Sitting in Darkness

Front matter

MARK TWAIN'S ASIA AND

COMPARATIVE RACIALIZATION

- Abas sw

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction: “Coolies” and Comparative Racialization in the Global West

. “A Witness More Powerful than Himself”: Race, Testimony, and Twain’s Courtroom Farces

Index

About the Author

139 167 171 209 229

` vii

Figure I.1.

Figure 1.1.

Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.2.

Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.2.

Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.3, Figure 4.4.

Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.2.

Figure 5.3.

Illustrations

True Williams, “John Chinaman in New York”

Harry Williams, “Ah Sin”

George Root, “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! or the Prisoner’s Hope”

Colophon image from Frank Bellew, The Tramp: His Tricks, Tallies, and Tell-Tales, With All His Signs, Countersigns, Grips, Pass- Words, and Villainies Exposed

“The Mill Among the Mill-Hands”

G. Frederick Keller, “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?”

The “Orientals”

“The Explosion”

Daniel Beard, “Another Miracle”

Daniel Beard, “After the Explosion”

“Indians and Chinamen”

“A Memorial for the Perpetuation of My Name’

Twain's calculations for the monument to King Leopold

20 46 63

Acknowledgments

While all its shortcomings are my own, writing this book has been a collaborative process enriched by conversations with colleagues, friends, and students over the last six years. The arguments presented here benefited from exchanges with undergraduates in my courses on U.S. literature and Mark Twain at Yale and the University of California, Davis, as well as provocative questions from audiences at the American Studies Association, the American Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Tokyo, Northwestern University, Claremont Graduate University, Loyola University in Chicago, the University of Michigan, Oxford University, and the University of Notre Dame.

Lawrence Buell, Colin Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Gordon Hutner, Colleen Lye, Samuel Otter, Priscilla Wald, and Edlie Wong offered encouragement, criticism, and support at crucial stages of the project. Pm also grateful for the generous guidance provided by established Mark Twain scholars such as Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Susan Harris, Bruce Michelson, Linda Morris, and R. Kent Rasmussen, as well as Neda Salem’s guidance at the Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

My research was supported by generous grants and prizes from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Davis Humanities Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Western Literature Association, and American Literature. Previous versions and excerpts from the Introduction, Chapter 2, and Chapter 4 were published as “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,’ American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013); “Vagrancy and Comparative Racialization in Huckleberry Finn and “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad,” American Literature, vol. 81, no. 4 (December 2009); and “A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Wu Chih Tien: Mark Twain and Wong Chin Foo,” Common xii > ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ź

Place, vol. 11, no. 1 (October 2010). I am grateful to the publishers of these journals for permission to reprint portions of those articles here. Gordon Hutner’s invitation to participate in American Literary Historys “Second Book Project” symposium and special issue was especially helpful, as it first prompted me to imagine this project as a book.

At NYU Press, Eric Zinner provided encouragement and advice throughout the process; the press’s referees offered rigorous and incisive feedback that I have found indispensable in revising this book. I’m also grateful to Mac Layne and Cara Shipe for proofreading the manuscript in its final stages and to Grace Kowles for producing the index.

The English department at UC Davis and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences have been ideal work environments, not least because of the fellowship and intellectual engagement of my colleagues Beth Freeman, Danielle Heard, Mark Jerng, Kathleen Frederickson, Jonathan Levy, Martha Lincoln, Michael Makovski, Desiree Martin, John Marx, Timothy Schroeder, Matthew Stratton, Julie Sze, and Mike Ziser. Beyond the academy, I’m grateful for the love and support of friends and family—particularly Kang, Hsiang-Lin, Kang Jr., Lin, Cristina, Jason, Kile, Kalissa, Myron, and Beenash. Like Twain's novels, much of this book was written in feline company, thanks to a stray cat named Jasper.