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.

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.