Realism and the hierarchy of racial inclusion: Representations of African Americans and Chinese Americans in post-Civil War literature and culture

This study situates the place of Chinese Americans within the literary and cultural history of the United States by configuring the post-Civil War reconciliation between the North and the South along an East-West axis in order to examine realism's attempt to produce a cohesive vision of America. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical scholarship by David Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson with literary criticism by Amy Kaplan, Brook Thomas, and Colleen Lye, my project traces the figure of the normative individual subject promoted by realism to the free labor republicanism of the antebellum period. It argues that this genealogy enabled realism to produce a narrative of racial inclusion that contained the social and legal possibilities created by African American emancipation within established racial hierarchies. By contrast, the presence of the Chinese American, which Colleen Lye identifies as a figure of economic efficiency that has historically been perceived as both a racial threat and a racial exemplar, destabilized the privileged normative subject and thus required more aggressive strategies of representational management and erasure in order for realism to account for racial difference while consolidating an inclusionary national sensibility. Focusing on racial representations, my project examines the engagements with competing individual subjectivities in the nineteenth-century pictorial press and in work by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Jack London, and Sui Sin Far.