Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization (America and the Long 19th Century, 7) - Hardcover

Hsu, Hsuan L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1479880418 ISBN 13: 9781479880416

Publisher: NYU Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Hsuan L. Hsu is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis and author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.

Review

"A brilliant book that will add immeasurably to Mark Twain studies, American literary studies, and the field of comparative studies of race and ethnicity. Exciting, well-written, and filled with surprising, unexpected connections,Sitting in Darknesscontributes to our understanding of the history of comparative racialization in America while deftly placing literature in legal and social contexts that are truly illuminating." (Shelley Fisher Fishkin,Professor of English and Director of American Studies, Stanford University)

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1479880418
• ISBN 13: 9781479880416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 248