Joining the growing efforts to explore the intersections of transatlantic and transpacific formations, this essay examines Chen Yingzhen's "Roses in June" (1967), focusing on how its narrative historicizes and theorizes the black Pacific problematic. My reading traces affinities between a Black soldier in the Vietnam War, an enslaved mother/prostitute in the American South, and a Taiwanese foster daughter turned bar-girl. I suggest that the text mediates a transpacific problematic of blackness, prompting a reconsideration of Cold War historiography and its critiques and activisms. My analysis experiments in intimating Chen's writing with historicized theorizations by Jin-kyung Lee, Ding Nai-fei, and Saidiya Hartman to bring into view oft-obscured entanglements among U.S. racial settler colonialism, Cold War militarization and sexuality in the Pacific, and Taiwan's postwar industrialization in the inter-Asia context, mediated through the liberalization of marriage (as prostitution abolition) and sex in developmental state-building. This critical juxtaposition articulates the significance of the black Pacific and its implications for decolonization, particularly in terms of Cold War epistemologies and movements, where the narrative's self-interrogation of contradictions in historical blankness gestures not toward resolving difference but toward holding open the unfinished, the unmarried, the unborn – as a figure for decolonial futures still in formation.
Chien-ting Lin (Thu,) studied this question.