The Siamese Twins, the Bunker Family, and Nineteenth-Century U.S
American Family, Oriental Curiosity: The Siamese Twins, the Bunker Family, and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Society Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Joseph Andrew Orser Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2010 Dissertation Committee: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Adviser John Brooke Alan Gallay Copyright by Joseph Andrew Orser 2010 Abstract This dissertation examines the cultural and social spaces that conjoined brothers Chang and Eng Bunker occupied, interrogating the insights their lives offer into nineteenth-century ideas of race, class, gender, and respectability. Chang and Eng were conjoined twins of Chinese descent whose stage name, the Siamese Twins, derived from the country of their birth. The brothers toured the United States as “Oriental” curiosities from 1829 to 1839, and then settled in North Carolina as farmers, becoming slaveholders, marrying white sisters, and eventually fathering twenty-one children between them. In 1849, the twins returned to touring, this time taking two daughters along with them; until their deaths in 1874, Chang and Eng exhibited themselves and their offspring, touring as the Siamese Twins and Children. Through promotional literature, personal correspondence, visual images and newspaper reports, this work traces the evolution of public discourse about the twins and their families, contributing to other considerations of the twins and the course of American Orientalism. This dissertation goes further, however, by introducing early Asian Americans to considerations of the turbulent terrain of class and respectability in the 1830s and 1840s; the increasingly divisive debates over slavery, nativism, and sectionalism; and the tensions of national reunion in the years following the Civil War.
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