wk 2 "lee"Notes on 'The Heathen Chinee' on God's Free Soil

The "Heathen Chinee" on God's Free Soil

A poem excerpt illustrates negative perceptions of Chinese immigrants, accusing them of abandoning marriage vows and displaying aggression.
The gold rush led to a diverse population in California, described as a "motley crew" and an "unnatural brotherhood" due to the lack of True [white] Women.
San Francisco experienced rapid population growth between 1850 and 1870, becoming a diverse city with Chinese, African American, and European immigrants.
Billy Rice's song "The Chinese Ball" reflects this diversity through a satirical depiction of a Chinese dance, highlighting cultural differences and stereotypes.

Orientalism and Race: From Chinese to Chinaman

Edward Said's concept of Orientalism is introduced as a way the West defines itself against Asia by creating cultural polarities and power imbalances.
Early Chinese settlers in the U.S. were seen as curiosities, but the large influx during the Gold Rush shifted this perception to one of threat.
The arrival of thousands of Chinese settlers in California undermined the definition of Oriental difference, which relied on distance.
Before large-scale Chinese immigration, China was represented in American popular culture through museum displays of curiosities and life-size models.
Peale's Museum and the East India Marine Society showcased Chinese items and figures, attracting public curiosity.
Nathan Dunn's Chinese Museum aimed to counter negative stereotypes and promote a positive image of the Chinese as trade partners.
The museum featured dioramas depicting Chinese society, attracting a large audience.
P.T. Barnum introduced a live Chinese woman, Ah Fong Moy, to his American Museum, presenting her as a "Chinese Lady" in elaborate settings.
Barnum's most intriguing display was Chang and Eng, the "Siamese Twins," who combined exoticism with a physical anomaly.
Chang and Eng toured extensively, became Southern gentry, married, and fathered children, embodying a mix of East and West.
The relationship between natural sciences, ethnology, and imperialism is mentioned, highlighting the cataloging and hierarchizing of peoples.
Museum dioramas naturalized cultural difference for a middle-class audience, while Chinese immigration was seen as a boundary crisis by working-class settlers.
Chinese immigrants disrupted the narrative of westward progress and challenged the vision of California as a White Republic.
Douglas's theories on pollution are applied to ethnicity and race, where ethnic boundaries are permeable and racial boundaries are impermeable, leading to the construction of the Chinese as pollutants.
Chinese immigrants were associated with industrial capitalism and seen as a symbol of the collapse of a pastoral past.
The transformation of Chinese cultural difference from exotic to pollutant was demanded by the boundary crisis.
Chang and Eng's career reflects the shift in the Chinese image from curiosity to racial "crisis," with minstrel shows becoming a key site of this transformation.
Minstrelsy was a powerful vehicle for constructing the Chinaman as a polluting racial Other in the popular imagination.
Human bodies, their parts and functions, are always culturally constructed, as Mary Douglas argued.
Minstrel shows featured caricatures of various racial and ethnic groups, drawing sharp boundaries around racial difference.
Minstrelsy distinguished between acceptable behavior among white characters and punishable behavior among colored characters, enacting the bounds of acceptable working-class behavior and resistance.
Minstrelsy distinguished a category of anomalous and polluting racial difference from a category of normal and nonpolluting ethnic difference.
Blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s and 40s ridiculed the urban free person of color, using characters like Zip Coon and Jim Crow.
The ideological effect of the blackface minstrel show lay in its dual message to a nascent working class consolidating its own white racial identity.
The minstrel representation of the Chinese immigrant as a racial Other relied on a trope of insurmountable cultural difference.
The minstrel construction of Chinese racial difference around cultural excess focused on language, food, and hair.
Chinese "pidgin" was widely imitated on the minstrel stage, collapsing linguistic difference between pidgin and nonsense to infantilize its speakers.
Examples of minstrel songs using pidgin and nonsense words are provided (e.g., "Hong Kong," "Chinese Song," "The Heathen Chinee").
Minstrel songs frequently referenced Chinese foodways, focusing on the consumption of dogs, cats, mice, and rats.
The consumption of dogs and cats is the most common image of Chinese foodways.
The queue worn by Chinese men was another focus of minstrel attention, seen as a cultural anomaly and a source of ambiguity.
The queue was a principal target for victimization of the Chinese.

Minstrelsy's Focus on Language, Food and Hair

Minstrel songs paid great attention to Chinese foodways.
Anne Norton argues that eating was the primary metaphor of the West.
Eating provides an archetypal expression of the mythic process of regeneration through violence.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg observes that Crockett is credited with killing and eating every sort of wild animal.
While the eating of "wild" animals and "wild" people might endow the young frontiersman with savage strength, the Chinese are identified with eating dogs and cats.
The Chinese are also identified as eating mice and rats, animals considered filthy and disease-carrying and therefore dangerous and polluting.
A third focus of minstrel attention was the braided plait of hair or queue worn by Chinese men.
The length and manner in which hair is cut and groomed has been a central marker of gender, age, and class in many cultures.
Since the establishment of the Qing dynasty in 1644, Han Chinese men were required to shave their foreheads and wear their hair in a braided plait as a sign of fealty to their Manchu conquerors.
The queue presented a cultural anomaly and a source of ambiguity.
The Chinaman's queue thus became a principal target for the victimization of the Chinese by every bigot, old and young.
Bret Harte reported in a letter to the Springfield Republican on March 30, 1867:

Even legislation only tolerated [the Chinese], and while they were busy in developing the resources of the state, taxed them roundly for the gracious privilege. Regularly every year they were driven out of the mining camps, except when the enlightened Caucasian found it more convenient to rob them a proceeding which the old statutes in regard to the inadmissibility of their evidence in the courts rendered quite safe and honorable. They furnished innocent amusement to the honest miner, when gambling, horse racing or debauchery palled on his civilized taste, and their Chinese tails, particularly when tied together, cut off or pulled out, were more enjoyable than the Arabian nights entertainments. Nature seemed to have furnished them with that peculiar appendage for the benefit of the Anglo-Saxon.