appreciate here the idea of the palimpsest,
as it speaks to how histories of racialization can become apparent, erased,
or even both simultaneously. In imagining a comparative analytics, then,
we must grapple with questions about the meanings and context of racial
discourse. And, although Hong and Ferguson seem to often equate racial-
ization with “death and devaluation,” I believe their collection of essays,
taken as a whole, demonstrates that racial discourse as indiscrete, as pro-

188 | Conclusion
miscuously emanating from particular bodies, has its own histories that
may be drawn on, ignored, or exaggerated for a multiplicity of purposes.
This conjunction of interests has not only produced a way to think
through the situating of sexuality in the United States, say, through the lens
of queer of color critique, aesthetic production, and postcolonial studies,
but it also reminds us that we write these texts in a moment of danger. A
field such as postcolonial studies itself was formed at the intersections of
many disciplines (and those many disciplines were formed at the intersec-
tions of many other disciplines), including anthropology, literature, inter-
national studies, cultural studies, and feminist studies. These academic in-
discretions even drew the ire of the U.S. government: suspicious of this
field formation, the House of Representatives proposed in October 2003 to
regulate the “anti-­American” field.4 This suspicion also reared its head in
the legislation proposed in Georgia in 2009 to eliminate courses in queer
theory and gender and women’s studies at state institutions. As George Lip-
sitz notes, American studies as a discipline is at a “dangerous crossroad,”
and as a field it needs to reimagine its political import in the twenty-­first
century by drawing on “the organic grassroots theorizing about culture
and power that has informed cultural practice, social movements, and aca-
demic work for many years.”5 His suggestions remind us that the work of
the academy and the work of social justice organizing need not be sepa-
rated, and therefore the ways we orient our fields can be not just acts of in-
discretion but also acts of organizing for social change, depending on what
questions we ask across the borders of knowledge construction and circu-
lation. This kind of thinking is what produces eye-­opening ideas like Kevin
Gaines’s understanding of the “transnational dimensions of American citi-
zenship,”6 which becomes particularly prescient when, in 2011 and 2012,
lawmakers in Arizona worked to ban ethnic studies material from class-
rooms because of tensions presumably caused by the state’s proximity to
national borders, and to contentious struggles about the scope of national
security and the rights of citizenship.
Understanding the structure of imperial logic exposes the justifications
for continuing wars, social policies that devalue citizens and non-­citizens
alike, and wartime actions that ignore legal protections and rights, often
through creating affiliations with national others, peoples whose alle-
giances, cultures, and ethnicities mark them as non-­normative both within
designated national spaces and abroad. In this way, the geographic and

Academic Indiscretions | 189
the ideological mingle in our thinking through tried and true categories
of race, class, gender, and sexuality, categories that still bear the burdens
of representation in the realms of aesthetics, ethics, law, and politics. Fer-
guson’s reading of Weberian rationality gives us a clue as to why and how
these categories manage so much. “As social order achieves normativity by
suppressing intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality,” Ferguson
argues, “rationality must thus conceal the ways in which it is particularized
by those differences.”7 The seeds of this kind of rationality blow across our
fields of inquiry in palimpsestic gusts that sometimes expose and at other
times hide how these categories interact, shape, and undo one another.
For example, as Ferguson observes of postnationalist American studies,
“as it arises out of cultural and revolutionary nationalisms, this version of
history suppresses knowledge of the gender and sexual heterogeneity that
composes social formations.”8 My work interrupts this discrete thinking to
extract knowledge about the complexities of power’s machinations across
the categories through which it defines itself: the “multiple axes of power,”
in the words of Lisa Lowe.9 For example, I have been interested in how
knowledge of these categories is affected by space and spatialization—how
they travel across borders and use spatial reasoning—which has led to my
current understanding of how epistemologies and ontologies are grounded
in imperial logic. Just as Jazz Age New Yorkers emerged from behind city
lines to populate the California desert, using knowledge gained in night-
clubs and cabarets to make sense of this both strange and yet hauntingly
familiar landscape and its inhabitants, my methodologies expand beyond
discrete categories to recontextualize the way in which ideas about space,
subjectivity, and power also travel across borders, even as they are formed
by those borders. In this way, my work lingers between the solidity and
instability of the formation of identity categories. Rather than view this
solidity and instability as contradictory states, I understand their relation
as a way to apprehend the palimpsest of identity formation that precedes
and exceeds discourses of regulation, violence, liberation, resistance, cita-
tion, and reiteration.
The kinds of contradictions that guide my methodology have helped
me ask a different set of questions about the circulation of imperial signi-
fiers. Not content with a model of power that simply exposes imperialism
as producing repression, I have sought the variety of meanings available to
those signifiers in order to understand the range of meaning-­making prac-

190 | Conclusion
tices produced by imperialism. This methodology springs in part from the
work of Foucault in critiquing the repressive hypothesis and in part from
Derrida’s notion of différance. From Foucault I have learned that, even in
situations of violence, more is produced than simply repressive force.10 So,
in instances of imperial violence, or in the use of imperial logic to justify
violence at home, more must be produced than a quieting of a popula-
tion, the regulation of race and sex, or nation building. The palimpsestic
excess of these moments might instead be resistance, a reconfiguration of
subjectivity, or the unearthing of creative impulse. Furthermore, in mobi-
lizing Derrida’s concerns about the concomitant deferral and granting of
meaning, a model that also guides my reading of the palimpsest here, I
have analyzed the circulation of imperial logic through received and pro-
ductive meanings, drawing on the sometimes contradictory histories of
words, movements, objects, and spaces that are both known and manipu-
lated, solidified and creative.11 Imperial logic, as it feeds on these contra-
dictory modes of meaning making, thus becomes a useful heuristic device
for examining identity formation at home, the political power of imperi-
alism as it relates to urban environments, and the creation of subjectivity
on and off the stages of New York. In short, this work demonstrates that
the meanings attached to cultural production, more than simply shaping
and reflecting the larger political landscape, are already inherently part of
the societal systems of logic that traffic in older and continuing forms of
national conquest.

Academic Indiscretions | 191
 Notes

Introduction

1. For some of the canonical scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance that discusses
the meanings of whites traveling into Harlem, see David Levering Lewis, When
Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Vintage, 1982); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem
Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
2. “The Vogue,” report, 25 January 1917, Box 31, Committee of Fourteen Records,
1905–32, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New
York (hereafter cited as C14, nypl).
3. See, for example, Huggins, Harlem Renaissance; Lewis, When Harlem Was in
Vogue; Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transfor-
mation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); Ann
Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noon-
day, 1995); Mark Robert Schneider, African Americans in the Jazz Age (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reform-
ing Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
This is also evident in earlier work, such as James Johnson, Black Manhattan
(New York: Knopf, 1930); and George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New
Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966).
4. See Bill V. Mullen, Afro-­Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004); Daniel Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison,
Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2005); Heike Raphael-­Hernandez and Shannon Steen, AfroAsian En-
counters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006);
Helen H. Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-­Century Narratives of Race and
U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58 (June 2006): 1047–66; Scott Kurashige,
The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of
Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Vijay
Prashad stands apart from this scholarship in that he does look beyond U.S.
borders for racial meaning making. For instance, he examines connections be-
 tween Bruce Lee’s popularity and U.S. wars in Southeast Asia in Everybody Was
Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-­Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Bos-
ton: Beacon, 2001).
5. There is too much scholarship to name it all here, but see, for example, Win-
throp Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Anne McClintock, Im-
perial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:
Routledge, 1995); Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Cul-
ture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony,
trans. A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, and Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001).
6. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geogra-
phies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 193, 195, 202–3.
7. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 73–74. The precise number cited by Douglas is
749,000. Also see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making
Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
This vision of modernity also seems to be in accordance with that espoused by
T. J. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation
of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
8. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the
United States Taken in the Year 1910, vol. 3, Population 1910: Reports by States,
with Statistics for Counties, Cities and Other Civil Divisions, Nebraska-­Wyoming,
Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1913), 240; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Cen-
sus of the United States: 1930, vol. 3, part 2, Population Reports by States, Show-
ing the Composition and Characteristics of the Population for Counties, Cities, and
Townships or Other Minor Civil Divisions, Montana-­Wyoming (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1932), 279.
9. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 4–5.
10. See, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire
Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-­Colonial Literatures (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1989); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993);
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, introduction to Scattered Hegemonies: Post-
modernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren
Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1–33.
11. See Moon-­Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor
Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Moon-­Ho Jung,
Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal
Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004).

194 | Notes to Introduction
 12. Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Lon-
don: Verso, 2007), 44.
13. “The Tokio” (27 September 1916), Box 31; “Night Clubs and Speakeasies Located
on Numbered Streets” (1929), Box 37, Folder 8; “Speakeasy Clubs which Employ
Hostesses” (1928), Box 51, C14, nypl.
14. Carrie Tirado Bramen, “The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of American-
ization,” American Quarterly 52 (September 2000): 446.
15. The canonical historiographical texts for this time period portray race relations
in the city as strictly between black and white. See Huggins, The Harlem Renais-
sance; Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue; Douglas, Terrible Honesty.
16. For more on flâneurie, see Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Auto-
biographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 146–62. For the feminization of the flâneur,
see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993). Also see Leora Auslander, “The Gender-
ing of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-­Century France,” in The Sex of Things:
Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria De Grazia (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1996), 79–112, for a discussion of how flâneurs
performed a type of failed masculinity by consuming women and products with
their eyes, but—in failing to purchase them—failed to reproduce themselves or
the state, the two mandates of masculine consumption. For more on the chang-
ing racial geography of New York, see Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of
a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930, 2nd ed. (1971; repr., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
1996), 82.
17. Wallace Thurman and William Jourdan Rapp, “Few Know Real Harlem, the City
of Surprises: Quarter Million Negroes Form a Moving, Colorful Pageant of Life,”
in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed.
Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2003), 67.
18. Wallace Thurman, Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular
and Interesting Section (Girard, KS: Haldeman-­Julius, 1927), 64.
19. Thurman and Rapp, “Few Know Real Harlem,” 67.
20. Minutes, 7 December 1926, 572, City Council, 1647–1977—Board of Alder-
men, New York City Department of Records and Information Services, City
Hall Library and Municipal Archives, New York. In 1926 the Board of Aldermen
passed cabaret laws that were specifically aimed at clubs that featured jazz and
dancing. For more on this, see chapter 1; Paul Chevigny, Gigs: Jazz and the Caba-
ret Laws in New York City (New York: Routledge, 1991).
21. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 121.
22. Langston Hughes, “When Harlem Was in Vogue,” Town and Country, July 1940,
64. David Levering Lewis borrows the phrase from Hughes as well, discuss-
ing the ways in which Harlem became a popular destination for white people

Notes to Introduction | 195
 who traveled uptown to sample cabarets, nightclubs, and even to rent parties.
As noted by Lewis, this phenomenon became increasingly common after Carl
Van Vechten published his famous and controversial work, Nigger Heaven (1926;
repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). See Lewis, When Harlem Was in
Vogue.
23. Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chi-
nese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1.
24. See, for instance, Pascal Blanchard, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron, Le Paris
noir (Paris: Hazan, 2001); Tyler Edward Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans
in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). On Josephine Baker, see,
for example, Anne Anlin Cheng, “Skin Deep: Josephine Baker and the Colonial
Fetish,” Camera Obscura 69 (2008): 35–79; Daphne Ann Brooks, “The End of the
Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women’s Corporeal Comedy,”
S&F Online 6, nos. 1–2 (2007–8), accessed 23 May 2013, http://sfonline.barnard
.edu/baker/brooks_01.htm; Bennetta Jules-­Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and
Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Jeanne
Scheper, “‘Of la Baker, I Am a Disciple’: The Diva Politics of Reception,” Camera
Obscura 65 (2007): 73–101; Mae G. Henderson, “Josephine Baker and La Revue
Negre: From Ethnography to Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23
(2003): 107–33.
25. Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” in Beauti-
ful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 35.
26. Konrad Bercovici, Around the World in New York (New York: Century, 1924),
211–48.
27. Thurman and Rapp, “Few Know Real Harlem,” 67.
28. The musician Elton Fax recalled that “color wasn’t the only problem. I remem-
ber a comedy routine that was popular at the Apollo as an outgrowth of the West
Indian migration to Harlem. Two actors were onstage. Each was dressed as a
woman, and each engaged in a heated exchange onstage about something minor.
One would call the other ‘monkeychaser.’ The other would say, ‘Don’t call me
nigger.’ All this sort of thing. It laid the audience out in the aisles, because they
did it in dialect of the Caribbean and the dialect of the South” (in You Must Re-
member This: An Oral History of Manhattan from 1892 to World War II, ed. Jeff
Kisseloff [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989], 294).
29. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 103.
30. Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 44.
31. I borrow these notions of power and fields from Michel Foucault, The Birth of
Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart,
trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Ruth Wilson

196 | Notes to Introduction
 Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Jacques Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. with an introduction
by Gabriel Rockhill, afterword by Slavoj Žižek (London: Continuum, 2004).
32. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 186.
33. Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” pmla 123 (October 2008): 1382.
34. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxxvii.
35. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1.
36. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans.
John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 97–116.
37. Chandan Reddy, “Modern,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce
Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 161.
38. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-­Coloniality (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 100.
39. Leti Volpp argues something similar in the post–9/11 context that begins to
mark those that “appear to be ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim’” as not “repre-
sent[ing] the nation.” Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” in September
11 in History: A Watershed Moment?, ed. Mary L. Dudziak (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 157.
40. See C. Kaplan, Questions of Travel; Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation,
Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1996).
41. Indeed, immigrants to the imperial city included many temporary laborers with
no legal way to obtain permanent residency or citizenship. The Jazz Age also saw
the passage of anti-­immigration legislation that further curtailed the scope of
their movements as well as where they could live.
42. C. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 3.
43. Ibid., 110.
44. Linda Gordon, “Internal Colonialism and Gender,” in Haunted by Empire:
Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 427–51, especially 428–30.
45. In his 1917 ditty “From Here to Shanghai,” the Tin Pan Alley favorite Irving
Berlin tells of a New Yorker who visits Chinatown, which fires his imagination of
China beyond Chinatown.
46. Recent scholarship on New Orleans jazz also suggests that empire informs that
musical scene. See Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and
Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 2004).
47. Helen H. Jun argues that African Americans and Asian Americans have long
produced narratives of inclusion to achieve political, economic, and social in-
corporation into U.S. citizenry (Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian

Notes to Introduction | 197
 Uplift from Pre-­Emancipation to Neoliberal America [New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2011]). Lisa Marie Cacho also argues for the use of a comparative
lens in her brilliant analysis of the racializing discourse of the gang member
(Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
[New York: New York University Press, 2012]).
48. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North
American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Haunted by Empire: Geogra-
phies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 23–67. See also Stoler, Along the Archival Grain:
Epistemic and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
49. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 120–21.
50. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
51. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, in his analysis of the Tin Pan Alley hit song “China-
town, My Chinatown,” argues that “musical fantasies bear important marks,
however partial, of the lives, experiences, and treatment of the Chinese in
America” (Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Cen-
tury [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008], 127). Calloway’s “Minnie
the Moocher” also shows the interaction of races within those fantasies of spaces
not just as the denigration of Chinese subjectivities, but as a way to create di-
verse black ones.
52. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry . . . (1929; repr., New York: Collier, 1970).
53. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian
Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 12.
54. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 6–7.
55. “Gigolo May Hold Key to Moth Murder,” New York Evening Journal, 14 March
1931.
56. Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Instal-
lation Art (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008), 4.
57. Stuart Hall, “The After-­Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black
Skins/White Masks?,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Repre-
sentation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996), 20.
58. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 40.
59. Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (1932; repr., New York: Random House,
1999).
60. Richard Bruce Nugent, “Geisha Man (excerpt),” in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Re-
naissance: Selctions from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 90–111; Richard Bruce Nugent,
“The Geisha Man,” unpublished manuscript, 1928.
61. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University

198 | Notes to Introduction
 Press, 2003); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
62. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 112–14.
63. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 39.

1. Desire and Danger in Jazz’s Contact Zones

1. Marion Carter, “Fragile Blondes Float over Dance Floor in Arms of Filipino
Partners,” New York Evening Journal, 28 January 1930, clipping, Committee of
Fourteen Records, 1905–32, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York
Public Library, New York, NY (hereafter cited as C14, nypl).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Roderick A. Ferguson argues that in today’s moment of globalization, “the regu-
lation and transgression of gender and sexuality are the twin expressions of
racial formation” (Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique [Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 145). Arguably, the same was
true in the Jazz Age, even if the expression and structure were different.
6. For example, the Johnson-­Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was passed in an at-
tempt to shape the future population of the United States, favoring immigrants
from Western Europe over those from imperial sites. For more on how legisla-
tion works to create national and racialized identities, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant
Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1996); Ian F. Haney-­López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New
York: New York University Press, 1996); Lisa Marie Cacho, “The People of Cali-
fornia Are Suffering: The Ideology of White Injury in Discourses of Immigra-
tion,” Cultural Values 4, no. 4 (2000): 389–418.
7. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 31.
8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 6–7.
9. Following the logic of Hazel V. Carby’s arguments about the use of the figure of
the mulatto as a “‘narrative device of mediation’” (Reconstructing Womanhood:
The Emergence of the Afro-­American Woman Novelist [New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987], 89), Siobhan B. Somerville argues that writings about inter-
racial sexualities can function as “literary vehicles for exploring culturally spe-
cific structures of racialization, sexuality, and power” (Queering the Color Line:
Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture [Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000], 80).
10. Scholars have explored the meanings of multiracial spaces as contact zones, or
spaces of possibility and danger. For example, the critical geographer Edward W.
Soja’s notion of “thirdspace” (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-­and-­Imagined Places [Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996]) and the historian

Notes to Chapter one | 199

 Kevin J. Mumford’s notion of “interzones” (Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts
in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century [New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997]) both speak to how these spaces make it possible to cross
racial and sexual boundaries and can then be turned into spaces of cross-­racial
allegiance. Scholars like the legal historian Ian Haney-­López (White by Law)
and the immigration historian Mae M. Ngai (Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004]) identify immigration legislation as a site of border control, but one that
can be challenged and circumvented.
11. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry . . . (1929; repr., New York: Collier, 1970).
12. Asian/American masculinities, for example, were not constructed the same way
in every time period; rather, they are time- as well as place-­specific. For more
on understanding histories of masculinities, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and
Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Brian Klopotek,“‘I Guess Your
Warrior Look Doesn’t Work Every Time’: Challenging Indian Masculinity in the
Cinema,” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West,
ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau (New York: Routledge,
2001), 251–74; Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle
Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004).
13. For more on how legislation was aimed at guarding the whiteness of the state,
see Haney-­López, White by Law; Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 1–36.
14. One of Ferguson’s main claims is that sociology as a discipline reproduced En-
lightenment epistemology. I am attempting here to attach these epistemological
concerns to imperialism and the entrance of immigrants into the city. See Fergu-
son, Aberrations in Black, especially the introduction and first chapter.
15. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 175.
16. Stephen Jay Gould writes about the fallacies in the logic of various eugenics tests
and how the science was informed by social fears. He also makes the link with
immigration legislation, noting that Robert M. Yerkes’s tests for army recruits
helped establish “the supposedly objective data that vindicated hereditarian
claims and led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, with its low ceilings
for lands suffering the blight of poor genes” (The Mismeasure of Man [New York:
Norton, 1981], 157). Nancy Ordover adds to this body of scholarship by making
clear the effects of scientism in creating the national body in terms of race, sexu-
ality, disability, and reproductive rights: “As national and ethnic and racial iden-
tities merged in public and political discourse, eugenic rhetoric acted as court
empiricist, justifying, sustaining, and often initiating anti-­immigrant attacks in
the name of ‘bettering and protecting’ the white race” (American Eugenics: Race,
Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism [Minneapolis: Minnesota Univer-
sity Press, 2003], 9).

