Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on the representations of distant lands and exotic bodies that filled the nightclubs of Jazz Age New York, Fiona I. B. Ngô shows how U.S. ambitions abroad shaped racial, gendered, and sexual formations at home.
Trade Review"
Imperial Blues is a spectacular elaboration of queer of color critique. Fiona I. B. Ngô creatively reveals how orientalist discourses shaped Jazz Age subjectivities and social life. Theorizing racialized sexuality, she blurs the boundaries between domestic and international migrations, political and aesthetic discourses, and global and national racial formations. This is a beautifully conceived book."—
Roderick Ferguson, coeditor of
Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization"I love this book. It is smart, fresh, and new, a game-changer.
Imperial Blues is a theoretically astute and historically grounded cultural studies analysis of empire as central to the circuits of, and discourses about, jazz in Jazz Age New York."—
Sherrie Tucker, coeditor of
Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies“[Ngô] deftly employs social history; ethnography; 'queer' studies; and analysis of literary, visual, and musical texts, making her book of potential interest to a diverse audience. … [I]t is a rewarding and insightful book, tying together multiple threads that were at some point disentangled by scholars with narrower foci on specific components of the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance.” -- E. Taylor Atkins * Journal of American Studies *
“
Imperial Blues is an original and valuable study that contributes to histories of imperialism, sexuality, gender, and urban spaces. The study will be of use to students and scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds.” -- Imaobong D. Umoren * Gender & History *
“With its attention to such cartographies for mapping pleasure and importance,
Imperial Blues is a welcome contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on a relatively neglected period for the intersections of postcolonial studies, critical ethnic studies, postnational American studies, and queer studies." -- Victor Bascara * GLQ *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Desire and Danger in Jazz's Contact Zones 33
2. Queer Modernities 71
3. Orienting Subjectivities 121
4. Dreaming of Araby 155
Conclusion. Academic Indiscretions 187
Notes 193
Bibliography 231
Index 251
