The peculiar afterlife of slavery : the Chinese worker and the minstrel form

Resource Information

The work The peculiar afterlife of slavery : the Chinese worker and the minstrel form represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The peculiar afterlife of slavery : the Chinese worker and the minstrel form

Title remainder

the Chinese worker and the minstrel form

Statement of responsibility

Caroline H. Yang

Creator

• Yang, Caroline H

Author

• Yang, Caroline H

Subject

• Electronic books
• Foreign workers, Chinese, in literature
• Minstrels in literature
• Racism in literature
• West (U.S.) -- In literature
• Race in literature
• American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism

Genre

• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

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

Member of

• hoopla (Digital media service)

Cataloging source

Midwest

Dewey number

813/.395073

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

Asian America

Target audience

adult