200 | Notes to Chapter One

 17. Jennifer Terry makes clear the extreme attention to the body in trying to delin-
eate the differences between heterosexual and homosexual in possible abnor-
malities (“Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Sci-
entific Search for Homosexual Bodies,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives of
Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], 129–69).
18. Somerville makes the important connection between the racial science of eugen-
ics and the sexual science of sexology from the end of the nineteenth century to
the beginning of the twentieth (Queering the Color Line, 15–38). Ordover con-
nects sexological science in the early part of the twentieth century to immigra-
tion legislation and congressional debates (American Eugenics, 81–82).
19. Chad Heap writes about sociologists’ interest in the racialization and sexuality
of city space and how spaces of nightlife were often singled out as possibly queer
(“The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago School,”
Qualitative Sociology 26, no. 4 [2003]: 457–87). Heap’s work focuses on Chicago,
but in other cities social workers, vice investigators, policemen, tourists, and
even Harlem Renaissance writers drew meanings from city space through race
and sex.
20. Other scholars who have consulted the Committee of Fourteen reports at the
New York Public Library include George Chauncey (Gay New York: Gender,
Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 [New York:
Basic, 1994]) and Mumford (Interzones).
21. The details are from an investigative report form used in 1928 (C14, nypl).
22. Susan McClary, “Same as It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music,” in Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 32.
23. Ibid., 33. McClary has, in effect, taken notions of illocutionary force from the lit-
erary field and transposed them to music. In the process, she makes it clear that
music is a more powerful force than are texts because of the direct relation of
music with the body. Still, it may be useful to briefly return to the word-­centered
writings of Luce Irigaray in order to further illuminate the gendered meanings of
performance. Irigaray has noted that the female body could be a means of dis-
ruption if the limiting discourses that are enforced on the body could be illumi-
nated and therefore made transparent. In this way, Irigaray suggests that women
could rewrite themselves more accurately; as it is, woman “resists all adequate
definition” (This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter [Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985], 26). As women performing woman, artists can at-
tempt to define themselves against a cultural current. In the case of the 1920s,
female artists were able to begin to define themselves in resistance to popular
cultural images by singing the blues. Indeed, the Harlem Renaissance was very
much interested in self-­definition.
24. For information on who was playing where, see Roseland News, October 1923,
C14, nypl; “Roseland Offers a New Band,” New York Evening Graphic, 21 June

Notes to Chapter one | 201

 1932; “Cab Calloway at Roseland,” New York Evening Graphic, 13 April 1932;
James Gavin, Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret (New York:
Grove Weidenfeld, 1991).
25. Chick Webb, “Swinging on the Reservation,” recorded 29 October 1936, Stomp-
ing at the Savoy, with vocals by Ella Fitzgerald, Proper b000dnvrz6, 2006,
compact disc; Fletcher Henderson with Ethel Finnie, “He Wasn’t Born in Araby,
but He’s a Sheikin’ Fool,” composed by Edgar Dowell and lyrics by Andy Razaf,
recorded April 1924, on Fletcher Henderson & the Blues Singers, Volume 2, Docu-
ment Records docd-­5343, 1995, compact disc; Duke Ellington, “Swingtime in
Honolulu,” recorded 11 April 1938, Cotton Club: A Nostalgia Collection, Gallerie
gale 455, 2000, compact discs; Porter Grainger, “Hula Blues,” recorded April
1924, Porter Grainger in Chronological Order, 1923–1929, rst Records jpcd-
­1521–2, 1995, compact disc.
26. Anonymous report dated 9 May 1923, Box 35, C14, nypl.
27. Philippe Zani, liner notes, trans. Charlemagne, Hawaii’s Popular Songs: “Un-
forgettables,” 1920–1930, EPM Musique 995842, 1997, compact disc.
28. Quoted in Alan P. Merriam and Fradley H. Garner, “Jazz—the Word,” in The
Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (1960; repr., New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 21.
29. Ibid.
30. Kathy Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 146.
31. “Dreamland Dancing,” report, 3 January 1931, Box 35, C14, nypl.
32. I choose these words specifically for their intimations of racial and sexual d­ anger.
33. “‘Sax’ Tooter’s Bigamy Tunes Lead to Jail: Modern Pied Piper, Wed to 7 Wives,
Gets 21/2 to 5 Years in Sing Sing,” New York Evening Journal, 9 April 1931.
34. I am thinking here of Michel Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis
that forms of sexuality are created through the language that is meant to pro-
hibit them (The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
[New York: Vintage, 1990], 17–49).
35. Minutes, 7 December 1926, 573, City Council, 1647–1977—Board of Aldermen,
New York City Department of Records and Information Services, City Hall
Library and Municipal Archives, New York, NY.
36. According to the ordinance, places that allowed music did not need a special per-
mit if there was no dancing and if there were no more than three musicians who
played only piano, organ, accordion, guitar, or other stringed instruments. A
singer could be present, but only if the singer accompanied herself on one of the
aforementioned instruments. As Paul Chevigny has noted, the ordinance “for-
bade percussion as well as typical jazz frontline instruments such as horns” (Gigs:
Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City [New York: Routledge, 1991], 15).
37. Nathan Irvin Huggins notes that the white and black mixing that occurred
in Harlem was a way for both groups to gain a foothold in the artistic world,
though there were incredible racial disparities in how whites and blacks gained

202 | Notes to Chapter One

 those footholds (The Harlem Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press,
1971]).
38. “Roseland Dance Hall,” report dated 27 January 1920, box 34; “Moon Danc-
ing Studio,” report dated 19 November 1920, box 35; “St. Nicholas Rink,” report
dated 7 and 8 December 1920, box 34; “Yeaples,” report dated 7 August 1922,
box 37; “Sunbeam Dance Palace,” report dated 18 October 1923, box 37; “Yeaple’s
Dancing,” report dated 19 October 1923, box 37; “Happyland,” report dated 17
November 1924, box 37; “St. Nicholas Rink,” report dated 3 April 1926, box 37;
“Mayflower Dancing Academy,” report dated 29 September 1927, box 37; “Cathe-
dral Ballroom,” report dated 2 December 1927, box 37; “Rose Danceland,” report
dated 7 December 1927, box 37; “Romey Dancing School,” report dated 20 Feb-
ruary 1928, box 36; “Lincoln Square Dancing,” report dated 18 April 1928, box
37; “Bamboo Inn,” report dated 17 May 1928, box 37; “Roma Danceland,” report
dated 7 February 1930, box 37; and “Lincoln Square Dancing,” report dated 27
February 1931, box 35, C14, nypl. Romey Dancing School may be the same as
Remey Dancing School, given the various spellings of names in these reports.
39. “Spanish” may have referred to Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and other
Latino patrons or to men from Spain. For descriptions of dancing at Yeaple’s, see
“Yeaples,” report dated 7 August 1922, box 37; “Yeaple’s Dancing,” report dated
19 October 1923, box 37; “Yeaple’s Dancing School,” report dated 8 March 1928,
box 37 (which noted the presence of “Japs, Chinese, Philipinos and Argentines”),
and “Yeaple’s Dancing Academy,” report dated 11 April 1930, box 37; ibid.
40. Dreamland Dancing,” report dated, 6 and 7 November 1930, box 35; and
“Dreamland,” report dated 5 October 1931, box 35; ibid.
41. Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), 265.
42. Sherrie Tucker, “Together but Unequal: Dance Floor Democracy at the Holly-
wood Canteen,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American
Studies Association, Washington, DC, 5–8 November 2009.
43. Bruno Lasker, Filipino Immigration to Continental United States and to Hawaii
(1931; repr., New York: Arno, 1969), 99. For Filipino participation in dance hall
culture, also see ibid., 120, 139; Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Per-
sonal History (1946; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973). Lasker,
a German immigrant, was an interesting character in his own right. A social
worker associated with the Henry Street Settlement, he traveled to U.S. imperial
sites like the Philippines and Hawaii to write sociological reports for the Institute
of Pacific Relations.
44. Lasker, Filipino Immigration to Continental United States and to Hawaii, 99.
45. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas argues that the points of difference used to marginalize
these two groups were race for the Filipino men and class for the white women
(“‘White Trash’ Meets the ‘Little Brown Monkeys’: The Taxi Dance Hall as a Site
of Interracial and Gender Alliances between White Working Class Women and
Filipino Immigrant Men in the 1920s and 30s,” Amerasia Journal 24, no. 2 [1998]:

Notes to Chapter one | 203

 115–34). Mumford calls the dance halls the “quintessential border institution” be-
cause they hosted a heterogeneous group of racialized men, including Chinese,
Japanese, Filipinos, blacks, and whites (Interzones, 53–71). Ronald Takaki also
writes about this type of marginalization, particularly in his recounting of Carlos
Bulosan’s days in the dance halls on the West Coast (Strangers from a Different
Shore: A History of Asian Americans [New York: Penguin, 1989], 339–40, 347–48).
46. For a much more hopeful reading of racial mixing in dance halls, see Matt
Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los
Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
47. “Cathedral Ballroom,” report dated 2 December 1927, box 37, C14, nypl.
48. For more on white women entering the workforce and spaces of public amuse-
ment see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-­
of-­the-­Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); for more
on men of color and white women in dance halls see Parreñas, “‘White Trash’
Meets the ‘Little Brown Monkeys.’”
49. Though Filipinos were sometimes considered Asian, at other times they were
considered black, or white, or Spanish, depending on who was viewing them. As
an illustration of the confusion over racial categories at the time, Lasker noted
in 1931: “Until lately, there has been much uncertainty concerning the Filipino’s
‘official’ race in states that impose restrictions upon marriages between Mongo-
lians and white. Marriages between Filipinos and white women were frequent,
and it was left, apparently, to the discretion of county clerks in issuing licenses to
decide on the racial membership of applicants. . . . The majority of officials seem,
without any recourse to science at all, to have married Filipinos indiscriminately
with white and with Japanese and Chinese girls, thus exposing themselves to the
possible charge that if Filipinos should through some court decision be declared
to be white, then their marriages to the Asiatic girls would be illegal” (Filipino
Immigration to Continental United States and to Hawaii, 118).
50. Anonymous report, 2 December 1927, C14, nypl.
51. “Cathedral Ballroom,” report dated 2 December 1927, box 37, C14, nypl.
52. Frank Dolan, “Spider Web Lures Old Harlem Fans,” (clipping) Saturday News,
2 November 1929, C14, nypl. Confirmation that the operator was a Chinese man
appears in a “Bamboo Inn,” report dated 17 May 1928, box 37; ibid.
53. Dolan, “Spider Web Lures Old Harlem Fans.”
54. Ibid.
55. See Yutian Wong’s discussion about the orientalisms that informed the innova-
tions of those white women named as founders of U.S. avant-­garde dance move-
ments (Choreographing Asian America [Middlebury, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2010]).
56. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 6.
57. Ibid.; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 17.
58. According to Burton W. Peretti, McLaughlin was later suspended for being part
of an operation that framed young women as prostitutes (Nightclub City: Politics

204 | Notes to Chapter One

 and Amusement in Manhattan [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007], 139).
59. Judith Butler writes about the constitutive nature of juridical discourses, arguing
that “the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as
‘the subject’ of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given ver-
sion of representational politics” (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 2). Vivian Gordon was produced both
as a prostitute and an unfit mother by her husband, the police, and the court
system. Produced as such, she lived a life of suspect sexuality.
60. Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 71–72.
61. “Gigolo May Hold Key to Moth Murder,” New York Evening Journal, 14 March
1931.
62. Gaylyn Studlar, “‘Out-­Salomeing Salome’: Dance, the New Woman, and Fan
Magazine Orientalism,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew
Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1997), 116. Lea Jacobs describes the vamp as a common character in “fallen
woman” films, a woman who “often got rich at the expense of her male victims”
(The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995], 12).
63. Joanne J. Meyerowitz notes that a similar gold-­digging phenomenon occurred
in the lesbian community in Chicago, where women were paid to go out with
wealthier women. The paid escorts would sometimes keep the names and ad-
dresses of these women and later borrow money from them. Meyerowitz also
shows that there were kept women in wholly lesbian relationships (Women
Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988], 114). Brian Donovan also works on the figure of the 1920s
gold digger (“The Peggy Joyce Scandals: Gold Diggers and Whiteness in Jazz-­
Age America,” paper presented at the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute, Texas
A & M University, 5 February 2010).
64. Harun al-­Rashid was a caliph in the eighth and ninth centuries.
65. “Probe Suicide of Vivian’s Daughter: Girl Faces Quiz on Vivian’s ‘Daddy,’” New
York Evening Journal, 4 March 1931.
66. Quoted in “Vivian Raved at Daughter after Last Meeting,” ibid., 6 March 1931.
67. “Trace Car in Vivian Gordon Murder: Slain Girl Is Linked to Dope Racket,”
ibid., 3 March 1931. The Cuban Mrs. Halsey, a maid, did not fare well in some
reporters’ estimation. Reporters pointed out her nationality and also noted
that she was an unreliable witness because she changed her story. The Evening
Graphic was somewhat understanding, since her story changed only after men
came to her door to douse her with acid, but the Evening Journal seemed less
inclined to be forgiving. The removal of this potential witness from the police
investigations as well as from the court proceedings, first by the acid-­throwing
thugs and second by the newspapers, suggests that Mrs. Halsey’s ability to be

Notes to Chapter one | 205

 considered a U.S. citizen was at stake as a result of her simultaneous gendering
and racialization.
68. Paul Biese Trio with Frank Crumit, “Chile Bean,” recorded in 1920, 1920: “Even
Water’s Getting Weaker,” Archeophone 9001A, 2004, compact disc.
69. Winthrop Jordan writes about an “unthinking decision” in regard to why blacks
were seen as automatic candidates for English slavery (White over Black: Ameri-
can Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 [Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1968], 44). In short, they fit Englishmen’s notion of who was to be
enslaved, and the English just happened on them and the Spanish and Portu-
guese slave traders. Likewise, stereotypes of Latino men fit many white people’s
imaginations of a sexual murderer. Because they were known as hot-­tempered,
but not too smart, Latino Americans could easily be pushed to the fore in
cases involving sexual danger (ibid., 44–98). Feelings that Latinos were vora-
cious, even dangerous, lovers were so prevalent that when Helen Brown Norden
wrote “Latins Are Lousy Lovers” as an anonymous article for Vanity Fair in the
1930s, her words were shocking. She used the stereotypes of Latino, particularly
Cuban, men’s sensuality and willingness to discourse on sex to argue that these
men were talkers rather than doers (The Hussy’s Handbook [New York: Arden,
1942], 3–19). The stereotypes, however, had such a strong hold on the American
imagination that the article was received with amazement.
70. Quoted in “Detective Burns Sees Diaries as Murder Key,” New York Evening Jour-
nal, 5 March 1931.
71. “Dot King’s Life Story Traced,” New York Evening Journal, 5 March 1931.
72. Alex Feinberg, “Gigolo Angle in Vivian Death,” New York Evening Journal, 18
March 1931.
73. “Gigolo May Hold Key to Moth Murder.”
74. Feinberg, “Gigolo Angle in Vivian Death.”
75. Michel Foucault describes the level of control that can instituted over another’s
body in his important study of space and the construction of identity in Disci-
pline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vin-
tage, 1979]). Sandra Lee Bartky argues that one of the purposes of disciplining a
body is to “bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures,
and movements” (“Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal
Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond
and Lee Quinby [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988], 64). She also
argues that a body can be disciplined specifically to be feminine. Her arguments
point to a reading in which the dancing figures of the article by Feinberg are
struggling against gendered norms at an intimate level. McClary makes the con-
nection between discipline and music specific in “Same as It Ever Was.”
76. The Jazz Singer used blackface in an obvious way. Sophie Tucker, discussed in
chapter 3, was a huge vaudevillian star for decades. In the Gilded Age, she had
been known as a “coon shouter,” a woman performing songs in a black style.
Her performances depended on these types of racial crossings. Of course, black-

206 | Notes to Chapter One

 face discourse continues throughout the twentieth century. In the documen-
tary Color Adjustment, the cultural studies scholar Herman Gray argues that
J. J. Walker’s character in the television sitcom Good Times was also dependent
on the figure of the “dandified” gentleman from the minstrel tradition. (Marlon
Riggs, dir., Color Adjustment [San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2004, dvd]).
Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (Brooklyn, NY: Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks/New
Line Cinema, 2000, dvd) argues that blackface is still part of the entertainment
industry.
77. See Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black
Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
78. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 259. In
Wilentz’s account, the blacking up of the arriviste was a safe way to mock both
white interlocutors and blacks, but the bulk of his argument centers on how the
white working class disdained the presumably white upper class. Other works
on minstrelsy also comment on the subversive potential that blacking up has for
the white, male working class. David Roediger questions the oppositional nature
of blackface, setting new limits for exploring the meanings of black represen-
tation (The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class [New York: Verso, 1991], 116–27). George Lipsitz, in discussing the case of
Amos ’n’ Andy, explores the dialectical relationship of white and black culture in
the production of blackface radio: “The desire to subjugate and degrade black
people had political and economic imperatives of its own, but emotional and
psychic reinforcement for that exploitation came from the ways in which racist
stereotypes enabled whites to accept the suppression of their natural selves”
(Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 64). Eric Lott has written a book-­length
study of the nuances of this same dialectical relationship (Love and Theft: Black-
face Minstrelsy and the American Working Class [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993]). For the effects that blackface activities had on black communities
specifically during the Jazz Age in New York, see Huggins, The Harlem Renais-
sance, 244–301. The character of the Duke also recalls the deceptive carpetbag-
gers in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Duke and the
Dauphin. The echoing of these well-­known literary characters seems to equate
Feinberg’s Duke with a pretending white aristocracy à la Wilentz, but, again,
the comedic value and the fun poked at this creation was limited in Feinberg’s
article; rather, the Duke’s deception pointed to danger.
79. Feinberg, “Gigolo Angle in Vivian Death.”
80. Monica Miller notes: “Black dandies may seem to mimic European dress styles
in an effort to accrue power associated with whiteness. Such repetition, however,
is never a strict copy of the original style” (Slaves to Fashion, 14). Miller sees this
as a moment of liberatory potential, and the desire to deride and control behav-
ior at the level of dress certainly speaks to the fear of this potential. She also de-

Notes to Chapter one | 207

 scribes black dandyism as “a knowingness, acknowledgement, and capitalization
of the intersection of image and identity” (ibid., 41).
81. Feinberg, “Gigolo Angle in Vivian Death.”
82. Ibid.
83. Anonymous report, 27 February 1928, box 36, C14, nypl.
84. “Report on Cabaret Situation, 1917,” December 1917, box 31; ibid.
85. In writing about the creation of lesbian communities around Greenwich Village
and Harlem, Mizejewski argues: “Some feminists in the first two decades of the
century, responding to [the sexologist Richard Freiherr von] Krafft-­Ebing, delib-
erately took on male clothing as a political statement. On another level, available
knowledge about a lesbian sexuality made it possible for individuals to name a
desire” (Ziegfeld Girl, 86).
86. Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 152.
87. I have found no references to prove that Thurman had read sexological works,
but it is probable that he had. According to Thomas H. Wirth, Thurman’s room-
mate, Richard Bruce Nugent, read his father’s copy of Krafft-­Ebing’s case studies
at a young age (Thomas H. Wirth, “Introduction,” in Gay Rebel of the Harlem
Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H.
Wirth [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002], 8).
88. Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (1932; repr., New York: Random House,
1999).
89. For more readings of the “tragic mulatto” narrative, see Carby, Reconstructing
Womanhood; Somerville, Queering the Color Line; Sterling A. Brown, “Negro
Character as Seen by White Authors,” Journal of Negro Education 2 (1933): 179–
203.
90. Thurman also provides an exception in the African American literary canon by
being explicit about his queer characters. Sharon Patricia Holland notes that
African American literature and literary criticism often works through a disap-
pearance of queer identities (Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and [Black]
Subjectivity [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 104).
91. Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 33.
92. Carby notes that the figure of the mulatto generally filled two roles—a way of
understanding interracial contact and an expression of that contact (Reconstruct-
ing Womanhood, 89).
93. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public
Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–2.
94. Part of what is at stake in the policing of borders is the creation of safe spaces for
people of color, queers, and queer people of color within the nation. Lisa Marie
Cacho presciently argues that “imagined boundaries and arbitrary borders” can
be used to legitimate violence in the creation of a national imaginary (“Disci-
plinary Fictions: The Sociality of Private Problems in Contemporary California,”
PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002), 1–2.
95. Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, 106–7.

