Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia

The bestselling status of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010) and the recent controversy over the 2011 NewSouth edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in which the n-word has been replaced with “slave” throughout) attest to Twain’s unique appeal as an author of popular and formally sophisticated works that satirize US formations of race and empire. For a broad international audience,¹ Twain exemplifies how literary form and style can be mobilized against racist institutions; at the same time, his writings have provided key examples for critical conversations about the possibilities and limitations of canonical engagements with blackness and empire.² Whereas Toni Morrison’s reading of “the Africanist presence” at the “center” of Huckleberry Finn has given rise to illuminating scholarship on blackness in canonical American literature (54), historical dynamics of comparative racialization raise questions about how “Africanist” representations intersected with representations of Chinese immigrants in a period when the figure of the indentured coolie laborer blurred boundaries between traditional notions of freedom and servitude. My book project, “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” draws on recent scholarship on Asian immigration, US imperialism, race theory, and legal history to situate Twain’s race fiction in a comparative perspective: in the intersectional contexts of Chinese immigration restrictions and Jim Crow, even historical novels about antebellum slavery registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and antiblack racism. Although the project’s focus is on the explicit and implicit comparisons that Twain drew between different racial groups over the course of his career, contextualized analysis of his writings also provides occasions to think through broader methodological issues, such as how literature can reveal formative tensions between different racial groups, how to critique processes of comparative racialization without reproducing their logic of analogy, and how readings that attend to shifting institutions of structural racism can complement accounts that focus on the exposure of racial prejudice. The book’s title, which I take from Twain’s trenchant essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (Zwick 1901), points not only to the underrepresented status of the Chinese and their supposed lack of enlightenment, but also to how Western imperialism affected a host of racialized and colonized populations. If it invokes the possibility of analogizing colonized Chinese and Philippine subjects with an image of “darkness” frequently linked to African Americans, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” also attends to the different ways in which Boers, Chinese Boxers, and Philippine revolutionaries were subjugated. In addition to arguing that race in Twain’s writings and his era must be read comparatively and demonstrating the importance of Chinese immigration and US transpacific relations in his writing, “Sitting in Darkness” experiments with modes of reading that analyze how the shifting legal, material, and discursive grounds of racialization manifest in literary form.

When Mark Twain headed west in 1861 after serving for two weeks in the Missouri state militia, he distanced himself from the battlefields of the Civil War, but not from the political and cultural dynamics of slavery. Lighting out for Virginia City and San Francisco—where Twain’s professional writing career took off—was a viable option because the Compromise of 1850 had organized territories acquired from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo around a series of agreements concerning the future expansion of slavery. Although California was admitted as a free state in 1850, proslavery Democrats had considerable influence in the state’s government, and early legislatures “denied blacks voting rights, prohibited African American court testimony, and banned black homesteading, jury service, and intermarriage with whites” (De Graaf and Taylor 10). The state assembly even passed a bill that, had it not been blocked by state Senator David Broderick, would have banned the immigration of free blacks into California. Setting the stage for virtually unprosecutable acts of racist violence by whites, the first session of the state legislature stipulated in 1850 that “No black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person” (Statutes of California 230); the California Supreme...