Interracial Encounters

Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937

Julia H. Lee

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780814752562
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814753286
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

2013 Honorable Mention, Asian American Studies Association's prize in Literary Studies

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series



Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters appear in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? Interracial Encounters attempts to answer this rather straightforward literary question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity.



In this nuanced study, Julia H. Lee argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, Interracial Encounters foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation’s pervasive pairing of the figure of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.

1 / Introduction

In a speech delivered to the Cleveland Council of Sociology in 1906 on the subject of the “problem” of race, Charles Chesnutt describes the nation’s attitude toward African Americans by comparing them to another racial group: “The Negro is a hard pill to swallow. The Chinese we have sought to keep out—the Negro is too big to throw up” (“The Future American,” 248). Chesnutt’s enshrinement in the canon is based in part on his fiction’s nuanced and complex representations of black-white race relations, but this quotation is striking because it suggests that African American identity is structured in part by its relationship to an Asian other. To put it another way, these lines suggest how closely connected African Americans and Asians are to each other, not just in the nation’s mind but within the author’s own. Far from being a straightforward comparison, however, this linkage prompts an ambivalent and even contradictory response from Chesnutt. On the one hand, Chesnutt uses an alimentary metaphor to link black and yellow bodies as foreign objects that the national body politic either refuses to ingest or wishes to “throw up.” His formulation of race relations as a form of both absorption and rejection indicates how deeply and ambivalently embedded the racial other is in the formation of an ego identity, a process that Anne Cheng calls racial melancholia.¹ At the same time, Chesnutt subtly distances the two groups by using the pronoun “we” to describe those who have striven to keep the Chinese out. The distinction Chesnutt makes recognizes the fact that the two groups were often treated in radically different ways. The Chinese can be thrown out in a way that Negroes cannot, the implication being that the latter have been in the United States too long and in numbers too large to expel successfully.

The ambivalence that permeates Chesnutt’s brief description of the Afro-Asian relationship and the confluences and divergences that it constructs between the two groups are characteristic of writings by both African American and Asian American writers from the early twentieth century and form the backbone of my study. Interracial Encounters traces a series of Afro-Asian encounters and relationships that appear in African American and Asian American texts, examining the aesthetic effects they have on those productions and the politically diverse work they do in an era when the nation’s racial philosophy presumed, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, the “high civilization of the whites, the lack of culture among the blacks, the apparent incapacity for self-rule in many non-Europeans, and the stagnation of Asia” (“First Universal Races,” 45). The fact that the two communities were often defined, compared, or contrasted against each other in national discourses plays a formative role in understanding how they portrayed each other in fiction and essays from the period. This book tracks the various ways that Asian American and African American textual productions responded to this perception of racial difference and the relationship that the nation conceived as existing between the two groups. The intersectional quality of racial relations, which Chesnutt’s speech captures, is central to my book’s critical project of mapping the fertile but uneven terrain from which African American and Asian American interracial representations emerged.

As the passage from Chesnutt’s speech suggests, African Americans and Asian Americans in the early twentieth century depicted each other in wide-ranging and decidedly conflictual ways. The “Negroes,” “Mulattoes,” “Africans,” “Asiatics,” “Orientals,” “Indians,” and “Chinamen” who mingle and interact with each other in texts by Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang fulfill a range of artistic and political purposes, reminding the nation to comply with its democratic principles, pointing to the failures of a racial community, shoring up a racial identity, imagining themselves as aesthetic objects emptied of historical meaning, embodying a gendered conception of the exotic or foreign, exposing the impossibilities of inclusiveness under the rubric of the nation-state, allying with each other in the struggle for social justice and political action, and symbolizing the link between racism within the United States and imperialist projects abroad. The range of attitudes expressed in these texts indicates the complexity of the interracial relationship between African Americans and Asians in the early twentieth century.