208 | Notes to Chapter One

 96. Ibid., 107.
97. For example, see, Sterling A. Brown, “The American Race Problem as Reflected
in American Literature,” Journal of Negro Education 8, no. 3 (1939): 286; De-
von W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, “Wallace Thurman,” in
Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction,
ed. Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise (San Francisco:
Cleis, 2002), 63; Singh and Scott, “Excerpts from the Novels,” 442–44.
98. Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation,
edited by Alain Locke (1925; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 57–74.
The work includes black Caribbeaners.
99. For more on the logic of the construction of false categories, see Denise Riley,
“Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). See also Butler’s discussion of Riley
(Gender Trouble, 3).
100. Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, 97.
101. Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 37. She further notes that at the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, sexological texts often
connected the figure of the mulatto with deviant sex categories: “The mixed-­race
body evoked the mixed-­gender body” (80).
102. The historian Lillian Faderman rightly points out that Thurman displays a cer-
tain ambivalence in regard to discussions of homosexual writing because of the
way he demonizes male homosexuality in particular, even though he was him-
self queer (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-­
Century America [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 69–70). The
similarities between characters in the novel and Thurman himself have also
been pointed out by Mae G. Henderson (“Portrait of Wallace Thurman,” in The
Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps [New York: Dodd, Mead,
1972], 155–56) and Elenore van Notten (“Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renais-
sance,” PhD diss., Leiden University, 1994, 223–40), who both note that, like
Emma Lou, Thurman had moved from a western town to attend the University
of Southern California, and later moved to Harlem. Van Notten also notes that
Thurman shared biographical similarities with both Alva and Truman Walter, an
intellectual doppelgänger.
103. Alva is misidentified by Faderman as “a black bisexual who is a scoundrel” (Odd
Girls and Twilight Lovers, 69) and by the literary critic Marjorie Garber through
a quotation of Faderman (Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday
Life [New York: Touchstone, 1995], 124). This misidentification again points to
both the powerful historical imagination of the Harlem Renaissance as solely
characterized by blackness and to the seeming invisibility of Asians’ contempo-
raneous presence. An exception to this type of misidentification is in Eugene
Arden, “The Early Harlem Novel,” Phylon Quarterly 20, no.1 (1959): 30.
104. Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, 128.
105. Even in contemporary scholarship, it is relatively new to speak about mixed-­

Notes to Chapter one | 209

 race pairings beyond black and white. See Christina C. Iijima Hall and Trude I.
Cooke Turner, “The Diversity of Biracial Individuals: Asian-­White and Asian-­
Minority Biracial Identity,” in The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian
Americans, ed. Teresa Williams-­León and Cynthia L. Nakashima (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001), 81.
106. I have written more on the connections between mixed-­race embodiment, im-
perialism, and sexuality in Fiona I. B. Ngô, “A Chameleon’s Fate: Transnational
Mixed-­Race Vietnamese Identities,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 51–62.
Kieu-­Linh Caroline Valverde (“From Dust to Gold: The Vietnamese Amer-
asian American Experience,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P.
Root [Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992], 158) and Cynthia L. Nakashima (“An In-
visible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-­Race People in America,” in
Racially Mixed People in America, 168–69) have written more on the sexualiza-
tion of mixed-­race individuals, particularly women.
107. Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 17.
108. Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, 97.
109. My reading of Alva’s body comes from the literature devoted to intersexuals,
transgendered people, and transsexuals. Through the theories of sex and gender
produced in these sites, it is possible to view Alva’s body as sexually ambiguous
at a physical level and to think through the meanings of that ambiguity and how
they point to the possibility of many sexes. For more on intersexuals, see Anne
Fausto-­Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” Sci-
ences (March–April 1993): 20–24; Fausto-­Sterling “How to Build a Man,” in The
Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, ed. Roger N. Lan-
caster and Micaela di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 244–48; Cheryl
Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” GLQ 4, no. 2 (1998): 189–211. For more
on transsexuals, see Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the
Rest of Us (New York: Vintage, 1993); Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Trans-
sexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995); Holly Devor, FTM: Female-­to-­Male Transsexuals in Society (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Sandy Stone, “A Posttranssexual Mani-
festo,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia
Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 280–304. Related work
on transgendered communities can be found in Judith Halberstam and Del La-
Grace Volcano, The Drag King Book (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999); Halberstam,
Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); David Valen-
tine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007).
110. Though Alva might be considered queer because his sex acts were non-­
normative, he may not have been considered homosexual because homosexual
acts were not necessarily connected to homosexual identities. In other words,
simply because Alva had sex with men did not mean that Alva was considered
homosexual. As Chauncey notes, in early twentieth-­century New York, effemi-

210 | Notes to Chapter One

 nate men may have been labeled “fairies” and deemed homosexual, but if men
behaved in a masculine manner, they were not necessarily named as homosexual
(Gay New York, 12–18).
111. See Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and Fake,”
in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American
Literature, ed. Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn
Wong (New York: Meridian, 1991), 1–93; Elaine H. Kim, “Asian Americans and
Popular Culture,” in Dictionary of Asian American History, ed. Hyung-­Chan Kim
(New York: Greenwood, 1986), 99–114. For works on Asian American masculini-
ties that critique these positions, particularly Chin’s, see Richard Fung, “Look-
ing for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in Q & A: Queer in
Asian America, ed. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 115–34; David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Mascu-
linity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Daniel Kim,
Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary
Politics of Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). For work on
queer Filipino men in the later twentieth century, see Martin F. Manalansan IV,
Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003); Victor Bascara, “‘A Vaudeville against Coconut Trees’: Colonial-
ism, Contradiction, and Coming Out in Michael Magnaye’s White Christmas,” in
Q & A, 95–114; Gil Mangaoang, “From the 1970s to the 1990s,” in Asian Ameri-
can Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Russell Leong
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 101–11.
112. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate
in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 144.

2. Queer Modernities

1. Thomas H. Wirth (editorial note) in Richard Bruce Nugent, “Early Works,” in

Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce
Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 66.
2. In the language connecting the stranger and distance, I am drawing on Sara
Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-­Coloniality (New York:
Routledge, 2000) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
3. Flier for Un Bal Primitiv, Committee of Fourteen Records, 1905–32, Rare Books
and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY (hereafter
cited as C14, nypl).
4. Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz
Age Harlem,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed.
Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: New
American Library, 1989), 324–25.
5. The racialized queering of words as they change meanings is also taken up by
Tavia Nyong’o in “Punk’d Theory,” Social Text 84–85, nos. 3–4 (2005): 19–34.

Notes to Chapter Two | 211

 6. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 139.
7. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San
Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). She does this throughout the book. For a discussion
of imperialism, in particular, see 23–35. For her work on race, gender, and sexu-
ality, see 37–45.
8. Helen H. Jun writes: “I refer to this contradictory process as black Orientalism,
in order to name the paradoxical dilemma endemic to struggles for black citi-
zenship. Nineteenth-­century black Orientalism cannot be reductively under-
stood as anti-­Asian racism but is instead a concept that situates the contradic-
tions of black citizenship in structural relation to American Orientalism and
Chinese immigrant exclusion. My use of the term black Orientalism displaces the
emphasis on group ‘intentions’ by highlighting how the institution of citizenship
compelled narratives of black inclusion that converged with the rhetoric and
logic of the anti-­Chinese movement” (Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and
Asian Uplift from Pre-­Emancipation to Neoliberal America [New York: New York
University Press, 2011], 6).
9. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, afterword by Slavoj Žižek (London:
Continuum, 2004), 39.
10. Gabriel Rockhill, the translator, provides a note about Rancière’s use of body in
ibid., 104, note 13.
11. Ibid., 39.
12. Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” in fire!! Devoted to Younger
Negro Artists, ed. Wallace Thurman (1926; repr., Westport, CT: Negro Universi-
ties Press, 1970), 33–39.
13. Richard Bruce Nugent, “Geisha Man (excerpt),” in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Re-
naissance: Selctions from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 90–111; Richard Bruce Nugent,
“The Geisha Man,” unpublished manuscript, 1928.
14. I am riffing here on Michel Foucault’s notion of the “author-­effect” in his clas-
sic work on subjectivity (“What Is an Author?,” in Critical Theory since 1965, ed.
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle [Tallahassee: Florida State University Press,
1986], 138–48).
15. Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 171, 239. In addition, Clare Kendry’s
skin is described several times as ivory (157, 220, 221).
16. Ibid., 157, 220.
17. Deborah E. McDowell traces the language of queer desire in Passing (Introduc-
tion to Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell [New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986], xxvi–xxxi).
18. Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1932; repr., London: Arcturus, 1967), 51.
19. Ibid.

212 | Notes to Chapter Two

 20. Thomas H. Wirth, introduction, in Richard Bruce Nugent, Gay Rebel of the
Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed.
Thomas H. Wirth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
21. Ibid., 8. Nugent’s older brother was a dancer on Broadway (see Richard Bruce
Nugent quoted in You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from
1892 to World War II, ed. Jeff Kisseloff [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1989], 283).
22. Wirth, introduction, 8. Richard von Krafft-­Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With
Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct, trans. Franklin S. Klaf, 12th
ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1965.
23. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Introduction to Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed.
Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 7.
24. Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
(New York: New York University Press, 2004), 77–78.
25. In terms of mimesis, I am thinking primarily of Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonial-
ism, trans. Haaken Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1988); Homi Bhabha, The Loca-
tion of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Diana Fuss, Identification Papers
(New York: Routledge, 1995).
26. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; repr., New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1.
27. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1990), 175.
28. Elisa Glick writes: “Thurman uses the tropes of Orientalized decadence in order
to construct queer identity as a secret, much in the way that Wilde does in The
Picture of Dorian Gray, but he does not position the black dandy’s rebellion as
fundamentally murderous” (“Harlem’s Queer Dandy: African-­American Mod-
ernism and the Artifice of Blackness,” mfs 49, no. 3 [2003]: 436).
29. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 1–28. See also
Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
30. Daniel Kim presciently warns against viewing African and Asian American
interracialisms as magical moments of manly homosocial alliance because inter-
racialisms are “fractured by the asymmetry of African and Asian American con-
cerns” (Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the
Literary Politics of Identity [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], xvii).
31. Curtis Marez argues that Wilde is racialized by his critics because of his use of
orientalist objets d’art and the conflation of orientalist signs with queer signs
(“The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium
Smoke Screen,” elh 64, no. 1 [1997]: 257–87). D. Kim repeats this reading in
Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow (153–54).
32. For more on the “queer of color critique,” see Ferguson, Aberrations in Black.
33. Ibid., 83.
34. Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory,” 20.
35. Judith Halberstam has also been exploring queer art practices that occur in the

Notes to Chapter Two | 213

 absence of queer bodies in her recent work on failure (The Queer Art of Failure
[Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011]).
36. Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing
of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 23.
37. Sherrie Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight? A Queer Question for Jazz Studies,”
Critical Studies in Improvisation 4, no. 2 (2008): 2.
38. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 55.
39. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), 7. See also A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renais-
sance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 131–32.
40. D. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow, 154 (emphasis added).
41. David Levering Lewis oral interview notes, Voices from the Renaissance Collec-
tion, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library,
New York, NY.
42. Nugent in Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 288.
43. Chandan Reddy’s reading of Du Bois and his talented tenth politics also points
to its connection to European empire building. Reddy writes of the talented
tenth ideology: “In focusing on spaces above and beyond the nation-­state, and
on cultures of supranational space formations, black cosmopolitanism must be
distinguished from its European variant, even if it maintains an ambivalent rela-
tionship to that variant” (Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State
[Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012], 75). His reading coincides with my
reading of a how even the production of a queer black aesthetic is still dependent
on this kind of ambivalent relationship with European cosmopolitanism and its
history in colonial contact.
44. Glick, “Harlem’s Queer Dandy,” 414–15.
45. Ibid., 415.
46. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Black Man’s Burden,” in Fear of a Queer Planet:
Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), 233. Scholars often repeat this claim as a way to point
out the importance of studying black queer writers during the 1920s, but this
formulation can also hide the fact that these queer writers were not well received
when writing queer. See Siobhan B. Somerville, “Passing through the Closet in
Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” American Literature 69, no. 1 (1997):
141; Michael L. Cobb, “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renais-
sance’s Impolite Queers,” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (2000): 329; Schwarz, Gay Voices of
the Harlem Renaissance, 1.
47. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 9.
48. I am drawing here on Voloshinov’s reading of linguistic practice as dialogic but
also on Bakhtin’s later reformulation of dialogisms as heteroglossic. See V. N.
Voloshinov, “Critique of Saussurian Linguistics,” in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected
Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Arnold, 1994),
25–37; Mikhail Bakhtin, “Social Heteroglossia,” in The Bakhtin Reader, 73–81.

214 | Notes to Chapter Two

 49. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1.
50. Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, 120.
51. Cobb, “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative,” 347.
52. D. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow, 154–55.
53. Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” 36.
54. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.
55. Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” 34–37.
56. Ibid., 36.
57. Subsequent Harlem Renaissance texts take up similar themes. For example,
Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry . . . (1929; repr., New York: Collier,
1970) explores interracial relationships, free love, and queer male characters who
have sexual relationships with both men and women. For my purposes here, I
focus on how queer aesthetics are introduced and brought into play, leaving the
varieties of sexuality for future scholars to decode.
58. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Vintage, 1982), 76.
These names come up repeatedly in scholarship of the Harlem Renaissance. See
ibid., 197; Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, “Richard
Bruce Nugent,” in Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Afri-
can American Fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and
Donald Weise (San Francisco: Cleis, 2002), 74; D. Kim, Writing Manhood in
Black and Yellow, 155.
59. Wirth, introduction, in Nugent, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, 11. Wirth
notes that this was also where Nugent met Valentino (10).
60. Nugent also references Freud in regard to structures of desire (“Smoke, Lilies
and Jade,” 34).
61. Mimi Thi Nguyen, “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and
Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror,” Signs 36, no. 2 (2011): 364.
62. Nugent “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” 36. Nugent’s use of the abbreviation “vd.” in
the first line of this quotation supports Wirth’s idea that the character of Beauty
must be based in part on the Panamanian Juan José Viana because this linguis-
tic formulation (short for “vos otros”) is common in Central America. Thanks
to the historian Mireya Loza for calling this to my attention. In a reprint of the
story the phrase is rewritten as “perdone me señor tiene usted fósforo.” Richard
Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance:
Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 81.
63. Ibid.
64. Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 124.
65. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 19.
66. Ferguson has written about how the feminization of African American men re-
lates to the formation of the sociology canon in “The Knee-­pants of Servility:
American Modernity, the Chicago School, and Native Son,” in Aberrations in

Notes to Chapter Two | 215

 Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004), 31–53.
67. On the aura, see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. with
an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,
1969), 217–52. On the aura and imperialism, see Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora:
Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), 27–54.
68. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skins, Black Face in American Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107, 111.
69. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, with a foreword by
Nancy J. Chodorow and an introductory essay by Steven Marcus, ed. and trans.
James Strachey (New York: Basic, 2000), 5.
70. The heads also make note of the racial trope of mixed raceness, but not just
through the juxtaposition of black and white. Ella Shohat notes that mixed-­race
identity was a part of life in ancient Greece and Macedonia (Taboo Memories,
Diasporic Voices [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006]).
71. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York:
Noonday, 1995). Douglas notes that skyscrapers became one of the distinguish-
ing characteristics of the city in the 1920s.
72. “Report on Cabaret Situation, 1917”; anonymous reports, 11 February 1917, 23
March 1917, and 12 October 1917; Fredrick Whitin, letter to Adams Brown, 14
November 1917, C14, NYPL.
73. “Report on Cabaret Situation, 1917,” early draft, ibid.
74. Irving Kolodin, The Story of the Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1950: A Candid History
(New York: Knopf, 1953), 597–606.
75. Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (1932; repr., New York: Random House,
1999).
76. Ibid.
77. Kolodin, The Story of the Metropolitan Opera, 605.
78. Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 24.
79. Ibid.
80. This scene also predicts a transformative passage in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
([New York: Vintage, 1947], 275–87), where the narrator gives a speech defend-
ing tenants’ rights in Harlem and then is forced by a mob to run up the stairs
of the building, cross several rooftops, and exit into the street as a transformed
man, now a political activist. The narrator of Ellison’s novel is also faced with a
birth at the end of his transformative run: a woman is about to give birth in the
building from which he exits. “What a hell of a time to be born,” he thinks, as he
bursts out onto the street a new man (287). Also, like Ellison’s character and, by
extension, his narrator, Paul later uses his own racial illegibility to become what-
ever he aspires to be.
81. Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 32–33.
82. Ibid., 25.

216 | Notes to Chapter Two

 83. Ibid., 24–25.
84. Ibid., 174.
85. Rachel Kent, “Time and Transformation in the Art of Yinka Shonibare mbe,”
in Yinka Shonibare, mbe, edited by Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs, and Anthony
Downey (New York: Prestel, 2008), 12–13.
86. Anne Anlin Cheng, “Skin Deep: Josephine Baker and the Colonial Fetish,” Cam-
era Obscura 69 (2008): 67.
87. Reddy’s reading of the character of Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
complements my reading here. Reddy sees Crane as creating herself as part of a
tableau vivant where she becomes an orientalized object rather than the subject
she aspires to become (Freedom with Violence, 129–30).
88. Opera itself has been characterized as a queer male practice. In Wayne Koesten-
baum’s widely read autoethnography of queer operagoers, he connects his love
of opera with his own coming of sexual age as a queer man: “[When] I began to
listen, again and again, . . . to the four operas I owned, I had by that time ac-
quired a boyfriend, a sexuality, and a hunger . . . to have opera take over my
reason, as if opera were the antithesis of reason” (The Queen’s Throat: Opera,
Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire [New York: Vintage, 1994], 18). In
Koestenbaum’s thoughts the opera narrative produces illogic. By extension,
then, he might imagine the queerness of opera as that which exceeds the logical.
I imagine, however, that the recirculation of operatic signs in the Jazz Age used
the contradictory modes of imperial logic that produced a queer black aesthetic
and epistemology. Of course, the title of Thurman’s novel is also a play on the
title of Stravinsky’s ballet Le sacre du printemps (The rite of spring), which—
especially in performances with Vaslav Nijinsky—has been hailed as a bench-
mark of queer cultural identification. Through the circulation of some of the
queer signs found in the genealogy of queer cultural production in Europe and
the United States, Thurman and Nugent simultaneously reiterated the terms of
empire and challenged its naturalization and stability.
89. For more on how sexuality, gender, and race can become illegible as part of
that variety, see David Henry Hwang’s reading of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly
(M. Butterfly [New York: Penguin, 1989]). See also David L. Eng, “In the Shadows
of a Diva: Committing Homosexuality in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly,” in
Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed.
Russell Leong (New York: Routledge, 1996), 131–52.
90. Cobb, “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative,” 347–48.
91. Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 175.
92. Thomas H. Wirth, “Richard Bruce Nugent,” Black American Literature Forum 19,
no. 1 (1985): 16.
93. Though both Bhabha and Hall set up the possibility of multiple meanings, the
importance of those meanings is quite different for the theorists: Bhabha sees
ambivalence as creating a space of possible resistance to empire, while Hall views
doubleness as the consolidation of racism. The possibility should be considered

Notes to Chapter Two | 217

 that they are both right because both outcomes are potentials from moments
of contact. See Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, 85–92; Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their
Eyes,” in Gender, Race and Class in Media, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 18–22.
94. Fiona I. B. Ngô, “The Anxiety over Borders,” in Embodiments of Asian Pacific
Islander Sexuality, ed. Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Press, 2008), 89–104.
95. Arguments of cultural appropriation also rely on notions of space as static,
where groups can be defined and crossings between groups can contain only
certain meanings.
96. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1983), 206–7.
97. C. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 86.
98. Ibid., 70.
99. Victor Mendoza, “A Queer Nomadology of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters,”
American Literature 77, no. 4 (2005): 816.
100. Nugent, “The Geisha Man,” 34.
101. Ibid., 4.
102. Ibid., 50.
103. Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, 140.
104. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998).
105. Bessie Smith, “Foolish Man Blues,” recorded 27 October 1927, Bessie Smith:
The Complete Recordings, vol. 3, Columbia Records C2K47474, 1992, 2 compact
discs.
106. Nugent, “The Geisha Man,” 27.
107. Ibid., 50, 25.
108. Ibid., 15.
109. Ibid., 50.
110. C. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 110.
111. Nugent, “The Geisha Man,” 51.
112. Chandan Reddy, “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the
Case for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights,” Social Text
84–85, nos. 3–4 (2005): 101–3.
113. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 45.
114. Cobb, “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative,” 347–48.
115. Nugent, “The Geisha Man,” 65.
116. Ibid., 63–64.
117. Ibid., 66.

218 | Notes to Chapter Two

 118. Ibid.
119. I am borrowing the idea of the queer aesthetic from Judith Halberstam, “Notes
on Failure,” lecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign, 14 April
2006. I am inspired by her use of the visual, though her visual objects are much
more abstract than mine, and mine mobilize racial tropes much more obviously
than hers.
120. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 39.

