Open-access edition of Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization by Hsuan L. Hsu

FAIN: DR-290413-23

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Ellen Chodosh (Project Director: June 2022 to January 2025)

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization is the first book to examine Mark Twain's archive of writings about US relations with China and the Philippines, and demonstrates that his ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but were profoundly comparative. Based on interdisciplinary research as well as new readings of classic novels such as Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson and lesser known texts such as Ah Sin and "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," Hsuan Hsu broadens Twain's reputation as a chronicler of the American South by reconsidering him as a western and transpacific author. In so doing, the author develops a new model for formal literary analysis that considers the complex histories and mechanisms of comparative racialization.

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Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization
Year: 2015
ISBN: 9781479843404
Publisher: New York University Press
Author: Hsuan L. Hsu
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.
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479880416.001.0001
Primary URL Description: NYU Press
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89469
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN
URL 3: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287jq2
URL 3 Description: JSTOR
Type: Single author monograph

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