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, 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. 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