3. Orienting Subjectivities

1. Though their numbers were certainly quite low, some Arabs had already moved
to New York. Susan A. Glenn notes that Syrians were living on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan, working at home producing, interestingly enough, “kimo-
nos, lace, crocheting, and embroidery” (Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor
in the Immigrant Generation [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990], 73;
see also 56). It is important to note, however, that documents listing “Syrians”
could be referring to many different Arabic-­speaking national identities. In re-
gard to another neighborhood in Manhattan, a vice report on the general condi-
tions along Ninth Avenue between Thirty-­seventh and Forty-­third Streets in 1931
noted that the area was mostly populated by “Greeks, Turks, and Armenians”
(“General Conditions,” report, 29 December 1931, box 35, Committee of Four-
teen Records, 1905–32, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public
Library, New York, NY [hereafter cited as C14, nypl]).
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 284.
3. Melani McAlister devotes a considerable portion of her introduction to Epic En-
counters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East ([Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2001], 1–42) to thinking about late nineteenth-­century
and early twentieth-­century representations of the Arab world.
4. See, for instance, Said, Orientalism; Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of
Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 27–54; Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington, “We Think
Therefore They Are?: On Occidentalizing the World,” in Cultures of United States
Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 635–65; Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Ob-
jects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 116.
5. See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic
Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012).
6. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 12–13. Furthermore, Ahmed argues: “Objects become objects only as an
effect of the repetition of this tending ‘toward’ them, which produces the subject
as that which the world is ‘around.’ The orient is then ‘orientated;’ it is reachable

Notes to Chapter Three | 219

 as an object given how the world takes shape ‘around’ certain bodies” (Queer
Phenomenology, 120).
7. Lisa Lowe, “Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geogra-
phies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 193.
8. Yutian Wong, Choreographing Asian America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 13.
9. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 118.
10. Susan McClary, “Same as It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music,” in Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 33.
11. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 19; see also 1–52.
12. Ibid., 19–20.
13. Ibid., 20.
14. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1.
15. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 116–17.
16. Frank Crumit, “Palesteena,” recorded in 1920, The Roaring Twenties, Intersound
1401, 1997, 4 compact discs. All subsequent quotes from this song are from this
recording.
17. Quotes from “Becky from Babylon” and “Rebecca (Came Back from Mecca)” are
from Rebecca A. Bryant, “Shaking Big Shoulders: Music and Dance Culture in
Chicago, 1910–1925,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign, 2003,
222.
18. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4. Though Tsing writes about the
“transformation of tradition into modernity” (21) in terms of globalization as
happening from the 1950s onward, her methodology is useful in examining how
modernity and tradition were narrated in earlier moments of contact as well.
19. One account of this controversy appears in Theresa M. Collins, Otto Kahn: Art,
Money, and Modern Time (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002), 75–81. The figure of Salomé had also been circulated beyond the Bible in
Gustave Flaubert’s short story “Herodias” (1874), as well as in Oscar Wilde’s play
Salomé (1894, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley), on which Strauss’s opera
is based.
20. I am grateful to the dance scholar Yutian Wong for pointing out these conti-
nuities. For more scholarship on the shimmy, see Robert C. Allen, Horrible
Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991); Rebecca A. Bryant, “Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the
Shimmy in America,” American Music 20, no. 2 (2002): 168–87; Jayna Brown,
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

220 | Notes to Chapter Three

 21. For more on the specific orientalization of West Asia and North Africa, see Said’s
pathbreaking Orientalism.
22. Bryant, “Shaking Big Shoulders,” 222.
23. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 227.
24. Some scholars of orientalisms have noted that white women attempted to gain
power through the use of such orientalisms. See, for example, Elaine Showalter,
Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Virago, 1989);
Gaylyn Studlar, “‘Out-­Salomeing Salome’: Dance, the New Woman, and Fan
Magazine Orientalism,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew
Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1997), 99–125; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Ameri-
can Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Amy Koritz,
“Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allen’s The Vision of Salome,” in Mean-
ing in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), 133–52; Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White
Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
25. Studlar, “‘Out-­Salomeing Salome,’” 105–6.
26. Ella Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of
the Cinema,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein
and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 40.
27. “The Vampires” may have also been the name given to the musical number
performed by this “bevy of exotic beauties” at the Coconut Grove (“Coconut
Grove,” report, 22 January 1919, box 33, C14, nypl). Susan McClary notes the
“radical interchangeability of exotic types for the cultural Orientalist: Persian,
Greek, Jewish, Spanish, African—all wash together in an undifferentiated realm
of Otherness,” suggesting that the many guises these women took were impor-
tant only in marking them all as exotic, not because the individual cultures
that their garb was meant to invoke had special meaning in and of themselves
(Georges Bizet: Carmen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 30).
Again, though, this interchangeability is contextually specific and may not have
been true in other situations.
28. As mentioned in chapter 1, Bara’s promoters released the story that her stage
name had been chosen because it is an anagram for “Arab death”—a useful
notion considering the range of orientalist roles that she played. Furthermore,
according to David W. Menefee, the studio also promoted her as having been
“born in Egypt in the shadow of the Sphinx, half-­Arab and half-­French” (The
First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era [Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004], 2).
29. See Irving Kolodin, The Story of the Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1950: A Candid
History (New York: Knopf, 1953).
30. See Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
31. “Coconut Grove,” report, 22 January 1919, box 33, C14, nypl.

Notes to Chapter Three | 221

 32. Lewis A. Erenberg also notes this collapse of space. He calls this an “action en-
vironment” because of the interaction between performers and clients (Steppin’
Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930
[Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981], 114–45).
33. “Coconut Grove,” report, 22 January 1919, box 33, C14, nypl.
34. For an excellent history of the change in Parisian audience participation from
1750 to 1850, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1995). Johnson tells how audiences went from
being interactive to being silent and docile. For more on how danger was nar-
rated for female performers, see the next chapter.
35. Quoted in Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 41.
36. Gaylyn Studlar describes the doubleness of this kind of performative subjectivity
and its limits in relationship to orientalist fantasy film of the time as allowing
“women a fantasy release while they still (paradoxically) satisfied the regulatory
demands of [bourgeois] morality” (The Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Mascu-
linity in the Jazz Age [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], 116).
37. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48.
38. Lisa Lowe, “Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire, ed. Ann
Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 191–212.
39. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 121.
40. Though respectability became a possibility for formal performances like those
of Walker, vice investigators saw black women’s belly dancing in the much less
formal environment of cabaret dance floors as a cause for alarm. One report
from 1929 noted the goings-­on at the Lenox Avenue Club, a black and tan estab-
lishment in Harlem, where black and white patrons and performers could mix
during times of legal racial segregation: “The dancing was not supervised in any
manner as two couples were observed standing almost still in the center of the
floor and doing sort of a hootchy-­kootchy dance, in that they would rub their
bodies together, without interference on the part of the management and in
plain view of everyone” (“Lenox Avenue Club,” report, 26–27 September 1929,
box 36, folder 3, C14, nypl). The vice investigator finds out from a waiter that
this is normal for the club, and that the management does not like to interfere
with anyone’s “good time.”
41. Daphne Ann Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and
Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 328.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 338.
44. Brooks notes that “by breaking the color line in modern dance and performing
her own version of Salome, Walker staged her own coup of dominant cultural
forms and recentered them in the context of all-­black theatrical narrative” (ibid.,
333).

222 | Notes to Chapter Three

 45. J. Brown, Babylon Girls, 185.
46. Ibid., 182.
47. Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (New
York: Verso, 1999), 23.
48. J. Brown, Babylon Girls, 158.
49. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-­Coloniality (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 21–22.
50. For more on late twentieth-­century queer tourism, see Jasbir Puar, ed., “Queer
Tourism: Geographies of Globalization,” special issue, GLQ 8, nos. 1–2 (2002);
M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual
Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006),
66–90; Massad, Desiring Arabs, 160–90.
51. Quoted in Massad, Desiring Arabs, 10.
52. Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Liter-
ary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 175.
53. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 5 (emphasis
added).
54. N. Miller, Making Love Modern, 175.
55. Stephen Knadler, “Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Re-
naissance,” MFS 48, no. 4 (2002): 931.
56. For more on the Harlem ball scene, see Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The
Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Hidden from History: Re-
claiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus,
and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 324–25.
57. “Greenwich Village Affairs,” undated subsequent draft of a report originally
drafted in 1917, C14, nypl.
58. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-­Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 304–52.
59. Derrida, Archive Fever, 94.
60. George Melford, dir., The Sheik, 1921, special ed., with The Son of the Sheik, 1926
(Chatsworth, CA: Paramount Pictures/Image Entertainment, 2002, dvd).
61. D. Onivas, “Burning Sands: An Answer to ‘The Sheik,’” (New York: Richmond-­
Robbins, 1922); Harry B. Smith (lyricist), Francis Wheeler (lyricist), and Ted
Snyder (composer), “The Sheik of Araby” (New York: Waterson, Berlin, and
Snyder, 1921). “The Sheik of Araby” has become a jazz standard, recorded by
artists such as Sidney Bechet, Eddie Condon, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong,
Don Byas, Charlie Christian, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum, Jack Teagarden, and
Albert Ammons, as well as by more modern performers like Arlo Guthrie and
the Beatles.
62. Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (1926; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2000).
63. There are exceptions, discussed in chapter 1. For instance, newspaper accounts

Notes to Chapter Three | 223

 ascribed aberrational hypersexuality to Vivian Gordon’s fictional affair with
white lover Harry M. Joralman, described as “a Caliph of Bagdad.” However, he
also did not conquer this orientalization or orientation.
64. Fats Waller, “The Sheik of Araby,” lyrics by Harry B. Smith, composed by Ted
Snyder, recorded in 1939, Very Best of Fats Waller, rca B000050G8C, 2000, com-
pact disc.
65. Fletcher Henderson with Ethel Finnie, “He Wasn’t Born in Araby, but He’s a
Sheikin’ Fool,” composed by Edgar Dowell and lyrics by Andy Razaf, recorded
on April 1924, on Fletcher Henderson & the Blues Singers, Volume 2, Document
Records DOCD-­5343, 1995, compact disc. The lyrics in this version of the song
seems to hold some specifically queer potential: “All the gals and yellas, too, fol-
low him around the town the whole day through,” with “yellas” possibly replac-
ing “fellas” to clean up the song in the recording. The song originally appeared
in Lew Leslie’s Plantation Revue at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1923 and was
first recorded by Lena Wilson with Porter Grainger in March 1924 (Barry Singer,
Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf [New York: Schirmer, 1992],
132–33).
66. In an instrumental version of “The Sheik of Araby,” recorded by the band of the
famous saxophone player Rudy Wiedoeft in 1921 (he also recorded “Karavan”
in 1919, “When Buddha Smiles” in 1921, and “Suez” in 1922, all of which feature
orientalist musical themes), the creation of an imperial masculine self through
performance is more ambiguous (Rudy Wiedoeft’s Californians, “The Sheik of
Araby,” recorded in 1921, The Roaring Twenties, Intersound 1401, 1997, 4 compact
discs). Wiedoeft and his band performed orientalist music through the inclu-
sion of a flatted minor third, similar to “Palesteena.” In performance, Wiedoeft
and his band might be said to inhabit the same position as Lena, inasmuch as
they are American musicians performing songs meant to mimic the sounds of
the Orient. However, Wiedoeft had a reputation as one of the best saxophone
players around, and the recording also features an oboe, which takes the Orien-
talist lead. Here the orientalist signifiers are controlled through a musical lan-
guage of virtuosity, especially in the absence of the first-­person perspective given
by the lyrics. Wiedoeft’s performance could be read through his expertise, in
contrast to that of an Arab musician for whom such sounds would come natu-
rally, thus creating Wiedoeft’s masterful subjecthood through imperial logic.
67. Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 6.
68. Kathleen Pfeiffer, introduction to ibid., xxv.
69. Knadler, “Sweetback Style,” 900–901. Shane Vogel also lists “sheik” among terms
like “fairies,” “pansies,” “sweetmen,” “bull dikes,” and “bulldaggers” that signify
queerness, though I think the example from Van Vechten tells us that this was
not an overdetermined meaning at the time (The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race,
Sexuality, Performance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 20, 135).
70. Knadler, “Sweetback Style,” 900; Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandy-

224 | Notes to Chapter Three

 ism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009), 5.
71. Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 5.
72. Quoted in J. Brown, Babylon Girls, 210. Although Brown marks this as a moment
that possibly dissolves heterosexism, I am viewing it here more as a particular
gendered performance.

4. Dreaming of Araby

1. Irving Berlin, “Araby” (New York: Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, 1915).
2. George Melford, dir., The Sheik, 1921, special ed., with The Son of the Sheik,
1926 (Chatsworth, CA: Paramount Pictures/Image Entertainment, 2002, dvd);
Raoul Walsh, dir., The Thief of Baghdad: An Arabian Nights Fantasy, 1924, deluxe
ed. (Douglas Fairbanks Pictures/Kino Video, 2004, dvd). The Thief of Bagh-
dad took place in settings similar to those of the uptown nightclubs and caba-
rets, settings where the East is manufactured and then populated by Americans
looking for exotic adventure. Though there were no Salomé dances in the film,
the viewer was treated to exotic sets, props, and revealing costumes inhabited,
manipulated, and worn mostly by white actors and actresses. For discussions of
images of the Orient in film, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”:
Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Cul-
ture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
3. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, composers and lyricists of popular
music began using West Asian and North African themes. Orientalisms were
already “well established in fashion, design, and the arts” prior to the advent
of the 1920s, though the 1920s and 1930s arguably saw their escalation (Gaylyn
Studlar, “‘Out-­Salomeing Salome’: Dance, the New Woman, and Fan Magazine
Orientalism,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein
and Gaylyn Studlar [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997], 103).
4. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geogra-
phies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–212; Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender
Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial
Studies,” in Haunted by Empire, 23–67. I am thinking of Yinka Shonibare’s sculp-
tural pieces that feature often headless mannequins in Victorian-­style clothing
made from batik cloth, such as The Swing (after Fragonard) (2001) and How to
Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies) (2006). The cloth, which has become syn-
onymous with Africa, originated in Indonesia, which became a Dutch colony.
The cloth was copied in European factories and distributed in colonial Africa.
Shonibare’s art demonstrates how multiple spaces of imperialism can come
together both ideologically and materially (in this case, in both senses of the
word). For more on Shonibare’s use of cloth see Rachel Kent, “Time and Trans-

Notes to Chapter Four | 225

 formation in the Art of Yinka Shonibare mbe,” in Yinka Shonibare, mbe, ed.
Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs, and Anthony Downey (New York: Prestel, 2008),
12–23.
5. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic and Colonial Common
Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 107.
6. Though not the only sexual imperial discourses that existed during the Jazz Age,
the orientalist discourses explored in this chapter are also important for what
they foreshadow during the next century. Although scholars have followed the
U.S. imagination of these geographical areas and their inhabitants after World
War II, when the United States had a more direct imperial interest in the regions,
the early part of the twentieth century from the 1900s to 1930s has not been fully
explored, and my work here only adds to the conversation that has begun about
this time period. The images, performances, and sounds explored here antici-
pate the Islamophobia that reached fever pitch at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury and beginning of the twenty-­first. Whereas the affiliations between black
communities in the United States and the peoples of West Asia and North Africa
anticipate the spread of Islam across black communities at home. For more
on Islamophobia, see Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls 9, no. 2
(2007): 148–61.
7. Report, 8 February 1918, box 33; “Hotel Martinique,” report, 9 March 1918, box
33; “Egyptian Garden,” report, 21 February 1929, box 36; “The Old Lybia,” re-
port, 3 November 1921, box 34, Committee of Fourteen Records, 1905–32, Rare
Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY (here-
after cited as C14, nypl).
8. Sophie Tucker, “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” recorded in 1923, The Roaring
Twenties, Waves 1400, 1997, 4 compact discs.
9. Building on Michel Foucault’s definition, they describe a method as being
heterotopic as “it refuses to maintain that objects of comparison [such as races,
genders, and sexualities] are static, unchanging, and empirically observable, and
refuses to render illegible the shifting configurations of power that define stuck
objects in the first place,” Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson,
introduction to Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative
Racialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 9.
10. Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and
Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 6.
11. Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African
American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007),
144.
12. Paul Morand, New York, trans. Hamish Miles (1929; repr., New York: Henry Holt,
1930), 239.
13. Ibid., 270. Faustin Soulouque was president and emperor of Haiti in the middle
of the nineteenth century.

226 | Notes to Chapter Four

 14. Linda Gordon, “Internal Colonialism and Gender,” in Haunted by Empire, 428.
15. Ibid., 431.
16. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Vintage, 1982), 164.
17. Irving Berlin, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (New York: Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder,
1929). All references to this song are from the recording by Fred Astaire, “Puttin’
on the Ritz,” recorded in 1930, The Roaring Twenties, Intersound, 1401, 1997,
4 compact discs. Berlin rewrote the lyrics for the film Blue Skies, changing the
location of the song’s action to Park Avenue (Stuart Heisler and Mark Sandrich,
dirs., Blue Skies, 1946, special ed., with Birth of the Blues, 1941 [Universal City,
CA: Paramount/Universal Studios, 2003, dvd]).
18. In the sheet music from 1929, the wording is “why don’t you go where Harlem
sits?” (Berlin, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”), but both Harry Richman, who originally
recorded the song for the Broadway show Puttin’ on the Ritz, and Fred Astaire,
who popularized it, sang “flits.”
19. Wallace Thurman, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renais-
sance Reader, ed. Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2003), 39. His essays on touring Harlem also include
“Harlem: A Vivid Word Picture of the World’s Greatest Negro City” (1927);
“Harlem Facets” (1927); “Harlem Directory: Where to Go and What to Do When
in Harlem” (1928); “Harlemese” (1929); “Few Know Real Harlem, the City of
Surprises: Quarter Million Negroes Form a Moving, Colorful Pageant of Life”
(1929); and “Harlem House Rent Parties” (unpublished). See ibid., 32–39, 63–71,
and 73–74.
20. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; repr., New York: John-
son Reprint, 1968).
21. Fats Waller, “In Harlem’s Araby,” recorded May 1924, The Complete Recorded
Works, Volume 1, jsp Records, jsp927A, 2007, 4 compact discs.
22. According to Marcus Garvey, Grey was a “scoundrel” because he embezzled
monies from both the Black Star Line and the unia. Marcus Garvey, The Phi-
losophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, ed. Amy Jacques Garvey (Dover, MA:
Majority Press, 1986), 188.
23. Edgar M. Grey, “White Cabaret Keepers Conduct Dives,” 10 December 1926,
New York News, newspaper clipping, Box 82, C14, nypl.
24. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate
in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 160.
25. Grey wrote other articles expressing his suspicion of the interracial and inter-
national character of Harlem and how it affected the economic prospects of the
black residents. For instance, in his “Intimate Glimpses of Harlem,” he notes
that Harlem’s “population is not made up of Negroes alone, but of mixed bloods
generally—Mexicans, Porto Ricans, Cubans, East Indians, Chinese, Japanese,
half-­Jews, Jews, Filipinos and a few Negroes” (4). This multiculturalism, though
is a threat according to Grey, where Jewish people squeeze black residents for

Notes to Chapter Four | 227

 rent, and Asian American restauranteurs have taken the clientele from “so-­
called Negro food houses” (4). Edgar M. Grey, “Intimate Glimpses of Harlem,”
New York Amsterdam News, 27 August 1927, 4.
26. Grey, “White Cabaret Keepers Conduct Dives.” This string of associations oc-
curs earlier in the article than the part quoted above.
27. Langston Hughes, “Jazzonia,” in Locke, The New Negro, 226.
28. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 147.
29. Kirschke argues that “Du Bois also promoted African art as an inspiration for
the ‘high culture’ of modern art” (ibid., 153).
30. Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006), 166–200.
31. Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2002), 44. Goeser also uses this terminology (Picturing the New Negro,
34).
32. Goeser, Picturing the New Negro, 29.
33. Wallace Thurman, ed. fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists (1926; repr., West-
port, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970).
34. Goeser, Picturing the New Negro, 30. Troublingly, Goeser sees Egypt is linked to
“civilization” while the rest of Africa is implicitly “tribal.”
35. Kirschke also notes that Douglas used this in his 1927 illustration The Burden
of Black Womanhood, a technique influenced by his relationship with the artist
Winold Reiss (Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem
Renaissance [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995], 30, 83).
36. Tucker, “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day.” All subsequent references to this
song are from this recording.
37. “Coon shouter” was a name for white singers who built a repertoire of songs
associated with the African American tradition. For more on coon shouters, see
Nicholas E. Tawa, The Way to Tin Pan Alley: American Popular Song, 1866–1910
(New York: Schirmer, 1990), 65, 185.
38. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the
Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 214.
39. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-­Politics, Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 181–82.
40. “Americans Saved Tutankhamen Treasures, Halting Their Own Work to Serve
Science,” New York Times, 28 January 1923.
41. “Tutankhamen’s Tomb Is Revising History; It Reveals That Egypt Reached the
Zenith in Power and Arts in His Period,” New York Times, 27 December 1922.
42. Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial
Terrains,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan,
and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 26.
43. Jack Yellen (lyricist) and Milton Ager (composer), “Lovin’ Sam (The Sheik of
Alabam)” (New York: Ager, Yellen, Bornstein, 1922).

228 | Notes to Chapter Four

 44. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xix.
45. J. Smeaton Chase, Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun (New
York: J. Smeaton Chase, 1923), 16.
46. Ibid., 42.
47. Ibid., 47–48.
48. Ibid., 48.
49. Ibid.
50. Shohat, Taboo Memories, 32.
51. Ibid.
52. Chase, Our Araby, 48–49.
53. Shohat notes that this desire to master land is written through a language of
“masculinist desire” to conquer the feminine: “The masculinist desire of master-
ing a new land is deeply linked to colonial history and even to its contempo-
rary companion, philosophy, in which epistemology partially modeled itself
on geography. The traditional discourse on nature as feminine—for example,
Francis Bacon’s idea that insofar as we learn the laws of nature through science,
we become her master, as we are now in ignorance, ‘her thralls’—gains, within
the colonial context, clear geopolitical implications” (“Gender and Culture of
Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,” in Visions of the East:
Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar [New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997], 27).
54. Ibid., 28.
55. I borrow this notion of “anti-­conquest” from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.
56. Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casa-
blanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 32.
57. Ibid.
58. Chase, Our Araby, 19.
59. Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 22.
60. Chase, Our Araby, 18.
61. Ibid., 42.
62. Ibid., 42–43.

Conclusion: Academic Indiscretions

1. Robert J. C. Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New
York: Routledge, 1995) is one of the classic postcolonial texts that brings the race
and sexuality of empire home, in his case to London. See especially 1–2.
2. Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian American Critique (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003), x.
3. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, introduction to Strange Af-

Notes to Conclusion | 229
 finities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, ed. Grace
Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011), 1–2.
4. Cynthia G. Franklin, Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University
Today (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 136–37.
5. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2011), 27, 315.
6. Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil
Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 277.
7. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 83.
8. Ibid., 139.
9. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1996), 67.
10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 17–35.
11. I have drawn my reading of Jacques Derrida’s différance from his “Différance,”
trans. Alan Bass, in Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy
Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 120–36. The work also
appears in Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy
Kamuf, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 61–79.

