Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T02:05:32.357Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ImpersoNation: Toward a Theory of Black-, Red-, and Yellowface in the Americas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jill Lane
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

How shall we face the enormous evidence of impersonation as a central cultural practice in the development of national discourses in the Americas?

It is well known that, in December 1773, a ship named Dartmouth sat idle in Boston Harbor, prevented from unloading her cargo by the governor in protest of the import tax and prevented from leaving the harbor by customs rules. As the customs period came to a close, a group of newly patriotic Bostonians came up with a plan to resolve the crisis. One historian recounts, “a chorus of Indian war whoops sounded outside the hall and a party of what looked like Indian men ran to the wharf, entered the ships, and proceeded to dump the tea in Boston Harbor” (Deloria 2). And the rest, as they say, was history: the Boston Tea Party has since functioned as favored tale of origin for American independence and national identity.

Type
Correspondents at Large
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1728 - 1731
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 290–322.Google Scholar
Crespo y Borbón, Bartolomé José [Creto Gangá]. “Creto Gangá, Carta de Creto Gangá a su muger Frasica Lucumí (Q. E. P. D.) sobre el médico chino.” Review in La prensa (8 Sept. 1847): n.p.Google Scholar
Cruz, Mary. Creto Gangá. Havana: Contemporaneo, 1974.Google Scholar
Del Monte, Domingo. Centón epistolario de Domingo Del Monte: Volume 7, 1823–1843. Havana: Siglo XX, 1957.Google Scholar
Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Jiménez Pastrana, Juan. Los chinos en la historia de Cuba, 1847–1930. Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1983.Google Scholar
Kennard, James K. “Who Are Our National Poets?” Rpt. in “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy.” By T. Allston Brown and Charles Day. The Black Perspective in Music 3 (1975): 83–95.Google Scholar
Lane, Jill. Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005.Google Scholar
Tchen, John Kuo Wei. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2008.Google Scholar