Racial Performance at Sea: Race, Region, and Empire on the Empress of Australia

Abstract

This article examines the 1928–1929 world cruise of the Empress of Australia, a ship owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Drawing upon concert programs, passenger accounts, Canadian Pacific official publications, and historical newspapers, it focuses on a concert that happened while the ship was at sea. It examines three songs—“Ol’ Man River,” “Hawaiian Memories,” and “Chu Chin Chow”—to show how nostalgia for the American South found purchase beyond US borders next to representations of a mysterious “Orient” and tropical Pacific. Situating this voyage within the larger context of Canadian nationhood and the Canadian Pacific’s investment in the British empire, I argue that the combination of these songs on a ship bound for sites of white empire did two things. One, it reassured white passengers that the racial order of the Southern past would continue in the present. Second, it reinforced their experiences in China, Hawai‘i, and other stops during the cruise. Through their depiction of Black folks and Asian people as submissive and alien, these songs collectively romanticized and exoticized people of color and the places they inhabited—whether living in the wake of slavery in the American South or under US and British imperialism in the Pacific. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the importance of the transnational for understanding the export of nostalgic representations of the American South and how they adopted new meaning outside of a US context.