アフリカ系アメリカ文学の地理的想像力――モンロー・ドクトリンの終焉――

抄録

This essay uses the geographic language of the Monroe Doctrine to explore the spatial paradigm shift that transpired in African American literature in the twentieth century. The Monroe Doctrine is grounded in the idea of separable hemispheres and continents, the “basic” global divisions that have long been taken for granted. The spatial ordering of the world, which is divided into Eastern and Western Hemispheres, Europe and America, “Old World” and “New World,” is a resilient paradigm perpetuated by the long-accepted Atlantic-centered codification of the Mercator projection. It is this view of the world in which African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance critically intervene.

As my subjects in this essay, I have chosen James Weldon Johnson and Walter White―the first and second executive secretaries of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)―whose international travels afford significant insight into the geography of African American literature. Johnson, known as the “Renaissance man” of the Harlem Renaissance, participated in the implementation of Big Stick diplomacy in Nicaragua in 1912 under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), Johnson justified the occupation of Nicaragua by the US Marines as having been dictated by the Japanese threat to construct a canal across the isthmus to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Caribbean and thereby bring spatial reorientation. Furthermore, Johnson’s autobiography registers a spatial reframing of the Pacific that occurred in the 1920s. Johnson was the first African American delegate of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), an organization that advocated the concept of the Pacific Community. It envisaged a Pacific-centered perspective on the world, transforming the region from the periphery of Europe to a central stage in international politics―a shift that is symbolized by a map entitled “The Pacific Region” in the proceedings of the second biennial conference of the IPR. Drawn using Goode’s projection, which challenged the distortions perpetuated by the Mercator projection, the map represented a Pacific region comprised of Pacific Rim countries, placing Asian countries on the western shores and the United States and Latin American countries on the eastern shores. I suggest that this spatial reorientation had a significant bearing on the way Johnson’s memory of the Monroe Doctrine in Nicaragua was modified in relation to Japan’s military occupation of Manchuria across the Pacific.

The equator-based Mercator projection rapidly lost its narrative power during World War II. Instead, an innovative cartography adopting an aerial perspective―popularized by the cartographic artist Richard Edes Harrison and his “One World, One War” map (1941)―represented America’s fresh world outlook. Bringing into question the earth’s division into separate hemispheres, and providing a salutary reminder of the Earth’s sphericity and continuity, it ushered in what Alan K. Henrikson has termed “air-age globalism.” Walter White, a pioneer African American globetrotter, navigated in this mutating spatial context. An accredited war correspondent, White flew in the aerial Atlantic world that the US Army Air Transport Command (ATC) created. He investigated the Jim Crow that “flew” to the European and North African theaters with the mobilization of the US military, which resulted in his war report A Rising Wind (1945). In the Pacific theater, White made a 36,000-mile, island-hopping tour with the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS); US forces used Pacific Islands for the military tactics of leapfrogging, building airstrips and integrating military operations using aircraft. Flying the global networks of ATC and NATS, White drew a black version of “One World, One War,” reshaping the language of freedom and “bondage” in Mercator’s maritime world plied by slave ships.