The diversity of these textual interactions also belies a late twentieth-century narrative of Afro-Asian interactions that tends to imagine the relationship in monolithic terms. Since the late 1960s, with increasing racial turmoil and unrest and the emergence of race-consciousness movements, the relationship between the two communities has often been either dismissed as irrevocably antagonistic or romanticized as intrinsically linked by a shared history of racism.² As many critics have pointed out, the popular press has been particularly invested in representing the relationship as inherently oppositional, basing this assessment on a highly essentialized view of cultural differences, and clinging to the notion of Asians as the model minority, implying none too subtly that blacks are the marred minority. As Keith Osajima notes, the emphasis placed on Afro-Asian hostility strengthened the notion that the two groups were insuperably different and insinuated that African American culture was somehow lacking when compared to Asian American experiences: “[The] delineation of good and bad culture deflected attention away from societal factors and placed blame for racial inequality on minorities” (217).

Meanwhile, in progressive and academic circles, the tendency has been to counter such popular images with narratives of Afro-Asian kinship and affiliation. One of the cornerstones of ethnic studies is its “coalitional and collaborative ethos” (D. Kim, Writing Manhood, xviii), an institutional commitment that has both supported and in turn been supported by a scholarship that emphasizes the bilateral potential of Afro-Asian relations. One must be cautious, however, that the legitimacy and urgency of this anti-racist project does not obscure the disharmonies and suspicions that are as integral and formative a part of interracial histories as the convergences. In his foundational essay “Is Yellow Black or White?” Gary Okihiro asserts of Asians and Africans, “We are a kindred people [who] know each other well,” sharing a history of colonization and racial oppression, as well as “migration, interaction and cultural sharing, and commerce and trade” (34). The radical potential of such coalitions, which, as George Lipsitz points out, can be “powerful weapons against white supremacy” (210), does not mean that any Afro-Asian alliance—whether personal, cultural, or political—is by its very essence or existence resistant to racial, gender, or sexual hegemonies. The claim that Asians and Africans have a kinship based on intersecting histories of commerce and oppression operates with the same logic as the notion, propagated in the past forty years, that African Americans and Asians feel an implacable animosity toward each other. Vijay Prashad reminds us that even interracial relationships can be incorporated into the service of a “color-blind capitalism” and cites as examples films like Rush Hour and Martial Law, in which Asian and African American identities are commodified in conjunction with each other in order to explore “two ethnic niche markets” (“Bandung,” xiv).³ Daniel Kim argues in Writing Manhood that by paying as close attention to the antagonisms between the two groups as to the affiliations, critics can advance the goal of “more progressive forms of interracialism, for [these antagonisms] speak to the question of why such coalitions seem to emerge with such infrequency and difficulty” (xx).

In looking at the early twentieth century, Interracial Encounters complicates these grand narratives of interracial relations by foregrounding the fact that Afro-Asian relations actually have a long and densely complicated history that predates our contemporary moment and that these relationships have been surprisingly ecumenical in their politics. My analysis of the texts in this study is informed by three interconnected points. First, this book is a historicizing project; it assumes that literary representations of interracial relationships are most fully understood by examining the historical circumstances surrounding their production. I ask what kinds of Afro-Asian representations emerged in light of the shifting levels of economic exploitation, physical violence, and political exclusion from the nation’s imagined community that each group endured in the early twentieth century. In other words, Afro-Asian representations are informed by the specific discourses that the early twentieth century’s national anxieties surrounding citizenship and global relations produced. The incredible diversity and surprising ambivalence of these interracial representations notwithstanding, the justification for linking these works emerges from the texts themselves and the buried history of Afro-Asian relations to which they allude but never fully describe. Evidence of a long history of interracial relations between these two groups has always been present in these texts and other historical or cultural documents, but it is only in the past few decades that readers and critics have begun to rethink their adherence to the prevalent racial binary of white/other and adjust their interpretive lenses to detect alternative racial histories. Historicizing Afro-Asian relations and theorizing the importance of such an approach forms the backbone of this book.

The time period of this study illustrates how rich a comparative analysis of African American and Asian American cultural production can be. My analysis begins in 1896, a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was at its height and the year that the Supreme Court codified black inferiority in Plessy v. Ferguson, and ends in the late 1930s, just before the outbreak of World War II would again dramatically alter the way the United States imagined itself, its citizens, and its interactions with the world. This historical context matters in interracial relations if we are to avoid essentializing race (i.e., claiming that all minority groups are similar because they have experienced racism) or reinscribing racial hierarchies (i.e., claiming that African Americans and Asians have the most complicated relationship and therefore are the most worthy of attention), about which I will say more later.

