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INTRODUCTION You cannot escape from the world more certainly than through art; and you cannot bind yourself to it more certainly than through art. —Goethe This book explores the cultural consequences of politicized imagery of Chinese people in the mid- to late nineteenth century. American political policy and cultural orientations intersected, interpenetrated, and were transformed when Chinese people, and not just Chinese objects, arrived on American shores. The four chapters that follow address a critical question that engrossed mid-nineteenth-century American society, but went unspoken: What happens when the exotic refuses to remain our fantasy, our abstraction , and instead intrudes into our space? When the exotic other is too close for comfort, what more is then at stake? Since Edward Said’s groundbreaking postcolonial analysis of the West’s conception of the East in his 1978 work Orientalism, and equally in his Culture and Imperialism (1993), Orientalism—the West’s idea of the East created through a mixture of knowledge and projection—has been a topic of scholarly study. In this work I diverge from classic Orientalist studies in several ways, but especially, rather than presuming the formation of Western ideas of Eastern peoples through the journey of Western peoples to the East, I look at movement in the opposite direction, considering the influence of Eastern people’s travel to the West.1 Other scholars, notably James Clifford and Anne McClintock, have discussed the nineteenth century’s radical reassignment of spatial geography and its resulting cultural tensions. Political and social anxieties rippled through (white) America as a consequence of such interpenetration.2 James Clifford describes the impact occurring “whenever marginal peoples come into historical or ethnographic space that has been defined by the Western imagination. . . . [G]eopolitical questions must now be asked of ever inventive poetics of reality . . . Whose reality? Whose new world?”3 These questions form the crux of this book. By examining resonances of Chinese immigration within American culture, we discover 1 2 COLLECTING OBJECTS/EXCLUDING PEOPLE the far-reaching cultural consequences when the exotic Orient is no longer only a place “over there,” but has its emissaries arriving over here. The four essays in this book developed from my unease resulting from a nagging incongruity: throughout the nineteenth century the United States imported large quantities of luxury items from China, and millions of Americans became acquainted with an abundance of Chinese material culture through its display at American world’s fairs. Later in the century, Americans began to appreciate Chinese objects as art, and placed them in newly made art museums as international signs of American aesthetic acumen and refinement. Yet over the century, incidents of both physical and legal hostility against Chinese immigrants increased, both physically and legally. Despite America’s foundational description of itself as a nation with open immigration, and despite the fact that few Chinese people lived outside of California—that in 1870, New York’s population of 63,254 reportedly included only 58 Chinese people—Congress voted to exclude Chinese people. In 1882 the US government passed the Federal Exclusion Act prohibiting Chinese from immigrating and forbidding those already in the country from naturalizing.4 How did America imagine Chinese and Chinese-ness in such a way that, on the one hand, it justified barring an entire people, while, on the other hand, it encouraged coveting objects redolent of Chinese culture? What relationships does this imply about high versus low: between classes, between fine art and popular culture, between citizens and alien? How were Chinese objects considered, and how did Americans visualize Chinese people during this half century? In short, what did Chinese signify to Victorian Americans in the eastern states? CHINESE IMPORTS AND MUSEUM CULTURE Nineteenth-century America’s relationships with Chinese people and objects were neither simple nor unilateral; quite the opposite: they were interwoven, complex, and reciprocal. (Re)connecting China’s immigration and American visual culture exposes their dramatic frisson, startling in its implications for both museum and vernacular cultures. Probing this tension, one discovers that the meaning of Chinese became one of the sites at which competing ideas of ethics and power struggled for hegemony. The profusion of images of Chinese people found in nineteenth-century America reveals the range of portrayals of Chinese vying for predominance within American culture. Art and politics are generally relegated to separate histories, but (re)united they form a powerful alliance. In these essays political history converges with the history of images and aesthetic objects, linked by their shared subject: nineteenth...

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