230 | Notes to Conclusion
 Bibliography

Libraries and Archives

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT
The James Weldon Johnson Collection
Columbia University, New York, NY
Alfred A. Knopf Oral History Interview
August Mencken Oral History Interview
Carl Van Vechten Oral History Interview
George Samuel Schuyler Oral History Interview
Jazz Project Oral History Collection
Jimmy Walker Oral History Interview
Popular Arts Oral History Collection
Richard Rodgers Oral History Interview
Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY
New York City Department of Records and Information Services, City Hall Library
and Municipal Archives, New York, NY (nyc)
City Council, 1647–1977—Board of Aldermen (Minutes from the Board of
Aldermen)
Minutes from the Board of Estimate and Apportionment
New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal
­Archives, New York, NY
John F. Hylan, Mayor’s Papers
James Walker, Mayor’s Papers
New York Public Library, Special Collections, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,
New York, NY (nypl)
Carl Van Vechten Papers
Committee of Fifteen Records, 1900–1901
Committee of Fourteen Records, 1905–32 (C14)
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Eva Gautier Letters
New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
New York, NY (sc)
Aaron Douglas Papers
Alberta Hunter Papers
Arthur Alonso Schomburg Papers
Bert Williams Portrait Collection
Bill Robinson Portrait Collection
Charles Gilpin Photograph Collection
Claude McKay Letters and Manuscripts
David Levering Lewis, “Voices from the Renaissance” Collection
Ethel Waters Portrait Collection
Eubie Blake Interviews
Fletcher Henderson Portrait Collection
George Walker Portrait Collection
George Washington Glover Papers
Glenn Carrington Papers
Gwendolyn Bennett Papers
J. Rosamond Johnson Portrait Collection
Josephine Baker Portrait Collection
Jules Bledsoe Papers
Katherine Handy Lewis Papers
Langston Hughes Vertical Files
Lawrence Brown Papers
Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project
Louis Armstrong Portrait Collection
Ma Rainey Portrait Collection
Mamie Smith Portrait Collection
Marcus Garvey Portrait Collection
Negro Labor Committee Records
Paul Robeson Collection
Ralph J. Bunche Papers
Regina Andrews Photograph Collection
Samuel Edwin Heyward Papers
Victoria Spivey Photograph Collection
Voices from the Renaissance Collection
Wilhelmina Adams Papers and Photograph Collection
William Pickens Papers

232 | Bibliography
 Newspapers and Periodicals

New York Amsterdam News

New York Evening Graphic
New York Evening Journal
New York Times
Saturday News

Published Primary Sources

Bercovici, Konrad. Around the World in New York. New York: Century, 1924.
Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart: A Personal History. 1946. Reprint, Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1973.
Chase, J. Smeaton. Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun. New York:
J. Smeaton Chase, 1923.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1947.
Fisher, Rudolph. “The City of Refuge.” In The New Negro: An Interpretation. Edited
by Alain Locke, 57–74. 1925. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968.
Fitzgerald, Zelda. Save Me the Waltz. 1932. Reprint, London: Arcturus, 1967.
Hughes, Langston. “Jazzonia.” In The New Negro: An Interpretation. Edited by Alain
Locke, 226. 1925. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968.
———. “When Harlem Was in Vogue.” Town and Country, July 1940, 64.
Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 1930.
Kisseloff, Jeff, ed. You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from 1892
to World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
Krafft-­Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Anti-
pathic Sexual Instinct. 12th ed. Translated by Franklin S. Klaf. New York: Stein and
Day, 1965.
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell. New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Lasker, Bruno. Filipino Immigration to the Continental United States and to Hawaii.
1931. Reprint, New York: Arno, 1969.
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. 1925. Reprint, New York: Johnson
Reprint, 1968.
Morand, Paul. New York. Translated by Hamish Miles. 1929. Reprint, New York:
Henry Holt, 1930.
Norden, Helen Brown. The Hussy’s Handbook. New York: Arden, 1942.
Nugent, Richard Bruce. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work
of Richard Bruce Nugent. Edited by Thomas H. Wirth. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2002.
———. “The Geisha Man.” Unpublished manuscript, 1928. (The second part of this
manuscript was published in 2002 in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selec-
tions from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent.) Copyright 2002, 2012 Thomas H.
Wirth.

Bibliography | 233
———. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” In fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Edited
by Wallace Thurman, 33–39. 1926. Reprint, Westport, CT: Negro Universities
Press, 1970.
Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. . . . 1929. Reprint, New York: Collier, 1970.
———. The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader.
Edited by Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2003.
———, ed. fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. 1926. Reprint, Westport, CT:
Negro Universities Press, 1970.
———. Infants of the Spring. 1932. Reprint, New York: Random House, 1999.
———. Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting
Section. Girard, KS: Haldeman-­Julius, 1927.
Thurman, Wallace, and William Jourdan Rapp. “Few Know Real Harlem, the City of
Surprises: Quarter Million Negroes Form a Moving, Colorful Pageant of Life.” In
The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. Edited
by Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, 66–71. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2003.
Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. 1926. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2000.

Secondary Sources

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2006.
———. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-­Coloniality. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2000.
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics,
Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute, 1987.
Arden, Eugene. “The Early Harlem Novel.” Phylon Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1959): 25–31.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-­Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Auslander, Leora. “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-­Century
France.” In The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective.
Edited by Victoria De Grazia, 79–112. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Social Heteroglossia.” In The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings
of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. Edited by Pam Morris, 73–81. London: Arnold,
1994.
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982.

234 | Bibliography
Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal
Power.” In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Edited by Irene Dia-
mond and Lee Quinby, 61–86. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Bascara, Victor. “‘A Vaudeville against Coconut Trees’: Colonialism, Contradiction,
and Coming Out in Michael Magnaye’s White Christmas.” In Q & A: Queer in
Asian America. Edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, 95–114. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998.
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited with an introduction
by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
———. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter
Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1978.
Bentley, Toni. Sisters of Salome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Blanchard, Pascal, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron. Le Paris noir. Paris: Hazan,
2001.
Bontemps, Arna, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead,
1972.
Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Vin-
tage, 1993.
Bramen, Carrie Tirado. “The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americaniza-
tion.” American Quarterly 52 (September 2000): 444–77.
Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Cul-
ture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Brooks, Daphne Ann. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Free-
dom, 1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
———. “The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women’s
Corporeal Comedy.” s�f Online 6, nos. 1–2 (2007–8). Accessed 23 May 2013,
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/brooks_01.htm.
Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Brown, Sterling A. “The American Race Problem as Reflected in American Litera-
ture.” Journal of Negro Education 8, no. 3 (1939): 275–90.
———. “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors.” Journal of Negro Education
2 (1933): 179–203.
Bryant, Rebecca A. “Shaking Big Shoulders: Music and Dance Culture in Chicago,
1910–1925.” PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign, 2003.
———. “Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America.” American Music
20, no. 2 (2002): 168–87.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.

Bibliography | 235
Byrd, Jodie A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Disciplinary Fictions: The Sociality of Private Problems in Con-
temporary California.” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002.
———. “The People of California Are Suffering: The Ideology of White Injury in
Discourses of Immigration.” Cultural Values 4, no. 4 (2000): 389–418.
———. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unpro-
tected. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
Carbado, Devon W., Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, eds. Black Like Us:
A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction. San Francisco:
Cleis, 2002.
———. “Richard Bruce Nugent.” In Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and
Bisexual African American Fiction. Edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A.
McBride, and Donald Weise, 73–74. San Francisco: Cleis, 2002.
———. “Wallace Thurman.” In Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bi-
sexual African American Fiction. Edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A.
McBride, and Donald Weise, 63–64. San Francisco: Cleis, 2002.
Carby, Hazel V. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. New York:
Verso, 1999.
———. “‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometimes’: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” In
Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History. 2nd ed. Edited by
Ellen Carol Dubois and Vicki Ruiz, 238–49. New York: Routledge, 1994.
———. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­American Woman
Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Chan, Jeffery Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. The Big
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature.
New York: Meridian, 1991.
Chase, Cheryl. “Hermaphrodites with Attitude.” glq 4, no. 2 (1998): 189–211.
Chauncey, George, Jr. “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual
Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era.” In
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. Edited by Martin B.
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 194–317. New York: New
American Library, 1989.
———. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World,
1890–1940. New York: Basic, 1994.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Skin Deep: Josephine Baker and the Colonial Fetish.” Camera
Obscura 69 (2008): 35–79.
Chevigny, Paul. Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1991.
Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” In The
Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature.
Edited by Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong,
1–93. New York: Meridian, 1991.

236 | Bibliography
Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian American Critique. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003.
Clément, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Cobb, Michael L. “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Im-
polite Queers.” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (2000): 328–51.
Collins, Theresa M. Otto Kahn: Art, Money, and Modern Time. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. 1968. Reprint,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. The Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
———. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. Translated by
Alan Bass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
———. “Différance.” Translated by Alan Bass. In Critical Theory since 1965. Edited
by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 120–36. Tallahassee: Florida State University
Press, 1986.
———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Devor, Holly. ftm: Female-­to-­Male Transsexuals in Society. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997.
Donovan, Brian. “The Peggy Joyce Scandals: Gold Diggers and Whiteness in Jazz-­
Age America.” Paper presented at the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute, Texas
A & M University, 5 February 2010.
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Noonday,
1995.
Duberman, Martin B., Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. Hidden from
History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library,
1989.
Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca
to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Eng, David L. “In the Shadows of a Diva: Committing Homosexuality in David
Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.” In Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the
Gay and Lesbian Experience. Edited by Russell Leong, 131–52. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1996.
———. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2001.

Bibliography | 237
Eng, David L., and Alice Y. Hom, eds. Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998.
Erenberg, Lewis A. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of Ameri-
can Culture, 1890–1930. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981.
Ewen, David. The Life and Death of Tin Pan Alley: The Golden Age of American Popu-
lar Music. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1964.
Faderman, Lilian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth-­Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haaken Chevalier. New York:
Grove, 1988.
Fausto-­Sterling, Anne. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.” Sci-
ences 33, no. 2 (March–April 1993): 20–24.
———. “How to Build a Man.” In The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Po-
litical Economy. Edited by Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo, 244–48.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979.
Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.
———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage, 1979.
———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley.
New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. “Questions of Method.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.
Edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Translated by Colin
Gordon, 73–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
———. “What Is an Author?” In Critical Theory since 1965. Edited by Hazard Adams
and Leroy Searle, 138–48. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986.
Franklin, Cynthia G. Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University
Today. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. With a foreword by Nancy J.
Chodorow and an introductory essay by Steven Marcus. Edited and translated by
James Strachey. New York: Basic, 2000.
Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993.
Fung, Richard. “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn.” In
Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, 115–34.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Gaines, Kevin K. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights
Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Garber, Eric. “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age

238 | Bibliography
 Harlem.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. Edited
by Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 318–31. New
York: New American Library, 1989.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-­Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
———. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Touch-
stone, 1995.
Garcia, Matt. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los
Angeles, 1900–1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twen-
tieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Black Man’s Burden.” In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer
Politics and Social Theory. Edited by Michael Warner, 230–38. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1993.
———. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-­American Literary Criticism. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Gavin, James. Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1991.
Gewertz, Deborah, and Frederick Errington. “We Think Therefore They Are?: On
Occidentalizing the World.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism. Edited by
Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 635–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993.
Gikandi, Simon. “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference.” In Beautiful/Ugly:
African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Edited by Sarah Nuttall, 30–59. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in
Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Glick, Elisa. “Harlem’s Queer Dandy: African-­American Modernism and the Artifice
of Blackness.” mfs 49, no. 3 (2003): 414–42.
Goeser, Caroline. Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and
Modern Black Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
González, Jennifer A. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation
Art. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cul-
tures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Gordon, Linda. “Internal Colonialism and Gender.” In Haunted by Empire: Geogra-
phies of Intimacy in North American History. Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 427–51.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981.

Bibliography | 239
Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of
Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Introduction to Scattered Hegemonies: Post-
modernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Edited by Inderpal Grewal and
Caren Kaplan, 1–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skins, Black Face in American Culture. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
———. “Notes on Failure.” Lecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign,
14 April 2006.
———. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Halberstam, Judith, and Del LaGrace Volcano. The Drag King Book. London: Ser-
pent’s Tail, 1999.
Hall, Christine C. Iijima, and Trude I. Cooke Turner. “The Diversity of Biracial Indi-
viduals: Asian-­White and Asian-­Minority Biracial Identity.” In The Sum of Our
Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans. Edited by Teresa Williams-­León and
Cynthia L. Nakashima, 81–92. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
Hall, Stuart. “The After-­Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black
Skin/White Masks?” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representa-
tion. Edited by Alan Read, 12–37. London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996.
———. “The Whites of Their Eyes.” In Gender, Race and Class in Media. Edited by
Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, 18–22. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010.
Haney-­López, Ian F. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New
York University Press, 1996.
Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Hausman, Bernice L. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gen-
der. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Heap, Chad. “The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago
School.” Qualitative Sociology 26, no. 4 (2003): 457–87.
———. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Henderson, Mae G. “Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre: From Ethnography to Per-
formance.” Text and Performance Quarterly 23 (2003): 107–33.
———. “Portrait of Wallace Thurman.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered.
Edited by Arna Bontemps, 146–70. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.
Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of
Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjec-
tivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson. Introduction to Strange Affini-
ties: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Edited by Grace

240 | Bibliography
 Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, 1–22. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011.
———, eds. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racial-
ization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press,
1971.
———. Introduction to Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Hug-
gins, 3–11. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985.
Jacobs, Lea. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 43–66.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Johnson, Barbara. The Wake of Deconstruction. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.
———. A World of Difference. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1995.
Jones, Andrew. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese
Jazz Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
Jules-­Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
Jun, Helen H. “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-­Century Narratives of Race and U.S.
Citizenship.” American Quarterly 58 (June 2006): 1047–66.
———. Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-­
Emancipation to Neoliberal America. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
Jung, Moon-­Ho. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Jung, Moon-­Kie. Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor Move-
ment. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Translated
by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002.
Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Bibliography | 241
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon,
2002.
———. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk.’” American Historical Review 97, no. 5
(December 1992): 1400–1408.
Kellner, Bruce, ed. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era. New
York: Methuen, 1984.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Kent, Rachel. “Time and Transformation in the Art of Yinka Shonibare mbe.” In
Yinka Shonibare, mbe. Edited by Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs, and Anthony
Downey, 12–23. New York: Prestel, 2008.
Kim, Daniel. Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the
Literary Politics of Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Kim, Elaine H. “Asian Americans and Popular Culture.” In Dictionary of Asian
American History. Edited by Hyung-­Chan Kim, 99–114. New York: Greenwood,
1986.
Kirschke, Amy Helene. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jack-
son: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
———. Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity
and Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Klopotek, Brian. “‘I Guess Your Warrior Look Doesn’t Work Every Time’: Challeng-
ing Indian Masculinity in the Cinema.” In Across the Great Divide: Cultures of
Manhood in the American West. Edited by Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee
Garceau, 251–74. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Knadler, Stephen. “Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Renais-
sance.” mfs 48, no. 4 (2002): 899–936.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of
Desire. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Kolodin, Irving. The Story of the Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1950: A Candid History.
New York: Knopf, 1953.
Koritz, Amy. “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allen’s The Vision of Salome.”
In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Edited by Jane Desmond,
133–52. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Kurashige, Scott. The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the
Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2010.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
Lee, Robert. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1999.

242 | Bibliography
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-­Smith.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Lipsitz, George. American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
———. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of
Place. New York: Verso, 1994.
———. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Long, Alecia P. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New
Orleans, 1865–1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996.
———. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of
Intimacy in North American History. Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 191–212. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Ma, Sheng-­Mei. Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Manalansan, Martin F., IV. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Mangaoang, Gil. “From the 1970s to the 1990s.” In Asian American Sexualities:
­Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience. Edited by Russell Leong, 101–11.
New York: Routledge, 1996.
Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity,
1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies
in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Marez, Curtis. “The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s
Opium Smoke Screen.” elh 64, no. 1 (1997): 257–87.
Massad, Joseph A. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Translated by A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman,
Murray Last, and Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle
East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1991.
———. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Bibliography | 243
———. “Same as It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music.” In Microphone Fiends:
Youth Music and Youth Culture. Edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, 29–40.
New York: Routledge, 1994.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Con-
test. New York: Routledge, 1995.
McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender,
Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997.
McDowell, Deborah E. Introduction to Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing. Edited
by Deborah E. McDowell, ix–xxxii. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1986.
Mendoza, Victor. “A Queer Nomadology of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.” American
Literature 77, no. 4 (2005): 815–45.
Menefee, David W. The First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2004.
Merriam, Alan P., and Fradley H. Garner. “Jazz—the Word.” In The Jazz Cadence of
American Culture. Edited by Robert G. O’Meally, 7–31. 1960. Reprint, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998.
Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–
1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Miller, D. A. “Anal Rope.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Edited by
Diana Fuss, 119–41. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Miller, Monica. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic
Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Miller, Nina. Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary
Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Mills, Charles W. “Racial Liberalism.” pmla 123 (October 2008): 1380–97.
Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
———. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-­Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002.
Mizejewski, Linda. Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Mullen, Bill V. Afro-­Orientalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in
the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Nakashima, Cynthia L. “An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-­
Race People in America.” In Racially Mixed People in America. Edited by
Maria P. P. Root, 162–80. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.
Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: Basic,
1993.
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Ngô, Fiona I. B. “The Anxiety over Borders.” In Embodiments of Asian Pacific Islander

244 | Bibliography
 Sexuality. Edited by Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger, 89–104. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Press, 2008.
———. “A Chameleon’s Fate: Transnational Mixed-­Race Vietnamese Identities.”
Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 51–62.
Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and
Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror.” Signs 36, no. 2 (2011): 359–83.
Nyong’o, Tavia. “Punk’d Theory.” Social Text 84–85, nos. 3–4 (2005): 19–34.
Ogren, Kathy. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Ordover, Nancy. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nation-
alism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003.
Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930. 2nd ed.,
1971. Reprint, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. “‘White Trash’ Meets the ‘Little Brown Monkeys’: The Taxi
Dance Hall as a Site of Interracial and Gender Alliances between White Working
Class Women and Filipino Immigrant Men in the 1920s and 30s.” Amerasia Jour-
nal 24, no. 2 (1998): 115–34.
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-­of-­the-­Century
New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
Peretti, Burton W. Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Pfeiffer, Kathleen. Introduction to Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, ix–xxxix. 1926.
Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Porter, Eric. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists,
Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Powell, Richard J. Black Art: A Cultural History. 2nd ed. London: Thames and Hud-
son, 2002.
Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-­Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon, 2001.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Puar, Jasbir, ed. “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization.” Special issue, glq 8,
nos. 1–2 (2002).
Rana, Junaid. “The Story of Islamophobia.” Souls 9, no. 2 (2007): 148–61.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans-
lated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, afterword by Slavoj Žižek. Lon-
don: Continuum, 2004.
Raphael-­Hernandez, Heike, and Shannon Steen. AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, His-
tory, Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Reddy, Chandan. “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the Case
for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights.” Social Text 84–85, nos.
3–4 (2005): 101–19.

Bibliography | 245
———. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2012.
———. “Modern.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Edited by Bruce Bur-
gett and Glenn Hendler, 160–63. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Work-
ing Class. New York: Verso, 1991.
Ross, Marlon B. Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. New
York: New York University Press, 2004.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.
———. Orientalism. 1978. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1994.
Scheper, Jeanne. “‘Of la Baker, I Am a Disciple’: The Diva Politics of Reception.”
Camera Obscura 65 (2007): 73–101.
Schneider, Mark Robert. African Americans in the Jazz Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2006.
Schuyler, George S. Black and Conservative. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966.
Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Shohat, Ella. “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the
Cinema.” In Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Edited by Matthew Bernstein
and Gaylyn Studlar, 19–66. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
———. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York:
Virago, 1989.
Silva, Denise Ferreira da. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
Singer, Barry. Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf. New York: Schirmer,
1992.
Singh, Amritjit, and Daniel M. Scott III. “Excerpts from the Novels.” In The Collected
Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. Edited by Amrit-
jit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, 441–48. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2003.
Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­Imagined
Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
Somerville, Siobhan B. “Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contend-
ing Forces.” American Literature 69, no. 1 (1997): 139–66.
———. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in Ameri-
can Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

246 | Bibliography
Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New
Century. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic and Colonial Common Sense.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
———. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
———, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
———. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American
History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Inti-
macy in North American History. Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 23–67. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006.
Stoler, Ann Laura, and Carole McGranahan. “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Ter-
rains.” In Imperial Formations. Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan,
and Peter Perdue, 3–43. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007.
Stone, Sandy. “A Posttransesexual Manifesto.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics
of Gender Ambiguity. Edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280–304. New
York: Routledge, 1991.
Stovall, Tyler Edward. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Studlar, Gaylyn. The Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
———. “‘Out-­Salomeing Salome’: Dance, the New Woman, and Fan Magazine Ori-
entalism.” In Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Edited by Matthew Bernstein
and Gaylyn Studlar, 99–125. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Summers, Martin. Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the
Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2004.
Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the
Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1973.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New
York: Penguin, 1989.
Tawa, Nicholas E. The Way to Tin Pan Alley: American Popular Song, 1866–1910. New
York: Schirmer, 1990.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003.
Terry, Jennifer. “Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the
Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives
of Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacque-
line Urla, 129–69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Tucker, Sherrie. “Together but Unequal: Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood

Bibliography | 247
 Canteen.” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Studies
Association, Washington, DC, 5–8 November 2009.
———. “When Did Jazz Go Straight? A Queer Question for Jazz Studies.” Critical
Studies in Improvisation 4, no. 2 (2008): 1–16.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the
United States Taken in the Year 1910. Vol. 3, Population 1910: Reports by States, with
Statistics for Counties, Cities and Other Civil Divisions, Nebraska-­Wyoming, Alaska,
Hawaii, and Porto Rico. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913.
———. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Vol. 3, part 2, Population Reports
by States, Showing the Composition and Characteristics of the Population for Coun-
ties, Cities, and Townships or Other Minor Civil Divisions, Montana-­Wyoming.
Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932.
Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Valverde, Kieu-­Linh Caroline. “From Dust to Gold: The Vietnamese Amerasian
American Experience.” In Racially Mixed People in America. Edited by Maria P. P.
Root, 144–61. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.
Van Notten, Eleonore. “Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance.” PhD diss., Leiden
University, 1994.
Vogel, Shane. The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Voloshinov, V. N. “Critique of Saussurian Linguistics.” In The Bakhtin Reader:
Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. Edited by Pam Morris, 25–37.
London: Arnold, 1994.
Volpp, Leti. “The Citizen and the Terrorist.” In September 11 in History: A Watershed
Moment? Edited by Mary L. Dudziak, 147–62. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003.
Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995.
Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-­American Culture, 1920–
1930. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1995.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Work-
ing Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Williams, Raymond. Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London:
Verso, 2007.
Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston, TX: Rice Univer-
sity Press, 1988.
Wirth, Thomas H. “Richard Bruce Nugent.” Black American Literature Forum 19,
no. 1 (1985): 16–17.
Wong, Yutian. Choreographing Asian America. Middlebury, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2010.