Early twentieth-century America’s troubled and multifaceted pairing of African and Asian bodies in a variety of legal, cultural, political, and scientific discourses maintained the racial exclusivity of American identity; at the same time, this pairing embodied the nation’s general apprehension about the racialized body’s relationship to American identity. This chapter is devoted to explaining this historical context in greater detail, but for now, it is important to emphasize that the literary texts in this study revise a potent national narrative in which American identity emerges from the interplay between the fantasies of the “Negro Problem” and the “Yellow Peril.” It is because blackness and yellowness are so intertwined in the early twentieth-century’s national imagination that Asian American and African American authors confront that issue through reciprocal representations in their own writings. The interracial representations I scrutinize emerged from the multiple associations that the nation imagined between African Americans and Asians in the early twentieth century, a time that witnessed America’s emergence as a colonial power with global reach, a massive influx of foreigners onto its shores, the migration of African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest, and West, and the increasing industrialization of its economy and urbanization of its populace. In my chapters on these writers and their texts, I pay particular attention to what kinds of rhetorical tropes and representational strategies they used when depicting these moments of interracial encounter. However, I also argue that Asian American and African American texts of the early twentieth century acknowledge that multiple logics of exclusion are being constructed and mobilized in order to marginalize not only their own group but the other as well.⁴ Because of the way that American popular and legal culture frequently paired the figure of the Negro with that of the Chinaman or Asiatic—or the Negro problem with the “Chinese question” or the Yellow Peril—Asian American and African American cultural producers acknowledge that tackling the question of inclusion in their work means engaging, however obliquely, with each other.⁵

This leads me to my second point: that these interracial representations express and reveal the extent to which Asian American and African American identities are mutually constituted within these historical moments. The representations of these encounters are also instrumental in understanding how authors from both groups conceptualized their respective communities, their relationship to the nation-state, and their solutions for the problem of race-based exclusion. Being African American in America means negotiating a relationship of some kind with the figure of the Asian; conversely, Asians must take into account the role of blackness in constituting their identities. Blackness played a key role, not only in how Asians were perceived, but also in how Asian authors imagined themselves within a national and then a global framework; similarly, the figure of the Asian was vital in the construction of an African American identity and became an important trope in African American literary texts for expressing black America’s relation to the nation and the world. The interracial encounters and relationships that are portrayed in these works capture the extent to which Africans and Asians are imbricated in their identity constructions. That is, racial identity is constantly being shaped and informed by a panoply of forces, and to imagine the formation of a racial identity solely as a contrast to “whiteness” renders other racial identity markers in monolithic terms and reaffirms the power of established racial hierarchies.

Again and again, the texts I examine reveal that Asian American and African American subjectivities require the other’s presence in order to articulate themselves as national and racialized subjects. The Chinese passenger riding in the whites-only train car in Justice John Harlan’s famous dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson and Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition highlights the hypocrisy of Jim Crow exclusion and also suggests that African Americans occupy a superlative outsider position in relation to other racial groups. The oriental objects in Nella Lars-en’s Quicksand become the models with which Helga Larsen attempts to shield herself from the discursive violence that African American women have endured. The black Jamaicans that appear in the memoirs of the Eaton sisters provide a contrast and lend depth to their respective struggles to locate their own biracial subjectivities. The political struggle against global oppression that W. E. B. Du Bois and Younghill Kang write of in their novels requires a multiracial and multi-ethnic cast of characters. Thus, the complex relationship that the nation imposed upon African Americans and Asians heavily informed the mutual cultural representations that African Americans and Asian American authors produced.

