| In the late 1800s, America began appreciating Chinese objects as fine art, placing them in newly created art museums in Boston and New York. Concurrently, anti-Chinese sentiment in America led to 1882 legislation excluding Chinese people from immigrating or becoming naturalized. By connecting the history of museum collections of Chinese art with that of Chinese exclusion, this dissertation creates a dialogue revealing the idea of "Chinese" as a pivotal site for conflicts in American aesthetic theory, as well as conflicts over American national identity.; Two chapters look at relationships between politics, museums and material culture, and two examine print media's role in constructing cultural images. Chapter One explores how, circa 1870, America's expressed admiration for Chinese things abruptly transformed and Chinese art virtually disappeared from American aesthetic discourse. Against the backdrop of anti-Chinese agitation, the "Japanese mania" arising at that time discloses its political component: it effectively subsumed the Chinese origin of many objects.; The Eastern states historically disavow responsibility for the Chinese Exclusion Laws, protesting it as the desire of Western states alone. Analyzing the New York Times from 1870 until 1882, Chapter Two documents the transformation of its image of Chinese people, finding complicity within the capitulation. Chapter Three returns to the investigation of art, exploring Chinese objects' uneasy fit within the dominant Ruskinian rubric informing art museum collecting. I propose that their "outsider" presence ultimately helped define the new rubric of Modernism. Chapter Four examines objectification of Chinese people in relation to mass culture and modernization, focusing on Chinese images on American advertising tradecards. I analyze these images as tools familiarizing Americans with fluid systems of valuation and encouraging the facility with visual culture necessary for modernization.; Investigating Chinese subjects, material culture and aesthetic theory, my dissertation establishes the occurrence of a circumstance in which accumulation of objects initiated new theoretical considerations. And it questions the assumption, accepted since the perception of an avant-garde, that art leads or anticipates politics, proposing instead that politics equally inform what is understood as art. |
