Edlie L. Wong - Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (America and the Long 19th Century, 12)

AMERICA AND THE LONG 19th CENTURY

General Editors: David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor

Elizabeth Young

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

Edlie L. Wong

Shadowing the White Mans Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Gretchen Murphy

Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America

James B. Salazar

Empires Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines

Meg Wesling

Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature

William A. Gleason

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

Robin Bernstein

American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

Jacob Rama Berman

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America

Andrew Lyndon Knighton

Tomorrows Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America

Peter M. Coviello

Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation

Hoang Gia Phan

The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

Michael J. Drexler and Ed White

Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization

Hsuan L. Hsu

Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century

Jasmine Nichole Cobb

Stella

meric Bergeaud

Translated by Lesley Curtis and Christen Mucher

Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

Robert Lawrence Gunn

The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

Jeremy Matthew Glick

Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Edlie L. Wong

Edlie L. Wong

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

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2015 by New York University

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ISBN: 978-1-4798-6800-1 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-4798-1796-2 (paperback)

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I.1. Flyleaf illustration, Truth versus Fiction; Justice versus Prejudice

1.1. Celestial Cubans

1.2. Cedula de Libres de Color for Jos Puchal

1.3. Contrata for He Fu (Eduardo)

1.4. Chinese translation of Contrata for He Fu (Eduardo)

1.5. Newspaper clipping pasted into letter from Richard H. Chinn to Eliza McHatton Ripley

2.1. Nast, The Civilization of Blaine

2.2. Title page, Life and Adventures of James Williams

2.3. Nast, The Nigger Must Go and The Chinese Must Go

3.1. Keller, San Francisco A.D. 1900

3.2. Keller, A Fresh Eruption of the Pacific Coast Vesuvius

4.1. Walter, Theres Millions in It

4.2. Case file 10025/36 (Ju Toy)

I have incurred innumerable debts to the many friends, colleagues, and librarians who helped me bring this book to life over the long course of research and writing. First, I would like to acknowledge the institutions that supported my work. A generous yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided me with the resources to conduct archival research at the Bancroft Library at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley and the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia. I wrote a majority of the book with the assistance of a Research and Scholarship Award from the Graduate School, University of Maryland. As the book neared completion, I received additional assistance from the College of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland, Subvention Fund as well as the Department of English, University of Maryland. I am grateful to my department chair, William Cohen, for his continued support.

I would not have been able to complete this book without the encouragement, intelligence, and guidance of the many friends and colleagues who helped direct my thinking and research over the years. Brent Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, David Eng, Stacy Klein, and Christine Chism offered helpful professional guidance as this book first took shape. The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis seminar on Vernacular Epistemologies (20092010), organized by Julie Livingston and Indrani Chatterjee, gave me the opportunity to share early work with a perceptive cohort of interdisciplinary scholars whose insights and suggestions helped reshape and expand the contours of the book. At different stages of the project, Ryan Kernan and Shuang Shen provided me with invaluable translation assistance, and Sonali Perera was unstinting in her encouragement throughout the process. I must also thank Herman Bennett, Matthew Sandler, Michael Schoeppner, Hester Blum, and Sunny Yang and Nancy Bentley of the American Studies reading group at the University of Pennsylvania for inviting me to their campuses to present my work. The feedback I received from the audiences that attended my talks at the CUNY Graduate Center (as a participant in the conference Middle Passages: History and Poetics), the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, Penn State University, and the University of Pennsylvania challenged me to further refine my ideas. I offer special thanks to Eric Hayot, who graciously shared his work with me during my visit to Penn State. The wonderful participants at the University of Marylands Race, Law, and American Literary Studies: An Interdisciplinary Conference (2012), especially Brook Thomas, Nan Goodman, Hoang Phan, Alfred Brophy, and Jeannine DeLombard, receive my deepest gratitude for their intellectual engagement, suggestions, and encouragement. My colleagues at the University of Maryland, including Ralph Bauer, Robert Levine, Mary Helen Washington, Christina Walter, Jonathan Auerbach, Brian Richardson, Peter Mallios, Sangeeta Ray, and Orrin Wang, have fostered my work in myriad significant ways. They welcomed me to Maryland with warmth, generosity, and good humor and provided me with the intellectual support to complete this book.

I would like to thank Eric Zinner at New York University Press, who reprised his role from my first book and, with Alicia Nadkarni, guided this second book through the lengthy publication process. I was fortunate to work with a wonderfully responsive copyeditor, Andrew Katz. Marisa Louie, an archivist with the National Archives at San Francisco, also offered indispensible assistance and provided me with the case files for