The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery – The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form

The Peculiar Afterlife of SlaveryThe Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form\nAuthor(s): Caroline H. Yang\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Stanford University Press, United States\nImprint: Stanford University Press\nISBN-13: 9781503610378, 978-1503610378\nSynopsis\nThe Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. \n\n Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesincluding Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles ChesnuttYang traces the intertwined histories.