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The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery : The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form
Author
Title
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery : The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form / Caroline H. Yang.
ISBN
9781503612068
Publication
Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2020]
Copyright Notice Date
©2020
Physical Description
1 online resource (296 p.)
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
In English.
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt-Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors' contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.
Variant and related titles
De Gruyter University Press eBook pilot project 2020.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
June 17, 2022
Series
Asian America
Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Chinese Question in the Early Afterlife of Slavery
Part One. "Earliest Pioneers" of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction
1. The "Heathen Chinee" and Topsy in Bret Harte's Narratives of the West
2. Mark Twain's Chinese Characters and the Fungibility of Blackness
3. Ambrose Bierce's Critique of Blackface Minstrelsy and Anti-Chinese Racism
Part Two. "Pioneers" of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
4. Representations of Gender and Slavery in Sui Sin Far's Early Fictions
5. Reading the Minstrel Tradition and U.S. Empire Through Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Subjects
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