History in the Making – Banjo on the Black Ships: a Transpacific History of Black Performance on the Perry Expedition to Japan (Dr. Jason Petrulis, Assistant Professor, The Education University of Hong Kong)

This talk traces the travels of two African/American instruments, the banjo and jawbone, to tell a history of the mid-19th century Black Pacific. In March 1854, as the US Navy’s “Perry Expedition” to Japan anchored in Yokohama waters, White crew members celebrated a new Japan-US trade treaty by staging a racist blackface minstrel show for Japanese officials. A Japanese artist sketched vivid images of the performance, which circulated in Japan and beyond. Historians have since used these images and other sources to read this encounter as a moment of White racemaking for Japanese audiences.

But how does this history change when we center Black musicians and their performances? This talk analyzes how the Perry Expedition brought Black music, instruments, dance, and recitation to Asia; and suggests that as Black musicians performed in oceans, littorals, and ports around Asia, they helped to construct a Black Pacific. Using banjo and jawbone, and dance and song, Black performers connected Asia to other times and places, especially to the other side of the Black Pacific: to Afro-Peru and Afro-Mexico, to Jamaican Maroon communities and New Orleans’s Congo Square. To tell this history, this talk follows Black performers on their oceanic passages, especially during the sailors’ end-of-day timespaces of freedom; and sails with them from Hong Kong to Hakodate, and from Shanghai to Singapore. In examining Black performances onboard and onshore, it thus traces the Asian circulation of Black Caribbean/Pacific instruments, and the cultures that attended them, to expand our understanding of these transpacific exchanges.

Dr. Jason Petrulis is Assistant Professor of Global History at the Education University of Hong Kong. He is an award-winning historian whose work traces global connections, especially between the Americas and Asia. In addition to his research on the Perry Expedition, he is writing a book, Wig: A Global History, 1958-1979, that uses this strange commodity as a “lens” on Asian industrialization under the US Cold War umbrella.

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