Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization

Perhaps the most popular of all canonical

American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize

American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored

Twain’s work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian

Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu

examines Twain’s career-long archive of writings about United States relations

with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain’s early writings about Chinese

immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and

anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain’s ideas about race were not

limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully crafted

assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, including

African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations.

Drawing on recent legal scholarship,

comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting in

Darkness engages Twain’s best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry

Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as well as his

lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the

allegorical tale A Fable of the Yellow Terror and the yellow face play Ah

Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of Chinese

Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connections

between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.