248 | Bibliography
Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York:
Routledge, 1995.
Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Zani, Philippe. Liner notes. Translated by Charlemagne. Hawaii’s Popular Songs: “Un-
forgettables,” 1920–1930. epm Musique 995842, 1997, compact disc.

Discography

Astaire, Fred. “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Recorded in 1930. The Roaring Twenties. Inter-
sound 1401, 1997, 4 compact discs.
Crumit, Frank. “Palesteena.” Recorded in 1920. The Roaring Twenties. Intersound
1401, 1997, 4 compact discs.
Ellington, Duke. “Swingtime in Honolulu.” Recorded 11 April 1938. Cotton Club:
A Nostalgia Collection. Gallerie gale 455, 2000, 2 compact discs.
Grainger, Porter. “Hula Blues.” Recorded April 1924. Porter Grainger in Chronological
Order, 1923–1929. rst Records jpcd-­1521–2, 1995, compact disc.
Henderson, Fletcher. “He Wasn’t Born in Araby, But He’s a Sheikin’ Fool.” Recorded
April 1924. Fletcher Henderson and the Blues Singers. Vol. 2, 1923–1924. Document
Records docd-­s5343, 1995, compact disc.
Paul Biese Trio with Frank Crumit. “Chile Bean.” Recorded in 1920. 1920: “Even
Water’s Getting Weaker.” Archeophone 9001A, 2004, compact disc.
Rudy Wiedoeft’s Californians. “The Sheik of Araby.” Recorded in 1921. The Roaring
Twenties. Intersound 1401, 1997, 4 compact discs.
Smith, Bessie. “Foolish Man Blues.” Recorded 27 October 1927. Bessie Smith: The
Complete Recordings. Vol. 3. Columbia Records C2K47474, 1992, 2 compact discs.
Sol Ho’opp’i and His Novelty Quartet. “Hula Girl.” Recorded 7 March 1927. Chansons
Populaires Hawaiiennes, 1920–1930. epm Musique 995842, 1997, compact disc.
Tucker, Sophie. “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day.” Recorded in 1923. The Roaring
Twenties. Waves 1400, 1997, 4 compact discs.
Waller, Fats. “In Harlem’s Araby.” Recorded May 1924. The Complete Recorded Works,
Volume 1. jsp Records, jsp927A, 2007, 4 compact discs.
———. “The Sheik of Araby.” Lyrics by Harry B. Smith, composed by Ted Snyder.
Recorded in 1939. Very Best of Fats Waller. rca b000050g8c, 2000, compact
disc.
Webb, Chick. “Swinging on the Reservation.” Recorded 29 October 1936. Stomping at
the Savoy. Proper b000dnvrz6, 2006, compact disc.

Sheet Music

Berlin, Irving. “Araby.” New York: Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, 1915.
———. “From Here to Shanghai.” New York: Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, 1917.
———. “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” New York: Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, 1929.

Bibliography | 249
Onivas, D. “Burning Sands: An Answer to ‘The Sheik.’” New York: Richmond-­
Robbins, 1922.
Smith, Harry B. (lyricist), Francis Wheeler (lyricist), and Ted Snyder (ccomposer).
“The Sheik of Araby.” New York: Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, 1921.
Yellen, Jack (lyricist), and Milton Ager (composer). “Lovin’ Sam (The Sheik of Ala-
bam).” New York: Ager, Yellen, Bornstein, 1922.

Films, Videos, and Documentaries

Heisler, Stuart, and Mark Sandrich, dirs. Blue Skies. 1946. Special ed., with Birth of the
Blues, 1941. Universal City, CA: Paramount/Universal Studios, 2003. dvd.
Lee, Spike, dir. Bamboozled. Brooklyn, NY: Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks/New
Line Cinema, 2000. dvd.
Melford, George, dir. The Sheik. 1921. Special ed., with The Son of the Sheik, 1926.
Chatsworth, CA: Paramount Pictures/Image Entertainment, 2002. dvd.
Riggs, Marlon, dir. Color Adjustment. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2004. dvd.
Walsh, Raoul, dir. The Thief of Baghdad: An Arabian Nights Fantasy. 1924. Deluxe ed.
Douglas Fairbanks Pictures/Kino Video, 2004. dvd.

250 | Bibliography
 Index

Aberrations in Black (Ferguson), 73–74, alterity, 104, 130, 131, 158–59

199n5, 200n14, 216n66 ambiguity: drag performances as, 36–37,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 72–73, 100–101, 144–45, 152; femininity
207n78 and, 125, 139–47; gender ambiguities,
aesthetic production, 6, 8, 11, 24–25, 101–2, 105–6, 115; gender/sexuality
37–38, 75, 85–86, 181, 186 ambiguity, 101–2; mulattoes, 65–69,
affinities/affiliations: domestic/trans- 98–104, 199n9, 208n89; orientalist
national, 31, 136, 163, 189–90, 226n6; discourse and, 104–5; passing perfor-
indigenous peoples and, 184–85; na- mances, 36–37, 213n17; racial ambi-
tional affiliations, 31; pan-­Africanism guities, 105–7, 115–16, 217n80; referen-
and, 172, 174, 226n6; time/space, 136, tiality of the black body, 30, 75–77, 82,
180 85–95; sexual ambiguity, 101–2, 104–5,
African Americans: cosmopolitan- 210n109; use of orientalism to create,
ism, 12–13, 31, 159–60, 163–64, 166, 104–5. See also referentiality
175, 214n43; internationalism and, ambivalence, 111, 175, 184–85, 218n93
175; interracial contacts, 3–4, 213n30; America (Baudrillard), 113
narratives of inclusion, 197n47; na- Amos ’n’ Andy (radio show), 207n78
tional affiliation with U.S., 31; ori- anti-­immigration legislation, 4, 37, 39,
entalist Harlem and, 3, 164–71; pan-­ 197n41, 199n10, 200n16, 201n18
Africanisms, 172; primitivism and, 17, Anzaldúa, Gloria, 74, 212n7
60–61, 72–73; racial affiliation with Arabian Nights (Burton), 140
Asia/Africa, 31, 179–81; rationale for Arabs/Arab immigrants, 140, 219n1
enslavement of, 206n69; respectability Araby, discourses of, 1–2, 155–59, 161,
and, 166–70 164–71
Against the Grain (Huysmans), 111 “Araby” (Berlin), 1, 155–56
Ahmed, Sara, 20, 24, 31, 124–25, 126, 134, Arbian, Paul, 22–23, 103, 131–32, 171–72
137, 138, 211n2, 220n6 archives/archivists: archives of perfor-
Aida (Verdi), 141 mance, 146–47; as assemblage, 146–47;
al-­Rashid, Harun, 55, 205n64 black women’s subjectivity and, 137;
archives/archivists (continued) blackface discourse, 163–64, 176, 207n76,
Derrida on, 126, 134–35, 147; imperial 207n78, 228n37
selfhood and, 109–10, 121; instability blackness: archives of black women’s
of, 153; knowledge production and, subjectivity and, 137; black cosmo-
126–28, 134–35; meaning making politanism, 12–13, 31, 159–60, 163–64,
through, 31, 147; national borders and, 166, 175, 214n43; blackface discourse,
122; queer black aesthetic production 163–64, 176, 207n76, 207n78, 228n37;
and, 112–13, 146–47; repertoire vs., black orientalism, 95–97, 103–4, 107–8,
30–31, 126, 140; as simulacrum, 84; 212n8; black subjectivity, 137, 158–59,
use of term, 30–31, 125–26 173–77, 180–81, 198n51; black/white di-
Around the World in New York (Berco- chotomy, 3–4, 13, 25–26, 103–4, 193n4,
vici), 16 195n15, 210n3, 210n5, 216n70; queer
Asian immigrants/Asian Americans: Chi- black aesthetics and, 24–25, 28–29,
nese immigrants/Chinese Americans, 73–77, 94, 95–97, 103–4, 112–13, 119–
1, 3, 21, 22, 39, 197n45, 198n51; ethnic/ 20, 146–47; referentiality of the black
racial categorization and, 204n49; body, 30, 75–77, 82, 85–95. See also
Filipinos, 45–47, 65–66, 69, 203n39, black womanhood; queer black aes-
203n43, 204n45, 204n49, 211n111, thetic production
227n25; flâneurie, 12; interracial con- black subjectivity: Africanisms and, 173–
tacts with African Americans, 3–4, 77; of black womanhood, 137; compet-
213n30; masculinities, 46–48, 200n12, ing narratives of subjectivity, 180–81;
211n111; misidentification of, 210n103; cosmopolitan aesthetics and, 175;
narratives of inclusion, 197n47 diversification of, 198n51; geographic
boundaries and, 158–59
Bacon, Francis, 228n37 black/white dichotomy, 3–4, 13, 25–26,
Baker, Josephine, 16 103–4, 193n4, 195n15, 210n3, 210n5,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 215n48 216n70
Bal Primitiv, 102–3 black womanhood: black femininity,
Bara, Theda, 54, 132, 222n28 62–70, 135–47; Black Salomé and,
Barber of Bagdad (Cornelius), 55 135–39; as dancers, 59, 129, 222n40;
Barthes, Roland, 87 as embodiment of distance, 139; im-
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 206n75 perial selfhood of, 17, 125; orientalisms
Baudrillard, Jean, 113 and, 135–39; primitivisms and, 135–39,
Beardsley, Aubrey, 81, 119, 141, 220n19 159–60; respectability of, 139, 222n40.
belly dancing, 2, 129–30, 135, 165, 177–78, See also Walker, J. J.
222n40 Blue Skies (1946), 227n17
Bentley, Berenice Benson, 55 Boieldieu, François-­Adrien, 55
Bercovici, Konrad, 16 borders/boundaries: black/white di-
Berlin, Irving, 1, 155–56, 163–64, 197n45, chotomy and, 3–4, 13, 25–26, 103–4,
227nn17–18 193n4, 195n15, 210n3, 210n5, 216n70;
Bhabha, Homi K., 111, 218n93 borderlands, 74, 212n7; comparative
Birth of Politics (Foucault), 18, 136n31 empire studies and, 22–23, 77–78, 121–
black and tan clubs, 159–60, 222n40 25, 163; as contact zones, 13–14, 35–38,
black dandyism, 208n80, 213n28 45–46, 69–70; within dance halls,

252 | Index
 3, 13–14, 35–36, 69–70, 112, 199n10, cabarets, 44, 157, 195n20, 202n36
204n45; distance/intimacy through, Cacho, Lisa Marie, 197n47, 209n94
7, 21–22, 133; embodiment of distance California, 181–86
as, 139; gendered boundaries, 43–44, “Caliph of Bagdad, The” (Bentley), 55
51–52, 64, 135–39, 152; identity forma- Calloway, Cab, 1, 41, 198n51
tion and, 15, 25–26, 29–30, 73–77, 85; Carby, Hazel V., 138, 199n9, 208n92
immigration legislation and, 199n10, Caribbean/West Indian immigrants/
200n13; imperial logic and, 26, 188–91; Americans, 4, 10, 11–12, 35–36, 49,
instability of, 13, 23, 25–26, 32, 48, 56–58, 119, 196n28, 209n98
85–87, 115–16, 118–19; internal colo- Carrington, Joyce, 159–60
nialism and, 22, 162–63, 166–70; jazz Carter, Howard, 30, 156, 176, 179
cultures and, 8, 43–45; marginalization Carter, Marion, 33–34, 44
and, 204n45; mixed-­race bodies and, Chase, J. Smeaton, 181–86
63–65; multiracial spaces and, 44–48, Chevigny, Paul, 202n36
199n10; national boundaries, 21–22, Chicago, 9, 130, 201n19, 205n63
56–57, 119–20, 162–63; neighborhood “Chinatown, My Chinatown” (Schwartz
delineations of, 3, 6, 8, 12–16; policing/ and Jerome), 198n51
surveillance of, 162, 166–67, 209n94; Chinese immigrants/Chinese Americans,
queer black aesthetics and, 24–25, 1, 3, 21, 22, 39, 197n45, 198n51. See also
28–29, 73–77, 94, 95–97, 103–4, 119– Asian immigrants/Asian Americans
20; racialization and, 3, 25–26, 28–29, Chuh, Kandice, 188
38, 64, 73–77, 107, 135–39, 152, 199n10; City of Refuge (Fisher), 65
referentiality and, 76–77; remapping Clayton, Buck, 15
of, 166–70; sexual boundaries, 73–77, Clément, Catherine, 118
105–6, 199n10; spatial discourse and, Cleopatra, 22–23, 103, 131–32, 171–72
20–23, 36–37, 51–52, 73–77, 135–39, Cleopatra’s Night (Hadley), 22, 103
190; transformation/transgression of, Cobb, Michael, 89–90, 110
29–30, 43–48, 51–52, 57–59, 68–69, Collins, Theresa M., 220n19
79–80, 87, 89, 115, 118–19; unfixing of, colonial discourse: ancient Egypt and,
162, 166–67, 187–91; of urban spaces, 176, 178–79; boundaries of internal
3, 12–14, 22–23, 57–59, 74, 162; use of colonialism, 22, 162–63, 166–70; civi-
term, 20, 36; veiling, 141–47. See also lizationist logic of, 168; cross-­colonial
contact zone; spatial discourse narratives, 156–57; as destructive
Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 12 tourism, 168; domestic colonializa-
Brancusi, Constantin, 100 tion, 158–59; economies and, 161–63,
Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 25 187–88; empire building, 4–5, 162,
Brooks, Daphne Ann, 138, 223n44 214n43, 218n93; frontier mythologies,
Brown, Jayna, 138, 139, 176–77, 225n72 34–35, 51, 184; of Harlem, 161–63; im-
Bulosan, Carlos, 203n43, 204n45 perial discourse and, 181–85; indige-
“Burden of Black Womanhood” nous populations and, 162–63; internal
(Douglas), 228n35 colonialism, 161–64; spatial discourse
Burton, Richard, 140 and, 181–86; tourism and, 159–60,
Butler, Judith, 205n59, 209n99 165–66, 181, 184–85
Byrd, Jodi, A., 181 comedy shows, 133–34, 196n28, 207n78

Index | 253
Committee of Fourteen, 40–41, 50, 131– Crisis magazine (cover illustration),
32, 201n20 159–60
comparative empire studies, 22–23, crossing performances, 36
77–78, 121–25, 163. See also borders/ Crumit, Frank, 138, 139, 176–77
boundaries; internal colonialism; Cuban migrants/Cuban Americans,
nationalist discourse 56–57, 203n39
conquest discourse: anti-­conquest dis-
course, 183, 229n55; civilizing tour- dance forms: avant-­garde innovations,
ism, 183; comparative empire studies 205n55; belly dancing, 2, 129–30, 135,
and, 22–23, 77–78, 121–25, 163; domes- 165, 177–78, 222n40; costuming and, 7,
tic colonialism and, 158, 185–86; per- 62, 72, 102–3, 129–30, 132, 135, 143–44,
formance reception and, 132, 133–35; 225n2; hoochy coochy, 1, 2, 3, 129–30,
racialized contexts for, 22, 149, 158; 178; orientalisms and, 205n55; shimmy,
sexualized conquests, 149, 188. See 129, 220n20
also colonial discourse dance halls: black femininity and, 62–63;
Conrad, Joseph, 168 boundaries within, 3, 13–14, 33–34,
contact zones: ambivalence/multiple 69–70, 112, 199n10, 204n45; as contact
meanings and, 218n93; borders/ zone, 13–14, 35–38, 69–70; as demo-
boundaries as, 13–14, 35–38, 45–46, cratic/disciplinary spaces, 112; im-
69–70; dance halls as, 13–14, 35–38, migrants and, 2–3, 13–14, 33–35, 37,
69–70; as frontier mythology, 34–35, 38–40, 44–48, 69–70, 203n43, 204n45;
51, 184; Harlem as, 162; homosexual interracial sexuality, 35–38, 69–70;
contact and, 213n30; interracial con- jazz cultures within, 41–44; margin-
tact, 3–4, 213n30; interzones, 199n10; alization and, 204n45; masculinities
as intimacy, 8–14, 27–32, 44–45, 133– and, 62–63; racial labor and, 13; as
34; jazz cultures as, 35–38, 163, 177–80; racially border/bounded spaces, 3,
knowledge production through, 8; 13–14, 33–34, 69–70, 112, 204n45; racial
multiracial spaces as, 9–14, 35–38, mixing within, 13–14, 33–35, 204n46;
41–42, 44–45, 199n10; neighborhoods as sexual transgressive space, 13–14,
as, 13–15, 26, 31–32, 70; racialization 33–34, 37–38, 58–59, 69–70; in Thur-
practices and, 35–36; referentiality man’s The Blacker the Berry. . . . , 25, 37,
and, 26; as sexualized spaces, 42–43, 63–69, 104, 106, 215n57; vice legisla-
46–48; as spaces of possibility, 199n10; tion and, 14, 35–36, 40–41, 44, 69–70,
use of term, 35–36 112, 195n20, 202n36; white woman and
coon shouters, 176, 207n76, 228n37 interracial relations within, 27, 33–34,
Cornelius, Peter, 55 37, 57, 58–59, 204n48
cosmopolitanism: black cosmopolitan- Dancer, Harlem (VanDerZee), 135, 136
ism, 12–13, 31, 159–60, 163–64, 166, 175, decadence, 29, 84–85, 88, 89–90, 112,
214n43; imperial discourse and, 11–14, 119–20, 166. See also morality
21, 31–32, 39, 48, 49, 79; queer black Delapazieux, Lucienne, 61
aesthetics and, 88, 116–18; spatial dis- Deleuze, Gilles, 83, 113
course and, 175 Denny, Lorna, 61
costume balls, 102–3, 117–18 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 111, 126, 134–35, 147,
Covarrubias, Miguel, 93 191, 230n11

