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    Sitting in Darkness

    Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization

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    Author(s)
    Hsu, Hsuan L.
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain’s work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain’s career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain’s early writings about Chinese immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain’s ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully crafted assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, including African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations. Drawing on recent legal scholarship, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting in Darkness engages Twain’s best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as well as his lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the allegorical tale “A Fable of the Yellow Terror” and the yellow face play Ah Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of Chinese Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89469
    Keywords
    Literature: history and criticism
    DOI
    10.18574/nyu/9781479880416.001.0001
    ISBN
    9781479843404, 9781479880416, 9781479843404, 9781479843404
    Publisher
    New York University Press
    Publication date and place
    New York, 2015
    Imprint
    NYU Press
    Series
    America and the Long 19th Century, 7
    Classification
    Literature: history and criticism
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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