Description
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.
Author: Caroline H. Yang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 04/14/2020
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781503612051
ISBN10: 1503612058
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American | Asian American & Pacific Islander
- History | United States | 19th Century
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Asian American Studies & Pacific
About the Author
Caroline H. Yang is Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.