254 | Index
desire, 96, 149 course and, 27–28, 37–41, 66, 67, 86,
Desiring Arabs (Mossad), 140 114–15
dialogisms, 215n48 empire building, 4–5, 162, 214n43, 218n93
différance, 191, 230n11 Endless Column (Brancusi), 100
distance, 4, 16–18, 21–22, 23–26, 37–38, Epic Encounters (McAllister), 122, 219n3
100, 124, 211n2, 211n12. See also inti- Erenberg, Lewis A., 222n32
macy; spatial discourse eugenic sciences, 4, 14, 27, 38–40, 48, 62,
Dixie to Broadway (1924), 162 66, 200n16, 201n18, 201n19
Donovan, Brian, 205n63 Everybody Was Kung-­Fu Fighting (Pra-
Douglas, Aaron, 99, 173–75, 176, 179, 180, shad), 193n4
228n35 exoticism, 15, 104, 127–28, 137, 140–41,
Douglas, Ann, 194n7, 216n71 157–58, 169, 177–78
drag performances, 36–37, 72–73, 100–
101, 144–45, 152 Faderman, Lillian, 209n102, 210n103
Drawings for Mulattoes (Nugent), 97–103 Fax, Elton, 196n28
Du Bois, W. E. B., 88, 159, 172, 214n43, Feinberg, Alex, 58, 59–61, 206n75,
228n29 207n78
femininities: agency through perfor-
Ebony and Topaz (Johnson), 97 mance, 130, 222n36; black femininity,
economies: of colonialism, 9–10; gold-­ 62–63, 62–70, 135–47; through disci-
digging, 47, 54–55, 132–33, 205n62, plining of bodies, 206n75; feminiza-
221n27; impact of economic pressures tion of masculinities, 67, 96, 115, 151–52,
on mobility of women, 52–53, 55–56; 165–66, 180, 195n16, 216n66; flâneurie
impact on social relations, 52; of inter- and, 195n16; gender ambiguity and, 125,
racial Harlem, 227n25; of U.S. eco- 139–47; imperial discourse and, 129–31,
nomic and imperial power, 9–11, 34; 134–47, 229n53; modernity and, 11; race
vamp character and, 47, 54–55, 132–33, and, 62–70, 176–77; sexualization and,
205n62, 221n27 54; white womanhood and, 47
Edwards, Brian, 184 Ferguson, Roderick A., 24, 52, 73–74, 85,
Egyptomania, 22–23, 103, 131–32, 171–80 87, 158, 188–89, 190, 199n5, 200n14,
Ellington, Duke, 1, 41 216n66, 226n9
Ellis, Havelock, 61 Filipino Immigration to Continental
Ellison, Ralph, 217n80 United States and to Hawaii (Lasker),
embodiment: black woman as embodi- 204n49
ment of distance, 139; as borders/ Filipino migrants/Filipino Americans,
boundaries, 63–65; disciplining of 45–47, 65–66, 69, 203n39, 203n43,
female bodies, 206n75; gendered 204n45, 204n49, 211n111, 227n25
meanings of performance and, 201n23; fire!! (cover illustration), 174–75
mixed-­race bodies as multiracial Fisher, Rudolph, 65
spaces, 63–69, 116; of orientalist dis- Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 10, 91
course through Asian bodies, 79–80, flâneurie, 12, 195n16
105; referentiality of the black body, Flaubert, Gustave, 220n19
30, 75–77, 82, 85–95; self-­definition of Foucault, Michel, 17, 18–19, 27, 41, 191,
female bodies, 201n23; sexological dis- 202n34, 206n75, 212n14, 226n9

Index | 255
Freedom with Violence (Reddy), 214n43 Grewal, Inderpal, 21
Freud, Sigmund, 42–43, 100, 134–35, Grey, Edgar M., 166–70, 227n22, 227n25
215n60 Guam immigrants, 10, 34
“From Here to Shanghai” (Berlin), Guattari, Fèlix, 113
197n45 Gubar, Susan, 97
Guimares, Albert E., 57
Gaines, Kevin, 189
Garber, Marjorie, 144, 210n103 Hadley, Henry, 22
Garcia, Matt, 204n46 Halberstam, Judith, 214n35, 219n119
Garner, Fradley H., 42 Hall, Stuart, 28, 111, 218n93
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, 198n51 Haney-­López, Ian, 199n10, 200n13
Garvey, Marcus, 227n22 Harlem: as contact zone, 162; destructive
Gates, Henry Louis, 88, 214n46 tourism and, 168; discourses of Araby
Gauthier, Eva, 49 within, 24, 31–32, 158–59, 161–71; dis-
“Geisha Man” (Nugent), 29–30, 78, placement of boundaries within, 166–
110–11, 112–19 70; internal colonialism of, 160–64,
gender formation: gendered boundaries, 166–69; as Mecca, 15, 16–17, 18, 21–22,
43–44, 51–52, 64, 135–39, 152; gendered 164; multiculturalism of, 227n25; ori-
intimacy, 22, 133, 139, 140, 144; gender entalization of, 160–71; policing of,
normativity, 52, 64; mixed-­race bodies 161–62, 166–70; queer subcultures of,
and, 209n101; racial ambiguity and, 165–66; sexualizing discourse within,
67–68; racial formation and, 199n5; 169–70; white interlopers and, 1, 12,
self-­definition and, 201n23; sexological 163–64, 171, 193n1, 195n22. See also
discourse and, 63–64, 66, 67, 209n101 New York City
Gender Trouble (Butler), 205n59 Harlem Renaissance, 12–13, 15–16, 25,
geographies of scale, 12, 18, 36–37, 38, 76, 62–63, 80–81, 88, 96, 201n23, 210n103
78, 82, 114–15, 120, 133–34, 140, 157, 185 Hawaii/Hawaiian migrants, 2, 5, 10, 34,
Gibson, Ann T., 55–56 41–42, 129, 178
Gide, André, 140 Heap, Chad, 201n19
Gikandi, Simon, 16 Henderson, Fletcher, 41
Glenn, Susan A., 219n1 Henderson, Mae G., 209n102
Glick, Elisa, 84, 88, 213n28 Herring, Scott, 86
Goeser, Caroline, 159, 174, 228n31 heterotopic method, 158, 226n9
Good Times (television show), 207n76 “He Wasn’t Born in Araby” (Henderson
Gopinath, Gayatri, 64 and Finnie), 224n65
Gordon, Linda, 162–63 Holland, Sharon Patricia, 208n90
Gordon, Vivian (Benita Bischoff ), 27, 37, homosexuality, 37–38, 39–40, 61–62,
49, 51–61, 205n59, 224n63 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 211n110, 213n30. See
Gould, Stephen Jay, 200n16 also entries beginning with queer
Graham, Martha, 5, 49, 139 Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 158, 188–89,
Grainger, Porter, 6, 31–32, 41, 165–66, 226n9
224n65 Ho’oppi, Sol, and his Novelty Quartet, 42
Gray, Herman, 207n76 Hotel Martinique, 157–58
Great Migration, 9–10, 52, 194n7 Huggins, Nathan Irvin, 82, 203n37

256 | Index
Hughes, Langston, 15, 71, 93, 171, 174, ing narratives of subjectivity, 180–81;
195n22 contradictory aesthetic practices and,
Huhndorf, Shari, 184 111–12; crisis of referentiality and,
“Hula Blues” (Grainger), 41 26–27; of domination, 161–62; of inter-
Hull, E. M., 22 nal colonialism, 161–64; intimacy and,
Huysmans, Joris-­Karl, 11, 81, 88, 91, 116, 7–8, 21–22, 82, 125, 152–53, 172, 185;
119 knowledge formations and, 8, 23, 32,
188–91; as mode of meaning making,
immigrants/immigration: anti-­ 4–5, 20–21, 64, 74, 190–91; modes of
immigration legislation and, 197n41; differential valuation and, 78–79; re-
boundaries and, 199n10, 200n13; sistance discourse and, 36; spatial
citizenship and, 189, 197n41, 197n47, discourse and, 5–6, 17, 23–25, 122–23,
212n8; comedy routines and, 196n28; 156–57, 190; structural importance of,
cross-­racial allegiance and, 199n10, 189–90; use of term, 5, 188; use of the
200n13; dance halls and, 2–3, 13–14, palimpsest, 52, 188–91
33–35, 37, 38–40, 44–48, 69–70, imperial selfhood, 17, 107, 121, 125, 126–
203n43, 204n45; eugenics and, 14, 27, 185
39–40, 200n16; jazz cultures and, 10, Infants of the Spring (Thurman), 29, 63,
37–38; Johnson-­Reed Immigration Act 64, 84, 96, 104–11, 112, 114, 116–17
of 1924, 38–39, 199n6, 200n16; per- “In Harlem’s Araby” (Grainger), 2, 6,
manent residency and, 197n41; sexo- 31–32, 41, 165–66, 224n65
logical discourse and, 38–39, 201n18; “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day”
whiteness and, 200n13 (Tucker), 158, 173, 176–78, 179, 180
Immoralist (Gide), 140 internal colonialism: borders/bound-
imperial discourse: Chinatowns and, 1, aries and, 22, 162–63, 166–70; colo-
3, 21, 22, 39, 197n45, 198n51; colonial- nial discourse, 161–64; economies and,
ist discourse and, 181–85; connections/ 161–63, 187–88; through empire build-
initimacies created by, 126, 132, 156–57; ing, 162; frontier mythologies, 34–35,
cosmopolitanism and, 11–14, 21, 31–32, 51, 184; of Harlem, 160–64, 166–69;
39, 48, 49, 79; domestic colonialism, imperial logic of, 161–64; of neighbor-
158–59; femininity and, 125–47; the hoods, 160–64, 166–69; of New York
imperial city, 8–14; imperialist fanta- City, 73, 87, 91–92, 161–64; queer of
sies, 159–71; indigenous peoples and, color critique and, 22, 31–32, 163, 189;
184–85; New Negro movements and, spatial discourse of, 161–65; use of
81–82, 158, 164–65, 172; oriental dis- term, 31, 162–63
course through, 155–56; racial affinity interracial relations: African American/
and, 158–59; sexological discourse Asian American, 3–4, 213n30; black/
and, 69–70; westward expansion and, white dichotomy and, 3–4, 13, 25–26,
34–35, 173–74, 181–86, 229n53 103–4, 193n4, 195n15, 210n3, 210n5,
imperial logic: aesthetic production 216n70; within dance halls, 13–14,
and, 6, 8, 11, 24–25, 37–38, 75, 85–86, 33–35, 204n46; homosocial alliances,
181, 186; ambivalence and, 11, 190–91, 213n30; interracial sexuality, 35–38,
218n93; antithetical modes of, 186; 69–70; meaning making and, 64;
boundaries and, 26, 188–91; compet- queerness and, 215n57; racial affinities/

Index | 257
interracial relations (continued) “Jazzonia” (Hughes), 171–72, 173
affiliation, 22, 26–27, 31, 42–43, 75–76, Jazz Singer (1927), 205n75
138–39, 158–59, 179–81; racial ambi- Johnson, Charles, 97
guity, 65–69, 98–105, 199n9, 208n89, Johnson, James H., 222n34
210n106, 217n80; roles of mulattoes Johnson-­Reed Immigration Act of 1924,
in, 208n92; sexological discourse and, 38–39, 199n6, 200n16
27–28, 37, 67; sexualities as narra- Joralman, Harry M., 55, 224n63
tive device, 199n9. See also borders/ Jordan, Winthrop, 205n69
boundaries; contact zones; racial Jun, Helen H., 75, 197n47, 212n8
­affinities/affiliation; racial mixing juridical discourse, 44, 171–72, 205n59
intimacy: borders/boundaries and, 7,
21–22, 133; contact zone as, 8–14, Kant, Immanuel, 19–20
27–32, 44–45, 133–34; distance vs., 4, Kaplan, Caren, 21, 34, 89, 113–14, 117
16–18, 21–22, 23–26, 37–38, 100, 124, Kim, Daniel, 87–88, 90, 213n30, 214n31
211n12; gendered intimacy, 22, 133, King, Dot, 54, 57
139, 140, 144; imperial logic and, 7–8, Kipling, Rudyard, 168
21–22, 82, 125, 152–53, 172, 185; queer of Kirschke, Amy Helene, 159, 172, 228n29,
color critique and, 24–25; racial inti- 228n35
macy, 22, 26–27, 42–43, 75–76, 138–39; Knadler, Stephen, 143, 151, 152
sexual intimacy, 22, 42–44, 100; spatial knowledge formations: archives and,
discourse and, 14–15, 17–21, 75–76, 159; 126–27, 134–35; boundaries and,
use of term, 7–8, 156 29–30; contact zones and, 8; gendered
“Intimate Glimpses of Harlem” (Grey), formations and, 4; imperial logic and,
227n25 8, 23, 32, 188–91; interdisciplinarity
Invisible Man (Ellison), 217n80 and, 189; knowledge production and,
Irigaray, Luce, 201n23 126–28, 135; meaning making and, 32;
Islamophobia, 226n6 naturalization of, 126–27, 135; power
relations and, 31, 122–24; queering of,
Jackman, Harold, 93 77–78, 103–4; racial formations and,
Jacobs, Lea, 205n62 4, 157–58; repertoire and, 126–27, 135;
jazz cultures: black sexuality and, 170– scientific classification and, 85–87, 156;
71; boundaries and, 8, 43–45; caba- sexual formations and, 4, 90–92; spa-
ret laws, 44, 195n20, 202n36; as con- tial relations and, 90–92, 201n19; tem-
tact zones, 35–38, 163, 177–80; within poral relations and, 90–92
dance halls, 41–44; Egyptomania and, Koestenbaum, Wayne, 217n88
172–80; immigration and, 10, 37–38; Krafft-­Ebing, Richard von, 81, 208n85,
the Jazz Age, 1–5, 7–14; New Orleans 208n87
jazz, 197n46; as orientalizing signi- Krigwa Players Poster (Douglas), 173–74
fier, 170–71; primitivism and, 42–43;
prohibition of percussion ordinance, Là-­bas (Huysmans), 88
202n36; sexual associations of, 42–43; Lang, Fritz, 100
subject formation and, 41; transna- Larsen, Nella, 79, 91, 95, 213n15, 217n87
tionalism of, 35–36 Lasker, Bruno, 46, 203n43, 204n49

258 | Index
Latino migrants/immigrants, 12–13, nalization of men of color and, 56–61;
34–35, 45, 56–57, 89, 93–96, 119, dance halls and, 62–63; feminiza-
203n39, 206n69 tion of, 67, 96, 115, 151–52, 165–66,
“Latins Are Lousy Lovers” (Norden), 180, 195n16, 216n66; flâneurie and,
206n69 195n16; masculine consumption and,
Lawson, Louise, 54 12, 195n16; masculinist desire, 229n53;
Lears, T. J. Jackson, 194n7. See also orientalized masculinities, 55–56,
Gordon, Vivian (Benita Bischoff ) 147–50, 180; queer black masculini-
Le Calife de Bagdad (Boieldieu), 55 ties, 62–63, 83–85, 143, 211n110; racial-
Lee, Bruce, 193n4 ized masculinities, 58–61, 62–63, 144,
Lefebvre, Henri, 19 200n12, 211n111, 216n66; white mascu-
legislation: cabaret laws, 44, 195n20, linities, 84–85
202n36; Committee of Fourteen, masquerade balls, 102–3, 117–18
40–41, 50, 131–32, 201n20; immigra- Massad, Joseph, 140
tion legislation, 4, 37–39, 197n41, Massey, Doreen B., 45
199n6, 199n10, 200n16, 201n18; McAlister, Melani, 122, 219n3
morality and, 29, 84–85, 88, 89–90, McClary, Susan, 41, 201n23, 206n75,
112, 119–20, 166; multiracial spaces as 221n27
spaces of regulation, 14, 35–36, 38–44, McDowell, Deborah E., 213n17
183, 199n10 McLaughlin, Andrew G., 52–53, 205n58
lesbians, 205n63, 208n85 meaning making: through the archive,
Leslie, Lew, 224n65 147; through geographies of scale
Lewis, David Levering, 163, 195n22, and aesthetics, 76; imperial logic as,
215n57 4–5, 20–21, 64, 74, 190–91; instability
liberation discourse, 190 of, 110; interracial relations and, 64;
Lipsitz, George, 189, 207n78 knowledge formation and, 32; across
Locke, Alain, 82, 164 national borders, 74; queer chaos of,
Lott, Eric, 207n78 147; through spatial modes, 20–21;
Lowe, Lisa, 7, 136, 156, 190 ­beyond U.S. borders, 193n4
Loza, Mireya, 215n62 Mendoza, Victor, 113–14
Lulu Belle (1926), 163–64 Menefee, David W., 222n28
Lunceford, Jimmie, 41 Merriam, Alan P., 42
methodology, 187–91
Madama Butterfly (Puccini), 29, 81, 103, Miller, Monica, 208n80
104, 110, 112, 119, 217n89 Miller, Nina, 141
Marez, Curtis, 214n31 Mills, Charles W., 19
marginalization, 204n45 mimesis, 83, 213n25
Mark Antony, 179–80 Minnie the Moocher, 1–2, 3, 17
masculinities: Arab masculinities, 147– “Minnie the Moocher” (Calloway), 1–23,
50; Asian immigrants/Asian Ameri- 17, 21, 198n51
cans and, 46–48, 200n12, 211n111; minstrelsy, 27, 53, 58–61, 176, 205n76,
black masculinities, 58–61, 62–63, 207n76, 207n78, 228n37
83–84, 143, 148, 180, 216n66; crimi- “Misery” (Hughes), 174–75

Index | 259
Mitchell, Timothy, 123, 178 7–14; orientalization through, 128–29,
mixed-­race bodies: black/white di- 176–77; spaces of musical perfor-
chotomy and, 3–4, 13, 25–26, 103–4, mances, 6–7
193n4, 195n15, 210n3, 210n5, 216n70;
borders/boundaries and, 63–65; gen- Naomi and Ruth (Nugent), 144, 146–47
der ambiguity and, 209n101; mulat- nationalist discourse: boundaries of
toes, 65–69, 98–104, 199n9, 208n89, nationalism, 22, 56–57, 119–20, 162–63;
208n92, 209n101; sexological discourse citizenship and, 189, 197n47, 212n8;
and, 27–28, 63–64, 209n101; sexualiza- domestic/transnational affiliations, 31,
tion of, 210n106 136, 163, 189–90, 226n6; eugenics and,
Mizejewski, Linda, 208n85 4, 14, 27, 38–40, 48, 62, 66, 200n16,
modernity: black modernity, 97, 119–20; 201n18, 201n19; extranational spaces,
femininities and, 11; industrialization 197n39; frontier mythologies, 34–35,
as modernity, 194n7; primitivism as, 51, 184; gendered knowledge of be-
119–20; queerness and, 116–17, 139–47; longing, 188; legitimization of violence
temporal relations and, 16; tradition within, 209n94; narratives of inclu-
and, 128, 220n18 sion, 188, 197n47; safe space within,
morality, 29, 84–85, 88, 89–90, 112, 209n94; subjectivity and, 197n39; vio-
119–20, 166 lence and, 191
Morand, Paul, 161–62 neighborhoods: anti-­immigration legis-
mulattoes, 65–69, 98–104, 199n9, lation and, 197n41; borders/bound-
208n89, 208n92, 209n101 aries and, 3, 6, 8, 12–16, 26; as contact
multiracial spaces: black/white di- zone, 13–15, 26, 31–32, 70; discourses
chotomy and, 3–4, 13, 25–26, 103–4, of Araby within Harlem, 24, 31–32,
193n4, 195n15, 210n3, 210n5, 216n70; 158–59, 161–71; flâneurie and, 12,
borders/boundaries and, 44–48, 195n16; instability of, 26; internal colo-
199n10; as challenges to imperial dis- nialism of, 160–64, 166–69; policing
course, 7–8, 35–36, 43–44, 45–46, 48, of, 26, 39–40, 152–53, 161–62, 166–67,
112, 199n10; as contact zones, 9–14, 219n1; racialization of, 58–59; spatial
35–38, 41–42, 44–45, 199n10; crimi- displacement and, 21–22, 166–70
nalization of men of color and, 56–61; New Negro: An Interpretation (Locke),
cross-­racial allegiance and, 199n10; 82, 164
dance halls as, 44–48; as interzones, New Negro movements: criticisms of,
199n10; mixed-­race embodiment as, 143; Harlem and, 164; identity for-
63–69, 116; as sexual spaces, 42–43, mation of, 97–100, 115–16; modes
46–48; as spaces of regulation, 14, of imperialism employed by, 81–82,
35–36, 38–44, 183, 199n10; as third- 158, 164–65, 172; New Negro intellec-
space, 199n10; women’s mobility and, tualism, 65, 71, 164; New Women, 1,
49–56 135–39, 159; Nugent and, 81–82, 84, 97,
Mumford, Kevin J., 199n10, 204n45 99, 114–19, 143; orientalism and, 164;
music cultures: Hawaiian music, 42; illo- pan-­Africanisms, 172; primitivism and,
cutionary force of, 201n23; immigra- 15–17, 29, 65, 71–72, 79–85, 97, 99, 172;
tion and, 10, 37–38; the Jazz Age, 1–5, queer black aesthetic of, 81–82, 84,

