Rethinking Alternative Contact in Native American and Chinese Encounters: Juxtaposition in Nineteenth-Century US Newspapers

This essay both introduces the Native/Asian Encounters special issue and theorizes and applies juxtaposition as a heuristic of alternative contact in nineteenth-century US newspapers. It takes as its focus journalistic representations that compare and contrast Chinese and American Indians with each other and with the white settlers and city dwellers on both the East and West Coasts across the nineteenth century. Specifically, the writers analyze the representations of Chinese and Native Americans in specific eras: Black Hawk, the Sauk Indian leader, and Afong Moy, the first documented Chinese woman in the US, in the 1830s; and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Paiute orator, in the 1870s. The essay also introduces and summarizes the contributors’ essays that follow.