The “strange affinities”: The figure of Chineseness in Black-themed cultural productions, 1850-1930

This dissertation, focusing upon archival research and ethnographic studies, provides a new interpretive framework for understanding the racial, musical, and theatrical discourses on the subject of Chinese Immigrant identities and Black cultural productions in the United States from 1850 to 1930. Engaging both regional and national studies, this research strives to reconstruct the cultural interaction between African and Chinese immigrants as it was performed and theatricalized. In this period, the interrelations of these two racial groups experienced simultaneously a geographic migration (from the West Coast to East Coast) and an attitudinal shift (from racial divergence to comparative assimilation). African-Americans and Chinese immigrants, both of which groups had been treated as inferior races in America since the Reconstruction Era, sought to contest and reconstruct the representation of minorities, and this played out in performance as well. This project suggests that the cultural representations pertaining to the racial depictions of Chinese immigrants and African Americans--in particular, musical and theatrical performances onstage in the United States--have been manipulated, misused, and abused.

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