Living in Japan, the dominant image of Lafcadio Hearn is something like: he’s that white man who came to Japan and told us he believed in us—he knew we had it in us to become the honorary-white vassal of Anglo-America that we are today! A new TV drama on the national broadcaster NHK lavishes screen time on a klutzy Lafcadio adorably befuddled by Japanese culture, baffled by the Japanese language, and played by a blue-eyed English actor—which is especially interesting because the real Lafcadio was a brown man born of the last Crusade, or maybe the first color revolution: the Greek war of independence from Ottoman Turkey, which was sponsored by a rising British Empire. His mother, a true daughter of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world with relatives on every shore of the Mediterranean, got in trouble with his father’s English family for piercing little Lafcadio’s ears and putting hoops in them. I run through a collection of his writings in Cinncinnatti and New Orleans, where he lived on the Colored side of town (not entirely by choice) and dedicated himself to recording the lives and speculating on the hopes and possibilities of declassed, liquidated, and colonized peoples that Amerikkka has always burned for fuel. In the end, he was converted to a social-Darwinist libertarianism that left no room for sincere solidarity, and this casts his later embrace of a rising Japan in a different light.

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