So what kind of interracial representations emerge when two groups are constantly paired with or pitted against each other to symbolize all that America is—or does not want to be? How do African American and Asian American authors respond to myths of the ideal national subject that are polychromatic in their exclusionary practices? Or, to restate Du Bois’s famous question in terms more relevant to this project (if much less eloquent), “How does it feel to be part of a problem?” To answer these questions and describe how the literary representations of interracial encounters interact with racial identities and political institutions, I rely on two theories of racial identity, one put forth by Robin Kelley and one by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, to elucidate the relationship between African American and Asian American cultural histories. The theories of polyculturalism and racial formation are useful models for thinking outside the white/other or majority/minority binaries of racial identity and interaction that have prevailed in literary studies; although I do not apply these theories in a systematic way to every text under consideration in this book, I do think they provoke a broad set of questions that ultimately make comparative racial cultural studies not only possible but also exciting. Kelley’s polyculturalism focuses on the often unspoken ways that different racial groups influence and borrow from each other, particularly in the realm of culture. I find polyculturalism to be useful in articulating my argument for the relationship between African Americans and Asian Americans in the early twentieth century. Kelley argues for the impurity of all racial identities, both in terms of lines of descent and cultural histories, and suggests that polyculturalism happens everywhere, without a sense of self-consciousness on the part of those individuals who are the products of or borrow from other cultures. In this regard, Kelley is drawing a pointed contrast between his idea of polyculturalism and multiculturalism, a term he dislikes because it “implies that cultures are fixed [and] discrete entities” (“People in Me”). Like Kelley’s work, this book counters the multicultural project of the late twentieth century, in which the emphasis was on extrapolating the similarities or equivalences between various racial groups constructed within rigid borders. This study attempts to capture how various racialized groups were shaped and influenced by each other in their struggles to negotiate the reality of the exclusionary nature of the nation and in their imagining of political structures that might rectify that injustice.

Perhaps more than Kelley’s, Omi and Winant’s thesis on racial formation has played a foundational role in my approach to comparative racial analysis. Their theory of racial formation analyzes how racial identity is constructed by the continuous negotiation between national institutions and discourses and the racialized groups themselves. The identities of these writers as African Americans or Asian Americans emerged not only from their multifaceted interactions with each other, as Kelley suggests, but also from a mythology of national identity that was deeply implicated in anxieties about racial difference. According to Omi and Winant, “Race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation”; therefore, racial formation is the dialectical process that occurs between institutions of power and ethnic or racial groups (56). One of the “racial projects” that informed how African Americans and Asian Americans viewed their own identities was the pervasive mythology of the “American” so endemic in the early twentieth century. In the words of Omi and Winant, this fantasy of national identity narrates “an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics [in] an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (56). The racial project of defining American identity in the early twentieth century was neither trivial nor merely theoretical; many believed that the very survival of the nation depended on who could and should be considered American. Although Theodore Roosevelt’s menacing warning in a 1915 speech that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans” refers explicitly to the threat posed by the influx of southern and eastern European immigrants, it also reflects the nation’s anxieties that the increasing physical, political, and social mobility of the country’s black citizens and the influx of immigrants from other countries, especially Asia, would somehow destroy the natural coherence of the American nation and subject (“Roosevelt Bars the Hyphenated”). This anxiety about American identity can also be seen in Woodrow Wilson’s comment in 1914 that “some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name” (quoted in Robinson et al., 217). The image of the hyphen dropping out of an identity because of “its own weight” suggests it is a burden that any reasonable person would want to shed at the first available opportunity. The weightiness of the hyphen stands in contrast to the weightlessness of American identity itself, as something natural, dominant, and an end in itself.

Constructing American identity as weightless is also a double-edged sword; the metaphor itself betrays the anxieties that inspired discussions about what it means to be an American. On the one hand, American identity can easily be taken up and worn without any trouble; on the other hand, its lack of heft suggests that it might be lacking in substance. In other words, despite the “naturalness” of such an identity, it is also, ironically, extraordinarily fragile if it can be obliterated by the existence of a hyphen. Roosevelt alluded to that fragility when he thundered in the same 1915 speech, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities” (“Roosevelt Bars the Hyphenated”). With his apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin, Roosevelt no doubt means to evoke the memories and fears associated with the chaos of the Civil War, which was at that point a fairly recent memory, as well as point to the horrors unfolding overseas during the First World War; however, his language also suggests that being American as such endows its citizens’ lives and their nation with a unique and transformative meaning that is more than just the sum of its parts. Within the operative mythology of the nation, being American meant something more than o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The “Negro Problem” and the “Yellow Peril”: Early Twentieth-Century America’s Views on Blacks and Asians
• 3 Estrangement on a Train: Race and Narratives of American Identity in The Marrow of Tradition and America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat
• 4 The Eaton Sisters Go to Jamaica
• 5 Quicksand and the Racial Aesthetics of Chinoiserie
• 6 Nation, Narration, and the Afro-Asian Encounter in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
• 7 Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index