Finally, it gave birth to alternative political solidarities, from world-belting social movements to inchoate aesthetic impulses, which aimed to displace it in the name of the “darker races,” the “Afro-Asian,” or the “Third World”—names that have come to evoke a nostalgia for worlds that never came to pass, a feeling that bears whatever is left in these histories that still gives itself to the chance of another world.
The black Pacific, to repeat, existed only as fantasy; it entered history to the extent that the denial of its entry into history was imagined as history’s inauguration. Its sheer unreality, moreover, allowed it to function as—to borrow Jacqueline Goldsby’s elaboration of Du Bois’s phrase—“a terrible real” (166). Lest this seem too obscure, note that its most celebrated denizen has already made an appearance on these pages, passing under the cover of familiarity. You know him as Kong.
* * *
Invented for the classic 1933 film that bears his name, King Kong’s broad appeal and wide-ranging cultural afterlife have never been significantly hampered by the widespread recognition that he serves as a metaphor for racist fantasies of violent black sexuality. Nor has that metaphor been disrupted by the largely ignored fact that Kong’s imagined origins lie not in Africa but in Southeast Asia—more specifically, the fictitious Skull Island somewhere west of Sumatra.6 A heart of darkness never penetrated by white explorers, it proves irresistible to Carl Denham, a fast-talking New York movie producer whose technological expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and cocky disregard for tradition embody U.S. modernity. His dream of capturing on film something “no white man has ever seen” expresses the ambitions of U.S. whiteness in an arena of imperial competition, and he guards the secret of their destination from his crew until just before their arrival, aware that its existence has circulated in obscure rumor. The captain, for example, admits to having heard the name Kong, which he skeptically identifies as “some native suspicion.”
These words appear to be a minor alteration from the shooting script, which refers instead to “some Malay suspicion” (22)—Malay being the dubious racial-scientific category of the period that included Filipinos and other Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders. Within days of King Kong’s March 24, 1933, premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the California Supreme Court ruled, in Roldan v. Los Angeles County, that because Filipinos were “Malays” rather than “Mongolians,” they did not fall under antimiscegenation laws targeting Chinese; less than two weeks passed before the legislature amended California law to bar Malay-white marriages (Baldoz 98–101). Threats of miscegenation reinvigorated anti-Asiatic exclusion movements, which converged with the complex politics of colonial nationalism to produce the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act of 1933 and its successor, the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, promising the Philippines formal independence within a decade while terminating Filipino labor migration. In short, a consensus had formed that colonial rule in the Philippines was more trouble than it was worth. The disappearance of the word “Malay” from the film’s dialogue parallels its broader elision of the Philippines and other U.S. colonial possessions in the Pacific. Similarly, the film never purports to represent Negro characters, but cast African American actors to portray Skull Island’s natives, in a notorious conflation of minstrel and savage stereotyping that recalls the black-skinned, bug-eyed, wide-lipped Filipino natives of U.S. political cartooning during the Philippine-American War.7
The accumulation of these elliptical references ultimately allows Kong to emerge from a dense network of racial signifiers, transubstantiating empirical knowledge and imperial histories of race. The island’s edges are littered with the wreckage of past imperial expeditions, circuited by a wall the men hesitantly compare to “Egyptian” ruins or “Angkor,” built by some “higher civilization” lost in the mists of time. While the current islanders “have slipped back,” they ritually maintain the fortifications sealing off the interior, and their language resembles that of the nearby (nonfictitious) Nias Islanders enough for the captain to engage them in crude dialogue. Their distance from the sleepy decadence of East Asian civilization is further established by contrast with the ship’s cook, Charley, a stock Chinese stereotype.
This distinction develops through a complex staging of racial and gendered dynamics involving the frustrated romance between Ann Darrow, the beautiful unknown cast by Denham as his film’s lead, and Jack Driscoll, the macho first mate, a committed sailor hesitant around modern women. In an extended sequence after the crew’s initial encounter with the islanders, whose chief had offered six native women to purchase Ann for the still-unidentified Kong, the shooting script shows Ann speculating about Kong’s identity with Charley, who exits suddenly in pursuit of a playful monkey named Ignatz (King Kong shooting script 38–39). On a ship full of men, only the reassuringly asexual cook and the comical simian mascot allow her to relax. The film elides this introduction, getting straight to the dramatic action: a chance encounter on the moonlit deck, where Ann tells Jack the islanders’ drumming has kept her awake. Jack confesses to fearing for her safety, then to fearing her, and finally, to being in love. When she retorts, “You hate women,” he awkwardly replies, “I know, but you aren’t women,” and they kiss. Then, after the captain calls him away, two islanders suddenly appear to kidnap her. Jack returns, finds only Charley, and heads off to her cabin, but then Charley discovers a cowrie bracelet on the deck and sounds the alarm, declaring: “Crazy black man been here!”
The modifier black, in the Chinese cook’s broken English, does not identify the absent kidnapper as African or Negro. Rather, it signifies his racialized capacity to violently assert masculine heterosexual prerogative—unlike Jack or Charley, who are not man enough to act upon their natural desires to possess the white woman. This racialized capacity is merely transferred to the kidnappers as the agents of Kong, to whom the white woman will be offered; at a further remove, it transfers from the islanders to Ann and Jack via the drumming that aurally conditions their previously blocked embrace. While Charley’s own interest in Ann is laughable—in a comic bit of business, he tries to join the search party, waving his meat cleaver and babbling, “Me likey go too. Me likey catch Missy,” before the white men, armed with guns and explosives, wave him away—he provides a cautionary tale for Jack’s white manhood. Just as the decline of Asiatic civilization resulted in emasculated, servile “Chinamen,” Western modernity risked falling into decadence through its supposed disruption of traditional gender roles. The figure of a beautiful young woman, driven by ambition to venture, without husband or father, first to New York City and then to a savage ocean on a boat of rough men, is terrifying enough to send the valiant, virile Jack scampering to the company of other sailors. What might forestall this collapse into decadence is a tonic infusion of primal, violent sexuality, the essence of a blackness embodied by Kong—“neither beast nor man,” Denham puts it, but “monstrous, all-powerful.”
Kong’s blackness thus emerges through careful differentiation from all existing racial categories to embody the ideal blackness posited by U.S. imperial desire. His dominion is the fabled blank spot on the map that eluded all previous empires, an untouched state of nature, abstracted from all the ongoing “race problems” left over from historical iterations of the civilizing mission—genocidal conquest, enslavement and Reconstruction, colonial rule in the Philippines. By implicit contrast to such historical complications, Kong’s blackness appears as a fictive distillate of the longed-for real: the primal essence that might rejuvenate a U.S. whiteness imperiled by the perversions of overcivilization.
This essence must therefore be captured and carried to the metropolitan center, its violent mastery enacted before an excited public. When his film is ruined and his crew ravaged, Denham redoubles his ambitions, capturing and exhibiting not the image but the creature himself. Back in New York, before a packed theater, he displays Kong in chains: “He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity.” This performance is heightened, for the cinematic audience, when Kong escapes, seizes Ann, and runs amok in the city.8 Finally, he climbs the Empire State Building, symbol of modern U.S. ascendancy, and briefly fights off a squadron of planes before falling to his death below.
By the rules of the narrative, Kong’s death had already been assured, if not by his status as a figure of terror, then by the notorious scene on Skull Island where he partially undresses his blonde captive. In staging a fantasy of white womanhood imperiled