The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang Klara Loc-Ling Boger (bio) The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form, by Caroline H. Yang. Stanford University Press, 2020. Ix + 280 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN 9781503612051. Explicitly evoking Saidiya Hartman's articulation of "the afterlives of slavery," Caroline H. Yang's The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form compellingly argues that one such afterlife, the minstrel form, informed representations of Chinese "coolie" labor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Yang emphasizes minstrelsy's origins in American chattel slavery and its antiblack logics that resulted in jovial depictions of enslaved Black people as "naturally" subservient to whites. Minstrelsy's specifically proslavery antiblackness affirmed whiteness as the only legitimate claim to personhood and citizenship even after Emancipation, and as the nation expanded westward, this sense of white national identity had to contend with other subordinated racialized labors. Coolie labor, at once seen as a replacement for slave labor and as a challenge to the standard of "free" American labor, perpetuated white anxieties about who can claim "legitimate" labor and citizenship. Using Robin Bernstein's definition of repertoire as a set of practices and gestures that inform everyday life, Yang asserts that blackface minstrelsy was one such repertoire that formed a "state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness" in nineteenth century America (37). Yang's turn to the minstrel form's manifestation in literature after Emancipation is significant as she demonstrates the ways pervasive and quotidian antiblackness set the terms of representation for the Chinese "coolie" laborer. Literary minstrelsy during Reconstruction was a venue for the forging of a national cultural identity that upheld white supremacist definitions of personhood and political enfranchisement, "recalibrating" antiblack racism through the coolie figure (19). "Coolie" minstrelsy continued proslavery logics through representations of nonwhite figures as subhuman as it attended to anxieties about racialized labor that was nonwhite yet also not enslaved. In "Part I: 'Earliest Pioneers' of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction," Yang explores work by white writers, namely Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce, who, in spite of their "progressive" politics, still perpetuated racist depictions of Chinese laborers by deploying popular minstrel tropes and gestures. Thus, these writers intertwined the antiblack logics of slavery with US imperialism. These writers began their literary careers in California and were central in crafting or "pioneering" the space of the West as an American national space. For example, Yang argues that Harte's best-selling 1870 poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," later renamed "Heathen Chinee," refigures Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a character that employs minstrel gestures, into the language and gestures of the Chinese laborer Ah Sin. Twain's early [End Page 510] representations of the Chinese, such as in the play Ah Sin (1877) co-written with Harte, demonstrates his appreciation for minstrel shows; in many of his early writings that feature Chinese people, Twain directly borrows from minstrelsy and employs a mixture of the stock characters the "interlocutor," a straight man character, and "end men," two joke-telling characters nicknamed Tambo and Bones. Bierce's representation of the Chinese in his early short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871) at first glance seems to be most critical of minstrelsy, yet ultimately fails to point to the form's origins in slavery. The westward extension of a minstrelsy cognizant of Chinese labor was a crucial mechanism that made the "external" space of the frontier internal to the nation. Yang's readings of these texts importantly underscore slavery, colonization, and imperialism's intertwined relationship. In "Part II: 'Pioneers' of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Yang examines how "Eurasian" writer Sui Sin Far and African American writer Charles Chesnutt offer critiques of minstrelsy. Whereas the aforementioned white writers were "pioneers" of the colonial space of the West during Reconstruction, Far and Chesnutt wrote after Reconstruction and can be seen as "pioneers" of their respective minority American literary traditions. Still, Yang argues, Far fails in her critique to acknowledge minstrelsy's roots in slavery, such...