Against Exclusion: Disrupting Anti-Chinese Violence in the Nineteenth Century

by Audrey Wu Clark

Overview

In Against Exclusion, Audrey Wu Clark dramatically reframes Asian American resistance via the lives of five early Chinese American public figures. In contrast to later activists who sought to defy stereotypes, Ah Toy, Mary Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing deployed the model minority and yellow peril tropes to make themselves visible during a period of rampant anti-Chinese violence and legal exclusion. In making themselves visible, they sought to expose and dismantle the contradictory exceptionalism of nineteenth-century US liberalism that both required and “disavowed” the deaths of Chinese Americans. In examining these figures and the ways in which they fought their exclusion as Chinese Americans—via court cases, autobiographical writings, journalism, and other forms of activism—Clark contributes to prevailing scholarly conversations about stereotypes of Asian Americans but contextualizes them in the nineteenth century. She traces the twinned emergences of the model minority and the yellow peril, excavating the exceptionalism with which Chinese Americans were racialized and subject to death—whether by lynching, other forms of driving out, or loss of citizenship or rights—and mapping its reverberations into the present day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814283745
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	09/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Audrey Wu Clark is Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. In addition to Against Exclusion, she is the author of Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War, and The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art.

Read an Excerpt

Against Exclusion recovers some of the earliest Asian American activists whose lives were affected by the exceptional minority discourse that fueled the driving-out era of the late nineteenth century. This study makes sense of the earliest Asian American literature and activism as autobiographies and court cases by contextualizing them during the driving-out era. The five figures of my study form a cohort of the earliest Asian American activists who responded to the driving-out era and the exceptional minority gender exclusion of the Page Act. Toy, a sex worker, and Tape, a Christian Victorian Chinese American woman, were both influenced by the Victorian ideology of female moral reform, which disparately spurred the formation of Protestant mission homes and suffragism. Although the Protestant mission homes attempted to homogenize the Chinese American community as Protestant and assimilationist to white American Victorian culture, and the suffragists did not include Asian Americans in their agenda, both Tape and Toy believed in the woman’s ability to stand up for her own rights and the rights of those she represents. Wong Chin Foo was a bit of an anomaly as a Chinese American protofeminist man during a period in which Chinese American women largely did not have a voice in public spheres and in which white American women had not yet won the right to vote. He rescued trafficked sex workers and believed in feminist free love. He also refused to essentialize women in his writing. On the other hand, Yan Phou Lee and Yung demonstrate their traditionalist yet sympathetic gender politics in their writing. Yan Phou Lee’s difficult personal relationships with women and his admission but documentation of structural sexism in Chinese culture in his ethnographic work contribute to his traditionalist gender politics. These politics also broadened his appeal to a conservative liberal audience. Yung’s vigorous masculinity in his plague-writing responded to charges of sickness and infirmity leveled at Chinese Americans during the plague period. As a result, his sympathy toward women’s oppression appears in his support and honor of the women who inspire his education and pursuit of writing even when he, at times, portrays them as submissive and demure. The respective protofeminism and gender sympathy of the five figures I discuss importantly respond to the Page Act, which excluded Asian women on the presumption of their sex work and was based on the yellow peril / model minority discourse of Asian American hypersexuality and hyperfemininity. Toy, Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing demonstrated their activism in their gender politics and in enfleshing themselves during a period in which Chinese Americans were spectacularly objectified through lynching in and expulsion from West Coast cities. However, their activism often relied on their collaboration with liberals.

...

Together, Toy, Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung faced the empiricism of white supremacy, documented the driving-out era, and provided a genealogy of the exceptional minority. In their work, they demonstrate that the exceptional minority stereotype, which existed more than a century before the term model minority was coined, ineluctably collapses the model minority into the yellow peril stereotype. This exceptional stereotype propelled the driving-out era and the attempt to exterminate Chinese Americans on the West Coast during the 1870s and 1880s. The figures of my study, especially Yung, who had the disadvantage of publishing the latest, also heralded Asian American modernism: they integrated progressive protest, before the Progressive Era, into the establishment of their voices—through court cases or literature—and many of them focused on the separation of secularism and Christianity, and some, like Yung, experimented with their writing. These five figures pioneered Asian American activism, literature, and protofeminism during an era in which Chinese Americans, particularly women, were legally excluded from citizenship and immigration on the bases of their race and sexualities. Hegemonic liberalism often co-opted their activist efforts, but their work did not entirely result in failure: their work and lives contributed to and traced the shift from conservative reform in the Gilded Age to progressive reform in the Progressive Era.

Always collapsing the model minority into the yellow peril stereotype, and constructed as a threat to either white America in the nineteenth century or other racial minority groups in the twentieth century, the seemingly benevolent discourse of the exceptional minority is insidious and pernicious, and led to the driving-out era. This book traces the genealogy of the exceptional minority stereotypes to the events and cultural productions of the early exclusion era in which the Chinese were blamed for urban epidemics, anti-Chinese organizations such as the Anti-Coolie Association (1869) were created, and in which Chinese were lynched, driven out in other ways in the 1870s and 1880s, and suffered social deaths through legal discourse (1854, 1875, 1882, 1892). The first pieces of Asian American literature and these infrastructures of activism emerged during this period to protest such stereotypes of the yellow peril but were absorbed by the model minority discourse. In attempting to enflesh themselves and other Chinese Americans and exposing the contradictions and exceptionalisms of liberalism, thus proving that they were all eligible for citizenship, Toy, Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung were dismissed by the liberalism that required and disavowed their exceptionalism. Toy, Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung presciently argued during driving-out and plague periods of the nineteenth century that all races are susceptible to discursively objectifying stereotypes, disease, and quarantine. As these figures demonstrate, tactically deploying and resisting these objectifying stereotypes are what make us human, in the flesh.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction “Violence and the Sacred” Chapter 1 Ah Toy and Mary Tape: Legal Exceptionalism and Early Chinese American Women’s Voices Chapter 2 Wong Chin Foo: The Excessive Making and Remaking of a Heathen Protofeminist Chapter 3 Trauma and Activism: Yan Phou Lee Writes Back Chapter 4 Yung Wing: Exceptional Minority Discourse in the Plague Era Conclusion The Enfleshed Exceptions Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Rich in historical detail, Against Exclusion establishes a model for Asian American literature/culture criticism that showcases the intellectual potential of interdisciplinary, historically situated scholarship of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural production. A deeply engaging, original work.” —James Kyung-Jin Lee, author of Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority 

“Uncovering interesting links between early Chinese American figures, the exceptional minority stereotype, and the exceptionalism of nineteenth-century liberalism, Clark makes a case for contextualizing the current day’s Asian hate crimes and the ways in which Asian Americans continue to be racialized within this nineteenth-century exceptionalist discourse.” —Hyesu Park, author of Alterity and Empathy in Post-1945 Asian American Narratives: Narrating Other Minds 

From the Publisher