The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about postnational cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of US culture. This chapter reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the United States as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, the essay considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine–American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the United States. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the United States as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.

Reconstruction legislators faced the uncomfortable yet broadly acknowledged fact that the U.S. Constitution had countenanced slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment set out to guarantee and secure civil freedom through the reassertion of the U.S. Constitution, yet its expansive possibilities proved short-lived. Anti-Chinese ideologues and nativists challenged birthright citizenship and advanced new legislation restricting legal entry into the United States. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the nation’s first raced immigration and naturalization ban, helped stabilize the meaning and value of citizenship as the federal judiciary began narrowing the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the end of the century, the Chinese Exclusion Acts and federal rulings on Chinese immigration cases completed the redefinition of the Asiatic as the categorically excluded. Among the earliest Asian American writers to publish in English, Wong Chin Foo and Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) produced a wide-ranging body of journalism and short fiction that addressed public anxieties over “contraband Chinese.” The criminalized “illegal immigrant” remains a ready foil for the citizen, shoring up fantasies of national belonging as our civil liberties face increasing erosion. The writers discussed in this chapter offer us a unique vantage on this conflicted and evolving history of U.S. citizenship.

This chapter analyzes several recently recovered newspaper and magazine narratives by Edith Maude Eaton. Extending far beyond the Chinatown plots of Mrs. Spring Fragrance for which she is best known, "Away Down in Jamaica," "The Alaska Widow," and "Wing Sing of Los Angeles on His Travels" exemplify the broad scope of Eaton's engagements with environmental health, cross-racial relationality, and transnational geographies, as well as how these themes intersect with her experiments with genre, narrative voice, and serial form.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the US annexation of Hawaii (1898) and imperial war in the Philippines (1899–1902) marked a radical shift in East-West relations and US foreign and domestic policies on the Asia-Pacific. This decade witnessed the simultaneous expansion of US empire in the Pacific and the proliferation of exclusion and restriction policies against Asian immigrants on US soil. This chapter mines the pages of the most influential of early Black literary magazines, the Colored American Magazine, and the lesser-studied works of one of its most celebrated contributors, Pauline E. Hopkins, to investigate the complex cross-racial and interethnic tensions and alliances that occur in Black writings from this period. Hopkins’s rhetoric of monogenesis and interracial kinship limned both the possibilities and limits of Afro-Asian linkages and connections against the US empire-state. A minor yet persistent theme in later African American and Asian American writings, this idea of shared kinship sought to challenge US colonialism and its taxonomic approach to racial difference. These writings contribute to an emerging Black American discourse on the Asia-Pacific.