No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures
Abstract
Why did the coolie's body speak so forcefully to nineteenth-century America of its future? And how did that body's loquacious, obscene ventriloquism shape the imaginary scaffolding of America's utopias, its science fictions? This essay answers those questions by reading Arthur Vinton's Looking Further Backward (1890), one of the first American novels to imagine a Chinese military invasion of the United States.
Women’s reproductive rights continue to be a highly contested ground. Larissa Lai’s queer speculative novel The Tiger Flu (2018) comments from a feminist, critical posthuman perspective on how the gendered and racialized bodies especially of women from the Global South are culturally marked as ultimately expendable and exploitable. This chapter analyzes how Lai explores the potential of alternative reproductive technologies such as cloning and genetic engineering as a means of empowerment for marginalized and subaltern subjects. From an ecocritical perspective, the thus arising new non-human entanglements provide an alternative to the Western, patriarchal, neo-liberal system that, if left unchecked, might lead to the destruction of the planet and all life on it—through new odd kinships, a more equal and egalitarian way of life becomes possible.
This paper considers Britain’s first large-scale Chinese restaurant, situated within the 1884 International Health Exhibition in London. It asks what cultural work this Chinese restaurant and associated tearoom performed by considering two interrelated factors that governed the relationship between Britain and the British Empire, Europe, and the United States and China in the 1880s: The first is the recovery of exhibition culture’s key role in the globalization of “foreign” food. Restaurants like those at the “Healtheries” presented “high culture” versions of Asian food in stark contrast to eateries catering to working-class populations in Limehouse and American/Australian Chinatowns and camp kitchens. The exhibitions worked to elevate Chinese people above stereotyped dog- and cat-eating “universal omnivores.” The second revolves around the situating of China (and Japan) as modern through these exhibition restaurants and their location within an exhibition emphasizing hygiene and industry. I explore how the outward-facing displays of culture and esthetics at such expositions functioned within the networks of diplomacy surrounding Western informal imperialism in China, Qing Dynasty pushback, and intra-Asian competition, alongside new understandings of imperial culture as syncretic and absorptive.
This article examines the role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and censorship in the cultural industries of Hong Kong while looking at possible alternatives to mainstream filmmaking for more radical cultural producers. There is no official censorship in Hong Kong, but the need to consider the structure of co-production with China and the PRC audience’s buying power has forced filmmakers to be cautious about the content of mainstream cinema. Ultimately such considerations and its ties to censorship have dramatic effects on film production in Hong Kong. As an alternative space for cultural industries, videos on online social networking platforms, such as YouTube, have become more popular as creative outlets for those living in Hong Kong to critique the increasing presence of the PRC. By examining the work of GVA Creative, a group of Hong Kong-based video producers, this article sheds light on how cultural icons, such as Guan Yu and Lei Feng among others, are mobilized as a rhetoric of Chineseness. In other words, Chineseness in the digital age must be considered a form of rhetoric that can be deployed for various purposes, such as a form of resistance to mainstream censorship among others. Furthermore, the visual citation of familiar figures in Sinophone communities is one that is remixed in the YouTube videos rather than images that simply reinforce state ideology. This process of remixing Chineseness is a participatory practice that contributes to the formation of a visual language that gives voice to marginalized groups in the face of state hegemony and other forms of censorship in the Sinophone world.
When we discuss the cross-cultural relationships of Euro-American modernists we often fall between the poles of either celebrating the ‘coming together of traditions’ or suspiciously decrying the power play involved. A case in point is the divergent critical understanding most often posited of Ezra Pound’s relationship to the materials he produced from Ernest Fenollosa’s notes – notably Classical Chinese poetry in the form of Cathay (1915). The first position is Hugh Kenner’s who holds that its meaning, its primary function, was as an anti-WWI volume, rather than as any representation of Chinese poetry or an extension of Imagism (1971, 202–204). In seeming opposition to this vision of an ideal aesthetic come at by the application of genius, we have those who highlight the source material of Fenollosa’s notes to discuss various modes of Pound as translator. Interestingly, these critics, who resist the Kennerian celebration of Poundian genius and insist that Pound is engaged here in an act of translation, “essentially [...] appropriative” (Xie 232), or otherwise, also reinforce a reading whereby “the precise nature of the translator’s authorship remains unformulated, and so the notion of authorial originality continues” (Venuti 6). This is the issue I wish to address when we study the disparities between Fenollosa’s notes and the Cathay poems, i.e. Pound’s own choices with regard to those poems’ content, as a key chapter in the study of transnational collaboration.
Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl is structured on the contrasting themes of reincarnation and cloning as means of human reproduction. Lai's strategic use of distinct literary forms—mythology and science fiction—reveals the ways in which capitalism racially codes and recodes the body in its attendant stages of development. Specifically, the novel's attention to bodily transformations and duplications emphasizes the historical formation of Asian American subjectivity.
Exploring the ambiguous status of "coolies" in nineteenth-century American culture and law, "Outlawing ÔCooliesÕ" proposes an alternative interpretation of the first federal laws restricting immigration into the United States. Rather than focusing on the modern immigration system that the Page Law (1875) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) inaugurated, Jung examines their legal and political precedents: slave trade prohibitions. Through diplomatic correspondence from China and Cuba, proslavery propaganda from the Old South, and antislavery legislative efforts in Congress, he demonstrates how "coolies" came to embody coerced labor in the age of emancipation. The antebellum equation of "coolies" with enslaved plantation labor in the Caribbean eventually drove Republicans to prohibit American participation in the international trafficking of "coolies" during the Civil War. This little known law of 1862, he suggests, reflected and established a racial logic that would enable the passage of anti-Asian immigration restrictions as antislavery, pro-immigrant measures. Outlawing "coolies" also allowed the U.S. nation-state to deepen and defend its imperial presence in Asia and the Americas under the banner of freedom.