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  • Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization by Hsuan L. Hsu
  • Matt Seybold (bio)
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization
Hsuan L. Hsu. NYU P, 2015. 248pp. $79.00 cloth.

Hsuan L. Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness joins Selina Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China (2015) in thoroughly engaging the “shadow archive of writing about China, Chinese immigrants, and transpacific imperialism” (4). Comprehensive critical investigation of Twain’s fascination with Asia and Asian Americans is long overdue and, undoubtedly, the quality of Hsu and Lai-Henderson’s works will ensure the ongoing vitality of these lines of inquiry.

As his title suggests, Hsu’s analysis extends beyond this specific “shadow archive” to explore how the plight of Asian Americans, as witnessed during formative periods spent in California and Hawaii, is contained within a more familiar corpus of Twain’s writing, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins. Hsu reveals that even though these novels engage racism most directly through the treatment of black slaves and European immigrants, Twain’s representations of certain peculiar qualities of antebellum racial animus can be more fully understood through the active struggle for civil rights being pursued by Asian Americans as these works are being written.

Hsu also concretely argues for expanding conventional understanding of the scope and scale of Twain’s expertise. By demonstrating the breadth of national and international concerns on which his works draw, Hsu presents Twain as a lucid macro-analyst who was grappling with global complexities more commonly associated with much later generations.

Hsu’s book is commendable in that it admirably exemplifies the mutual benefit of Twain studies and a rising tide of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship. Hsu chooses to let his readers “think through broader methodological issues” (1–2) unmolested. One wonders whether providing more explicit [End Page 173] personal and/or disciplinary rationales for his specialized methods and terms might actually make Sitting in Darkness more approachable for readers who come to it through Twain studies.

Hsu’s methodology is substantially derived from two critical subfields. If many Twain scholars find the phrase comparative racialization unfamiliar, they can hardly be blamed. This terminology and its associated techniques have emerged relatively recently. Vicente Rafael, a historian of Southeast Asia, coined comparative racialization in 1995. It enjoyed an initial limited embrace within critical race theory. According to Shu-mei Shih, a pioneer in the field of Sinophone studies, a clear set of methodological imperatives for literary and cultural studies didn’t begin to coalesce around comparative racialization until 2004. In Shih’s view, these imperatives addressed at least three concerns identified by the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada. First, they observed that outside the United States analysis of race and ethnicity in their fields was marginalized, in part because race was perceived as a distinctly American problem. Second, even in U.S. scholarship, race was too often understood according to a black-white binary. And, finally, scholars in literature and cultural studies had, since the 1980s, been slow to embrace innovative race critiques from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including, for instance, Rafael’s work.

Very little of the fruit of this debate reached the broader academic public until the last five years. Hsu’s book is only the second to include comparative racialization in its title. Through the invocation of this terminology, apparent interdisciplinary debts, particularly to critical race theory, and a subset of citations, including Rafael, Hsu makes apparent his inclusion in the emerging critical community Shih describes. Thus one must conclude that he makes a calculated choice by not directly engaging the related methodological debates, summarizing their origins and implications, situating comparative racialization within a critical canon, or even providing an explicit definition. That most readers must comprehend and contextualize his methods and terminology organically is clearly by design. The question then becomes, why does Hsu prefer such intentional ambiguity to the conventional survey and intervention in a critical field? From my perspective, identifying the specific contemporary valance of comparative racialization testifies not only to Hsu’s prescience, but...

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