Lanterna Rally

Author: Carol Kim Helfer

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9781267419156

"Cultural Imprints" broadens current scholarship on the Chinese in turn-of-the-century America by reframing representations of Chinese Americans along class lines. With a shift of focus to Chinese elites, this dissertation explores four distinct cultural projects to demonstrate the ways in which Chinese elites created unique spaces to negotiate their identities and to actively engage in American print culture. First, the writings of Edith Eaton, under the penname Sui Sin Far, provided subversive representations of Chinese Americans that challenged the notion that they were beyond the purview of American society and culture. Her writings employed middle-class Chinese characters to suggest that class status and respectability offered a measure of acceptance among white Americans. Second, Chinese merchants in America banded together to establish a Chinese village and exhibit at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. This dissertation also reveals that the 1892 Geary Act regenerated national debate about the status of Chinese in America within a world's fair context. Next, an analysis of newspaper advertisements for Chinese apothecaries elucidates how Chinese herbal doctors constructed their own identities in the American press and effectively treated a white clientele. Last, a study of the representations of Chinese elite women and Chinese medical missionaries in China and America counters the dominant narrative that portrays the victimization of Chinese women in missionary literature and the popular press. In spite of the Exclusionary Era, Chinese elites created public spaces where they negotiated their own identities and contested notions of Western cultural superiority in the American press. A repositioning of the portrayal of the Chinese in turn-of-the-century America produces a different vantage point from that of the working-class figure of the "coolie." An analysis of these four cultural projects indicates the various ways Chinese elites made their impressions on American print culture.