260 | Index
 97; reclamation of Africa and, 84, 158, 83–84; Salome: Negrotesque I, 141–43,
172–75, 228n34; respectability and, 143; 144; “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” 77, 87,
as signifiers of freedom, 1; Thurman 88–95, 116, 215n60, 215n62; Untitled
and, 143, 164. See also Nugent, Richard [Two Women], 144–46
Bruce; Thurman, Wallace Nyong’o, Tavia, 86, 212n5
New Orleans jazz, 197n46
New York City: African American migra- Ogren, Kathy, 43
tion to, 9–10, 52; Arab communities, Old Lybia, 158
219n1; Asian immigrants/Americans opera, 103–4, 110, 112, 114, 118, 129, 132,
in, 10, 12, 27, 34, 62–63; internal colo- 217n88
nialism of, 73, 87, 91–92, 161–64; Jazz Opportunity magazine (cover illustra-
Age demographics of, 4–5, 9; Latino/ tion), 71–73, 83–84
Caribbean immigrants/Americans in, Ordover, Nancy, 39–40, 200n16, 201n18
10, 34, 56–57; as modern metropole, orientalist discourse: Afro-­Deco, 173–74;
10–14, 34–35, 69–70; queer life within, ambiguity and, 104–5; of Asia/Asian
143–44; regulation of racial/sexual bodies, 79–80, 105; avant-­garde dance
encounters, 44–48, 157–58, 195n20, movements and, 205n55; black ori-
202n36; Vivian Gordon case, 49–61. entalism, 95–97, 103–4, 107–8, 212n8;
See also Harlem; neighborhoods black women and, 135–39; through
Ngai, Mae M., 199n10 colonial analogies, 159–71; discourses
Nguyen, Mimi Thi, 93 of Araby within Harlem, 1–2, 155–59,
Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 148, 150, 161, 164–71; as fantasy, 222n36; female
195n22, 225n69 performance and, 107, 121, 131–38; im-
Nijinsky, Vaslav, 217n88 perial selfhood and, 107, 121; jazz as
No Place of Grace (Lears), 194n7 signifier of, 170–71; through lyrics,
Norden, Helen Brown, 206n69 128–29, 149, 163–64, 176, 177, 179–80,
Nugent, Richard Bruce: Du Bois and, 88; 224n65; of musical language, 224n66;
emergent queer of color critique of, 29, mutability of, 173–74; of nation, 79–80,
77–78, 81–85, 89, 97, 114; New Negro 105, 159–71, 173–74, 182–85; opera and,
movement and, 81–82, 84, 97, 99, 103–4; of perversion, 160–61; of queer-
114–19, 143; queer black aesthetic prac- ness, 79–80, 84, 139–47; racial identi-
tices of, 29–30, 71–72, 83–84, 97–103, fication and, 157–58; sexological dis-
110–19, 140; referentiality of the black course and, 119–20; of sexual freedom,
body, 29–30, 75–77, 85–95; sexological 160–61; through sexualizing discourse,
discourse and, 81, 85–87, 97, 208n87; 169–70, 266n6; as transgression, 107;
Thurman and, 87–88; use of oriental- use of term orientalism, 24; westward
ism, 29, 112–20, 141–47; use of primi- expansion and, 173–74, 182–85; women
tivism, 29, 97–100 and, 135–39, 205n55, 221n24
Nugent, Richard Bruce, works by: Draw- Our Araby (Chase), 181–86
ings for Mulattoes, 97–103; “Geisha
Man,” 29–30, 78, 110–11, 112–19; Naomi Pagan Rout, 62, 102
and Ruth, 144, 146–47; Opportunity “Palesteena” (Crumit), 2, 127–29, 177,
magazine (cover illustration), 71–72, 224n66

Index | 261
palimpsest, 52, 188–91 ism commingled with, 18–19, 29, 181;
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, 204n45 queer black aesthetic formation and,
Peiss, Kathy, 49, 52 75, 77–85, 97–98, 119–20; sexological
Peretti, Burton W., 205n58 discourse and, 62, 81, 85–87, 97; sexual
performance: feminine agency through, freedom and, 42–43, 45, 58–59, 61,
130, 222n36; gendered meanings of, 72–73; as signifiers of Africa, 159–60
201n23; illocutionary force of music, Puccini, Giacomo, 29, 81, 104, 112, 119,
201n23; passing performances, 36–37, 217n89
213n17; repertoire, 30–31, 123, 125–26, Puerto Ricans/Puerto Rican migrants,
127, 134–35, 137, 140; respectability and, 2–3, 10, 34, 47, 53, 56, 57, 203n39
222n40; self-­definition and, 201n23. “Puttin’ On the Ritz” (Watson, Berlin,
See also archives/archivists and Snyder), 163–64, 165, 227nn17–18
Picasso, Pablo, 78, 143
Plantation Revue, 224n65 queer aesthetics: cosmopolitanism, 88,
Play de Blues (Douglas), 174–75 116–18; death trope, 118–19; imperial
policing/surveillance: of boundaries, 162, logic and, 78–85, 217n88; masquerade
166–67, 209n94; Committee of Four- balls, 102–3, 117–18; modernity and,
teen, 40–41, 50, 131–32, 201n20; sexo- 116–17, 139–47; use of term, 75, 219n119
logical discourse and, 27–28, 37–41, queer black aesthetic production: bor-
61–62. See also vice legislation ders/boundaries and, 24–25, 28–29,
Powell, Richard, 173–74 73–77, 94, 95–97, 103–4, 119–20; chaos
power relations: Foucault on, 196n31; of meaning making, 147; comparative
interracial sexualities as narrative empire studies and, 77–78; cosmo-
device, 199n9; knowledge forma- politanism and, 88, 116–18; Euro-
tions and, 31, 122–24; multiple axes of pean queer canon and, 29, 84–85,
power, 190; through reference, 156–57; 89–90, 119–20; imperial logic and, 6,
spatial discourse and, 36–37; subjec- 8, 11, 24–25, 37–38, 75, 85–86, 181, 186,
tivity formation and, 188; use of the 217n88; through lyrics, 224n65; mas-
palimpsest, 52, 188–91; of white inter- culinities and, 62–63, 83–84, 143; New
lopers in Harlem, 171 Negro movements and, 81–82, 84, 97;
Prashad, Vijay, 193n4 orientalism and, 95–96, 103–12, 119–
Pratt, Mary Louise, 26, 35, 229n55 20; primitivism and, 97–104; queer
primitivism: African aesthetics and, black writers, 214n46; queering of
15–16, 83–85, 97, 159–60; African knowledge formation, 77–78, 85–87;
American subjectivity and, 17, 60–61, queer subcultures of Harlem, 165–66;
72–73; as avant-­garde culture, 29, queer subjectivity, 165–66; racialized
81–82; as black modernity, 119–20; queering of words, 212n5; referentiality
black women and, 135–39; civiliza- of the queer black body, 30, 75–77, 82,
tion vs., 97, 127–28; colonial aesthet- 85–95; spatial discourse and, 97–103
ics and, 11, 15–16; jazz cultures and, queerness: dance halls and, 62–63; de-
42–43, 45, 58–59; mimesis, 83, 213n25; territorialization and, 112–20; homo-
modernism and, 11, 15–16, 73, 97; New sexual acts vs. homosexual identities,
Negro movements and, 15–17, 29, 65, 211n110; homosexuality, 37–38, 39–40,
71–72, 79–85, 97, 99, 172; oriental- 61–62, 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 211n110,

262 | Index
 213n30; interracial relationships and, and, 199n6; narratives of inclusion
215n57; literary disappearance of, and, 197n47; orientalisms and, 157–58;
208n90; modernity and, 116–17, 139– polyvalent mobility of, 167–68; racial
47; queer art practices, 214n35; queer categorization of Filipinos, 204n49;
desire, 213n17; Salomé as, 139–47; racial intimacy, 22, 26–27, 42–43,
sexological discourse and, 81, 85–87, 75–76, 138–39; racialized knowledge,
97, 101–2, 119–20; sheiks and, 224n65, 157; racialized masculinities, 58–61,
225n69; spatial discourse and, 80, 91, 62–63, 144, 200n12, 211n111, 216n66;
103, 112–20 racialized queering of words, 212n5;
queer of color critique: gender/sexuality racial logic of, 168; racial misidentifi-
ambiguity, 22, 100, 101–2; identity for- cation, 210n103; referentiality of the
mation, 97–100, 199n5; internal colo- black body, 30, 75–77, 85–95; regula-
nialism and, 22, 31–32, 163, 189; inti- tion and, 157; regulation and trans-
macy and, 24–25; national discourse gression of gender and, 199n5; regu-
and, 24–25, 31–32, 73–74, 78–79, lation and transgression of sexuality
81–82; queer black aesthetic and, 29, and, 199n5; sexological discourse and,
31–32, 77–79, 81–82, 84–85, 89, 100; 39–40, 63–64, 66, 67; spatial discourse
temporal relations and, 97–103; use of and, 3, 14–17, 27–29, 45–46, 123, 135–
term, 24–25, 73–74, 77, 199n5 39, 164, 183; temporal relations and, 7,
Quicksand (Larsen), 79, 91, 213n15, 35, 173, 175, 180–81; urban spaces and,
217n87 167–68, 201n19; use of palimpsest, 52,
188–91; violence and, 191
Race for Citizenship (Jun), 212n8 racial logics, 38, 168, 183–84
racial affinities/affiliation: between Afri- racial mixing: blackface discourse, 176,
can Americans and Asia/Africa, 205n76, 228n37; black/white di-
31, 179–81; collapse of time/space chotomy, 3–4, 13, 25–26, 103–4, 193n4,
through, 180–81; geographic bound- 195n15, 210n3, 210n5, 216n70; mixed-­
aries and, 158–59; racial intimacy, 22, race embodiment as multiracial space,
26–27, 42–43, 75–76, 138–39; temporal 63–69, 116; racial boundaries and, 3,
relations and, 7, 35, 173, 175, 180–81 25–26, 28–29, 64; racial miscegena-
racial ambiguity: mulattoes, 65–69, tion, 36–37. See also interracial rela-
98–104, 199n9, 208n89; racial illeg- tions
ibility, 104–5, 217n80; sexualization of Rancière, Jacques, 29, 32, 76, 77, 89, 91,
mixed-­race bodies, 210n106 95, 120
racial discourse: black modernity, 97, Rapp, William Jourdan, 12–13, 16–17
119–20; black/white dichotomy, 3–4, Reddy, Chandan, 95, 118, 214n43, 217n87
13, 25–26, 103–4, 193n4, 195n15, 210n3, referentiality: of the black body, 30,
210n5, 216n70; boundaries and, 3, 75–77, 82, 85–95; contact zones and,
25–26, 28–29, 38, 64, 73–77, 105–6, 26; crisis of referentiality, 26–29, 30;
107, 135–39, 152, 199n10, 204n45; death imperial logic and, 26–27; instability
and devaluation and, 188–90; embodi- of, 5–6, 16–17; queer identification
ment of distance, 139; geographies of and, 30, 75–77, 82, 85–95; queer orien-
scale and, 157; interracial sexualities talisms, 95–96, 103–5, 107–8, 110–12;
as narrative device, 199n9; legislation queer primitivisms, 95–103; use of

Index | 263
referentiality (continued) 108–9, 208n87; vice legislation and,
term, 5, 16–17, 76–78. See also ambi- 27–28, 37–41, 61–62
guity sexual ambiguity, 36–37, 104–5, 208n15,
Reiss, Winold, 228n35 210n109
repertoire, 30–31, 123, 125–26, 127, 134–35, sexual formations: bisexuality, 36–37;
137, 140. See also archive; performance borders/boundaries and, 73–77, 105–
resistance discourse, 36–37, 190 6, 199n10; geographies of scale and,
respectability, 143, 166–70, 222n40 157; imperial selfhood and, 121; inter-
Roediger, David, 207n78 racial sexualities as narrative device
Ross, Marlon B., 82 for, 199n9; intimacy, 22, 42–44, 100;
Rubaiyat (Khyyam), 157–58 knowledge formations and, 4, 90–92;
narratives of inclusion and, 197n47;
Said, Edward, 84, 122, 134, 141 non-­normativity of, 79–80; through
Salomé, 17, 30–31, 135–39, 220n19 orientalizing objects, 169–70; racial
Salomé (Strauss), 129–30 formation and, 199n5; repressive hy-
Salomé (Wilde), 122 pothesis of, 202n34; sexological dis-
Salome: Negrotesque I (Nugent), 141–43, course and, 37–38, 61–62, 63–64, 66,
144 67, 81, 208n15; sexual boundaries in
Save Me the Waltz (Fitzgerald), 80 multiracial spaces and, 44–48, 199n10;
scale, geographies of, 12, 18, 36–37, 38, 76, sexualization of mixed-­race bodies,
78, 82, 114–15, 120, 133–34, 140, 157, 185 27–28, 63–64, 209n101, 210n106;
Schwarz, A. B. Christa, 87, 89, 115 sexual regulation and, 157; of urban
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 84 spaces, 201n19; use of orientalist fan-
sexological discourse: embodiment and, tasy, 22, 92, 104, 138–39, 149, 153, 170,
27–28, 37–41, 66, 67, 86, 114–15; eugen- 176–77, 222n36; vamp character, 47,
ics and, 201n18; gender formation and, 54–55, 132–33, 205n62, 221n27; white
63–64, 66, 67, 209n101; homosexu- womanhood and, 49–54, 125–34
ality and, 37–38, 39–40, 61–62, 63–64, “Sheik of Araby” (Smith and Snyder),
66, 67, 81; immigrants/immigration 147, 148–49, 223n61, 224n66
and, 38–39, 201n18; imperial discourse sheiks, 1, 15, 22, 30–31, 53, 92, 124–25,
and, 69–70; interracial relations and, 147–52, 155–56, 180, 182, 185, 224n66,
27–28, 37, 67; lesbianism and, 208n15; 225n2
mixed-­race bodies and, 27–28, 63–64, Sheik, The (1921), 30, 92, 147, 148–49
209n101, 210n106; Nugent and, 81, Sheik, The (Hull), 22, 122, 147, 149
85–87, 97, 208n87; orientalist discourse Shohat, Ella, 131, 173, 183, 216n70, 229n53
and, 119–20; policing/surveillance and, Shonibare, Yinka, 225n4
27–28, 37–41, 61–62; primitivism and, Shu, Lee, 48
62, 81, 85–87, 97; queerness and, 81, Silva, Denise Ferreira da, 19
85–87, 97, 101–2, 119–20; racial forma- “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” (Nugent), 77,
tion and, 39–40, 63–64, 66, 67; sexual 87, 88–95, 116, 215n60, 215n62
formations and, 37–38, 61–62, 63–64, Soja, Edward W., 199n10
66, 67, 81, 208n15; spatial relations Somerville, Siobhan B., 39, 63–64, 66, 67,
and, 62, 170–71; temporal relations 199n9, 201n18, 209n101
and, 62; Thurman and, 28, 63–64, Soulouque, Faustin, 227n13

264 | Index
Spanish, use of term, 203n39 Chinese subjectivities, 198n51; extra-
spatial discourse: action environments, national spaces, 197n39; imperial logic
222n32; alterity, 104, 130, 131, 158–59; and, 180–81; national/extranational
borders/boundaries and, 20–23, spaces and, 197n39; performative sub-
36–37, 51–52, 73–77, 95, 135–39, 190; jectivity, 222n36; queer subjectivities,
California booster tracts and, 181–86; 78–79, 81–82, 89–91, 95, 116–17, 147,
colonialist discourse and, 181–86; 165–66; temporal relations and, 172;
cosmopolitan aesthetics and, 175; cul- travel as freedom and, 36
tural appropriation and, 218n95; de- Summers, Martin, 62–63
territorialization of queerness, 112–20;
distance, 4, 16–18, 21–22, 23–26, 37–38, Takaki, Ronald, 204n45
100, 124, 211n12; embodiment of dis- Taylor, Diana, 30, 126
tance, 139; exoticism and, 15, 104, temporal relations: black subjectivity
127–28, 137, 140–41, 157–58, 169, 177– and, 172; as contact zone, 35; knowl-
78; freedom concept and, 19; geogra- edge formation and, 90–92; moder-
phies of scale and, 12, 18, 36–37, 38, nity and, 16; queerness and, 103; queer
76, 78, 82, 114–15, 120, 133–34, 140, 157, of color critique and, 97–103; racial
185; imperial logic and, 5–6, 17, 23–25, affiliations and, 7, 35, 173, 175, 180–81;
122–23, 156–57, 190; of internal colo- sexological discourse and, 62
nialism, 161–65; intimacy and, 7–8, Terry, Jennifer, 201n17
14–15, 17–21, 75–76, 159; jazz culture Thief of Baghdad (1924), 55, 225n72
and, 35–38; knowledge formation and, thirdspace, 199n10
90–92; performer/client interactions, This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray),
222n32, 222n34; power relations and, 201n23
36–37; queer black aesthetic produc- Thurman, Wallace: biographical info,
tion and, 97–103; queerness and, 80, 209n102; emergent queer of color
91, 103; racial discourse and, 3, 14–17, critique of, 29; explicitness of queer
27–29, 45–46, 123, 135–39, 164, 183; re- characters, 208n90, 209n102, 213n28;
sistance discourse and, 36–37; sexo- on Harlem, 12, 164; as inspired by
logical discourse and, 62, 170–71; so- Nugent, 29; interracial relationships,
cial order/social chaos and, 36, 45–46; 215n57; New Negro movement and,
spatial displacement and, 21–22, 143, 164; Nugent and, 87–88; oriental-
166–70; as static, 218n95; subjectivity ism and, 104–11, 213n28; queer black
and, 14–23; westward expansion and, aesthetic practices of, 29–30, 104–11;
181–86. See also borders/boundaries; sexological interests, 28, 63–64, 108–9,
contact zone; intimacy 208n87; use of Stravinsky, 217n88
St. Denis, Ruth, 5, 139 Thurman, Wallace, works by: The Blacker
Stoler, Ann Laura, 23, 68, 156, 167 the Berry . . . , 25, 37, 63–69, 104, 106,
Strange Affinities (Hong and Ferguson), 215n57; Infants of the Spring (Thur-
158, 188–89, 226n9 man), 29, 63, 64, 84, 96, 104–11, 112,
Strauss, Richard, 119, 122, 129, 181, 220n19 114, 116–17
Studlar, Gaylyn, 54, 130, 222n36 tourism: colonial discourse and, 159–60,
subjectivities: author-­effect and, 212n14; 165–66, 168, 181, 184–85; of Harlem
black subjecthood, 171–81, 198n51; and, 22, 31–32, 161–69; modernism

Index | 265
tourism (continued) 69–70, 112, 195n20, 202n36; sexological
and, 20–21; queer tourism, 140, 165– science and, 27–28, 37–41, 61–62. See
66, 223n50; racial and ethnic, 11–12; also policing/surveillance
sexual tourism, 140 violence discourse, 190, 191
transformations, 29–30, 43–48, 51–52, Vogel, Shane, 225n69
57–59, 68–69, 87, 89, 115, 118–19 Voloshnikov, N. K., 215n48
transgender people/transsexuals, Volpp, Leti, 197n39
210n109
transgression: of boundaries, 29–30, Walker, Aida Overton, 137–39
43–48, 51–52, 57–59, 68–69, 87, 89, 115, Walker, J. J., 207n76
118–19; morality and, 29, 84–85, 88, Walter, Alva, 209n102
89–90, 112, 119–20, 166; sexual trans- Walter, Truman, 209n102
gressions, 13–14, 33–34, 37–38, 58–59, Weary Blues (Hughes), 174–75
69–70; veiling, 141–47 Webb, Chick, 41, 43
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 128, 220n18 West Indian/Carribbean immigrants, 4,
Tucker, Sherrie, 45, 86 10, 11–12, 35–36, 49, 56–58, 119, 196n28,
Tucker, Sophie, 158, 173, 176–77, 178–80, 209n98
207n76 westward expansion, 34–35, 173–74,
Tutankhamen, 158, 173, 176–78, 179, 180 181–86, 229n53
Twain, Mark, 207n78 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), 212n14
“White Cabaret Keepers Conduct Dives”
Untitled [Two Women] (Nugent), 144–46 (Grey), 166–70
urban spaces: boundaries of, 3, 12–14, Whiteman, Paul, 41
22–23, 57–59, 74, 162; comparative em- whiteness: black/white dichotomy, 3–4,
pire studies and, 123–25; the imperial 13, 25–26, 103–4, 193n4, 195n15, 210n3,
city, 8–14; political power of imperial- 210n5, 216n70; as default moral civili-
ism within, 191; racial discourse and, zation, 48, 178–79; legislation pro-
167–68, 201n19; racialization of, 167– tective of, 38, 200n13; mapped onto
68, 201n19; rights to space, 157; sexu- queers of color, 84–85; as proximate,
alization of, 201n19; as sites of crimi- 137; racialized masculinities, 58–61,
nality, 157; transnational production of 62–63, 144, 200n12, 211n111, 216n66;
space and, 3. See also New York City of working-­class white women, 137
Urbas, Anna, 54 white womanhood: femininities and, 47,
62–70, 135–47, 176–77; imperial self-
Valentino, Rudolph, 92, 93, 147, 150, 180, hood of, 17, 125, 126–27; interracial
182–83, 215n59 relations within dance halls, 27, 33–34,
vamp, the, 47, 54–55, 132–33, 205n62, 37, 57, 58–59, 204n48; mobility of,
221n27 49–56; orientalist performance and,
VanDerZee, James, 135, 136 125–34, 137, 205n55; points of class dif-
Van Notten, Elenore, 209n102 ference, 204n45; sexual formations of,
Van Vechten, Carl, 148, 150, 195n22, 49–54, 125–34; spaces of amusement,
225n69 204n48; as vamp, 47, 54–55, 132–33,
Viana, Juan José, 215n62 205n62, 221n27; Vivian Gordon case,
vice legislation, 14, 35–36, 40–41, 44, 49–61; workforce entry, 204n48

266 | Index
Wiedoeft, Rudy, 224n66 Wright, Richard, 24–25
Wilde, Oscar, 82–83, 84, 89, 104, 106– Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow
7, 111, 116, 119, 144, 213n28, 214n31, (Kim), 213n30
220n19 Wynn, Ed, 133
Wilentz, Sean, 207n78
Williams, Raymond, 11 Yerkes, Robert M., 200n16
Wirth, Thomas H., 72, 93, 111, 208n87, Young, Robert J. C., 229n1
215n59, 215n62 Yu, Henry, 39
Wong, Yutian, 124, 205n55, 220n20

Index | 267