Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain\'s Asia & Comparative Racialization - Hsuan L. Hsu

john bird is Margaret M. Bryant Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is the author of Mark Twain and Metaphor and the founding editor of the Mark Twain Annual.

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization Hsuan L. Hsu. NYU P, 2015. 248 pp. $79.00 cloth. Reviewed by Matt Seybold Hsuan L. Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness joins Selina Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China (2015) in thoroughly engaging the “shadow archive of writing about China, Chinese immigrants, and transpacific imperialism” (4). Comprehensive critical investigation of Twain’s fascination with Asia and Asian Americans is long overdue and, undoubtedly, the quality of Hsu and Lai-Henderson’s works will ensure the ongoing vitality of these lines of inquiry. As his title suggests, Hsu’s analysis extends beyond this specific “shadow archive” to explore how the plight of Asian Americans, as witnessed during formative periods spent in California and Hawaii, is contained within a more familiar corpus of Twain’s writing, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins. Hsu reveals that even though these novels engage racism most directly through the treatment of black slaves and European immigrants, Twain’s representations of certain peculiar qualities of antebellum racial animus can be more fully understood through the active struggle for civil rights being pursued by Asian Americans as these works are being written. Hsu also concretely argues for expanding conventional understanding of the scope and scale of Twain’s expertise. By demonstrating the breadth of national and international concerns on which his works draw, Hsu presents Twain as a lucid macro-analyst who was grappling with global complexities more commonly associated with much later generations. Hsu’s book is commendable in that it admirably exemplifies the mutual benefit of Twain studies and a rising tide of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship. Hsu chooses to let his readers “think through broader methodological issues” (1–2) unmolested. One wonders whether providing more explicit

Reviews

173

personal and/or disciplinary rationales for his specialized methods and terms might actually make Sitting in Darkness more approachable for readers who come to it through Twain studies. Hsu’s methodology is substantially derived from two critical subfields. If many Twain scholars find the phrase comparative racialization unfamiliar, they can hardly be blamed. This terminology and its associated techniques have emerged relatively recently. Vicente Rafael, a historian of Southeast Asia, coined comparative racialization in 1995. It enjoyed an initial limited embrace within critical race theory. According to Shu-mei Shih, a pioneer in the field of Sinophone studies, a clear set of methodological imperatives for literary and cultural studies didn’t begin to coalesce around comparative racialization until 2004. In Shih’s view, these imperatives addressed at least three concerns identified by the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada. First, they observed that outside the United States analysis of race and ethnicity in their fields was marginalized, in part because race was perceived as a distinctly American problem. Second, even in U.S. scholarship, race was too often understood according to a black-white binary. And, finally, scholars in literature and cultural studies had, since the 1980s, been slow to embrace innovative race critiques from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including, for instance, Rafael’s work. Very little of the fruit of this debate reached the broader academic public until the last five years. Hsu’s book is only the second to include comparative racialization in its title. Through the invocation of this terminology, apparent interdisciplinary debts, particularly to critical race theory, and a subset of citations, including Rafael, Hsu makes apparent his inclusion in the emerging critical community Shih describes. Thus one must conclude that he makes a calculated choice by not directly engaging the related methodological debates, summarizing their origins and implications, situating comparative racialization within a critical canon, or even providing an explicit definition. That most readers must comprehend and contextualize his methods and terminology organically is clearly by design. The question then becomes, why does Hsu prefer such intentional ambiguity to the conventional survey and intervention in a critical field? From my perspective, identifying the specific contemporary valance of comparative racialization testifies not only to Hsu’s prescience, but also, more importantly, to Mark Twain’s. That Twain intuits at least some of the rationales of a uniquely twenty-first-century critical discussion of race seems a point worth driving home early and often in a book that ends with speculation about Twain’s relevance to “postracial rhetoric” (169).

174

reviews

Just as Hsu elects to elude the methodological debates from which comparative racialization ensues, he likewise leaves implicit his equally apparent allegiance to the slightly older and more familiar methodologies of law and literature. He does engage readings by prominent law and literature scholars like Colin Dayan and Brook Thomas, but, when summarizing his argument, he always presents law and jurisprudence as part of a long list of source material—for instance, “recent scholarship on Asian immigration, U.S. imperialism, race theory, and legal history” (1) or “laws, geographies, and economic relations” (2). In actuality, jurisprudence, as much as comparative racialization or Mark Twain, is an organizing apparatus in Sitting in Darkness that synthesizes the distinct chapter arguments and operates as the historicist lens through which Hsu reads Twain’s representations of race. At the center of every chapter, one finds court decisions, pieces of legislation, and local statutes. These, inevitably, play much more than the complementary role Hsu generally reserves for journalism, economics, and political polemics. The denial of Asian testimony at the trials of Caucasian defendants, inequitable codes of vagrancy and hygiene, legal fictions of race and corporate personhood, local precursors to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and legislative prescriptions for estimating casualties in imperial wars: legal contexts are in every chapter of Sitting in Darkness the bridge between Twain’s works and the rest of American popular culture and politics. What is important here is not merely the homage a conventional critical intervention pays to methodological innovations that inform the work, but that the preferential integration of legal sources is left undefended. This is not so much a flaw as it is a missed opportunity. An explicit defense of prioritizing legal sources based on precedents established by law and literature scholars could have provided further support for Hsu’s insistence that cross-racial readings are not anachronistic, as well as clarified, from the outset, a consistent and well-defined structure in his analysis. In the case of Sitting in Darkness, I think lifting the methodological veil, rather than being confusing or distracting, actually emphasizes the extent to which Hsu’s work goes beyond merely exploring early and unpublished writings to provide original insight into the relationship between Twain, his times, and our own. matt seybold is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, home of the Center for Mark Twain Studies. His work, which focuses on the intersection of print culture and economic rhetoric

Reviews

175

in the nineteenth century, has been published in Reception, the Mark Twain Journal, the Western Humanities Review, the Henry James Review, and the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.

Mark Twain in China Selina Lai-Henderson. Stanford UP, 2015. 176 pp. $45.00 cloth. Reviewed by Susan K. Harris Many years ago, when I first looked up “Mark Twain” in the New York Public Library’s card catalog (remember those?), I was struck by the number of languages into which his works had been translated. His global presence continues to increase: Twain’s writings have been translated into most of the world’s major languages and not a few of its minor ones. Equally important is the burgeoning presence in the United States of Twain scholars from around the world, who are introducing new perspectives not just on Twain and his writings, but on the cultural contexts in which his works are read. Selena LaiHenderson’s Mark Twain in China falls into this category: she gives us a brief history of Twain’s relationship to the Chinese in the United States, she surveys the landscape of Chinese translations of his work, especially Huck Finn, and she lays out some of the Chinese cultural contexts in which Twain’s work has been read. Mark Twain in China is grounded in a fact that few Americans know: people in  other parts of the world value Mark Twain for different reasons than Americans do, in large part because they read Twain selections that most Americans don’t even know exist. Even when they read traditional Twain texts, they read them through their own cultures’ histories, not through ours. This is terrain Shelley Fisher Fishkin opened up with her admirable The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (Library of America, 2010), which features commentary about Twain from writers as diverse as José Martí, Rudyard Kipling, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lu Xun, and Kenzaburō Ōe. This collection illustrates how highly Twain is valued abroad for his political writings, especially those critical of U.S. imperialism. China is a case in point; LaiHenderson shows us that early twentieth-century Chinese readers knew and appreciated Twain’s championing of the Chinese in the United States at a time when American racism against the Chinese was at its height. 176

reviews