The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how anti-black racism was recalibrated and perpetuated through the figure of the non-black Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. By drawing connections between the form of blackface minstrelsy and the figure of the Chinese worker in Reconstruction-era and late 19th-century US literature, Caroline Yang reveals the ways in which antiblackness structured US cultural production, particularly at a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Drawing on early writings by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), and Charles Chesnutt, writers who remain among the most celebrated from the Reconstruction period, Yang reassesses these authors' complex and often contradictory positions on race and labor. This study suggests that the figure of the Chinese worker allows us to see an inextricable link between not just US literature and US empire, but also the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States"--

Caroline H. Yang is Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Introduction: The Chinese Question in the Early Afterlife of Slavery
1. The "Heathen Chinee" and Topsy in Bret Harte's Narratives of the West
2. Mark Twain's Chinese Characters and the Fungibility of Blackness
3. Ambrose Bierce's Critique of Blackface Minstrelsy and Anti-Chinese Racism
4. Representations of Gender and Slavery in Sui Sin Far's Early Fictions
5. Reading the Minstrel Tradition and U.S. Empire through Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition