The Chinese Other, 1850-1925

This book is a collection designed to gather together, for the first time, a conceptually wide and historically deep array of primary texts which demonstrate Euroamerican attitudes toward the Chinese. Among the many cultural artifacts generated by this encounter were plays written by Euroamericans which contained one or more representations of the Chinese. It would be reductive to say that such portrayals show merely the racism of a dominant culture toward a distinctive and different minority. Racism is of course present, sometimes of the coarsest and crudest sort; but other themes appear in the many dramatic portrayals of the Chinese as well, such as toleration, exoticism, and even idealization. The book is intended for scholars, graduate students and undergraduate students in the field of theatre, cultural studies, nineteenth-century studies, and Asian-American studies.