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127 The New Negro of the Pacific: How African Americans Forged Solidarity with Japan YUICHIRO ONISHI 5 Hubert Harrison (1883–1927), an African Caribbean immigrant from St. Croix of the Dutch West Indies and more famously known as the “father of Harlem radicalism ,” knew very well why Japan mattered to African America and the darker world during and after World War I. Writing for the Negro World in November 1921, the organ of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Harrison explained that “Japan” was only relevant insofar as it served as “an index” to advance the ends of black liberation.1 Unpacking the symbolic significance of Japan in relation to the upcoming Washington Conference on disarmament , where Japan, in the end, relinquished much of what it had gained at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to secure a position as an imperialist equal to “white” polities of the West, Harrison carefully crafted his rhetorical stance to remind peoples of African descent in New York and beyond of the meaning of Japan. For Harrison, the image of a defiant Japan challenging the dominance of Anglo-American powers was not an idol with which to engage in wishful thinking about the world without the color line but rather a springboard from which to translate African American democratic aspirations into concrete engagements at the grass roots. Japan was, after all, an ambitious imperialist and an aggressive colonizer—not a champion of “darker races.” Yet, it was not entirely devoid of a use value. Japan was a metaphor of sorts that could function as an incubator of what Harrison called “race-consciousness.” Jeffery B. Perry, Harrison’s biographer, interpreted it as “a necessary corrective to white supremacy” and “a strategic component in the struggle for a racially just and socialist society.”2 Starting in 1915, as Harrison directed his organizing energies toward African Americans in Harlem to mold a more militant, dynamic, and internationalist mass movement for black emancipation and equality, he steadfastly adhered to this principle of “race-consciousness” to quicken the currents of Harlem radicalism.3 When writing for such periodicals as the Voice, the organ of the Liberty League 128 YUICHIRO ONISHI (Harrison’s own organization), and the Negro World, all the while doing agitational work from soapboxes on street corners in Harlem, Harrison so often instructed African Americans to keep the horizon of political possibility open to manifest race-consciousness.To reiterate, “Japan is only a index,” Harrison wrote. He meant not just to look for Japan, which was struggling to hold on to its tenuous status as one of the great powers in the world dominated by “white” polities. Equally important were self-conscious efforts on the part of African American masses and leaders in Harlem to identify with, and, in so doing, achieve unity among, diverse peoples of African descent within their own communities locally as well as across the “colored world” in Asia and Africa. In “The Line-Up on the Color Line,” published in the Negro World on December 4, 1920, Harrison declared, In the face of these facts the first great international duty of the black man in America is to get in international touch with his fellows of the downtrodden section of the human population of the globe. . . .We need to join hands across the sea. We need to know what they are doing in India; we need to know what they are doing in China; we need to know what they are doing in Africa, and we need to let [“make” has been crossed out] them know what we are doing over here. We must link up with the other colored races of the world, beginning with our own, and after we have linked up the various sections of the black race the black race will see that it is in its interest and advantage to link up with the yellow and the brown races.4 An emphasis Harrison placed on the need to “link up” through the collective practice of self-teaching was what was at the core of his invocation concerning Japan. He defined the very labor of linking up as a way of bringing together theory and practice to make the space of resistance within Harlem’s Afrodiasporic everyday life productive for an insurgent politics and articulation of black internationalism.5 In essence, to register Japan as “only an index” was to rework the shape of black freedom. Not merely a pronouncement, it was the praxis of black...

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