“Queue”: a Case of Chinese Scalping
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Migration, Masculinity, and Mastering the “Queue”: A Case of Chinese Scalping RACHEL K. BRIGHT Keele University N 1906 a South African newspaper, The Prince, published a picture of Ia Chinese man’s scalp, which it had bought from an ex-prisoner. According to the original newspaper account and the subsequent government investigation, staff and prisoners were scalping Chinese men in the morgue on demand since at least May 1906, and selling them to colonial officials.1 ‘Queues’ were also being taken from living Chinese prisoners.2 The one sold to the newspaper was traced back to the execution of two Chinese prisoners at Pretoria Jail. When exhumed, both had been scalped. Prisoner witnesses attested that the 1 The Prince, 29 September 1906, 1116 had a photograph of the scalp (the front page), and 1118–1119 the story. See also 22 September 1906; 13 October 1906, 1166; Truth (Western Australia [WA]), 27 October 1906, 7; South African National Archives, Transvaal Foreign Labour Department (FLD) 7/147/20/20. Conclusions from Affidavits taken in connection with statements in The Prince regarding removal of a Chinaman’s Scalp; FLD7/ 147/20/20, Frank Oldrich Wheeler’s statement; FLD7/147/20/20, Alfred W. Sanders, District Surgeon, to Deputy Governor of Pretoria Prison, 9 October 1906; FLD7/147/20/20, Secretary, Law Department to Private Secretary, Acting Lieutenant-Governor, 16 November 1906; Warder Kidby’s statement; C. J. Hanrette, Director of Prisons, to Secretary of Law Department, 10 October 1906; FLD7/147/20/20, Secretary, Law Department, to Private Secretary, Acting Lieutenant-Governor, 16 November 1906;C. A. Mynott, Detective, to the Chief Detective Inspector, Criminal Investigation Department, 1 October 1906. 2 Queue remains the most common term used, in English, French and amongst Chinese scholars translating into English. However, because of its strong racial connotations, this article has chosen to refer to the hairstyle as a braid throughout, unless to do so would be anachronistic. In contrast with the ready acceptance to use the word ‘queue’ within current scholarship, there has been a long historiographical interest in the origins of ‘coolie’, and a recognition of its racialized meanings. See Lydia Potts, A History of Migration, translation by Terry Bond (London: Atlantic Books, 1990), for a history of ‘coolie’. See below for more details on the origins of ‘queue’ and ‘pigtail’. Journal of World History, Vol. 28, Nos. 3 & 4 © 2017 by University of Hawai‘i Press 1 2 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, DECEMBER 2017 practice was common and the prison photographer was clearly implicated,3 but as all of the witnesses were prisoners, no further official action was taken and no further bodies exhumed.4 How is one to understand this, both the scalping itself and the alleged collecting by colonial officials? Drawing on newspapers, photographs, and illustrations of the Chinese ‘queue’ from the 1600s, as well as the official investigation into the scalping incident and the ensuing press coverage, this article reflects on the intersection of settler colonialism, race, and manhood embodied by the Chinese braid. This article will specifically focus on three points. First, it will explore the history of Chinese hair and its social meanings and connect that to work on the body, what Burton and Ballantyne have called ‘the most intimate colony’.5 Bodies were already commodified in colonial contexts: race and gender were used to ‘differentiate between humans whose worth was constructed as beyond price or “price-less” and humans who became exchangeable and valuated commodities’.6 Related to this, it will explain why there was a commodification of Chinese hair at all. Arjun Appadurai has famously written about ‘the commodity potential of all things’, that ‘consumption (and the demand that makes it possible)’ send social messages, something he particularly links to elite consumption.7 As this suggests, it is significant that Chinese hair became commodified, allegedly collected by working class British colonials for elite colonial officials. While we may not ever know the details of the specific exchange, we can still understand the historic context that made Chinese hair a commodity. Anthropologists and archaeologists have studied the collection and commodification of human remains, but this is normally ‘recorded as a distant and past tradition belonging to the prehistoric Indigenous “other”, not easily or readily associated with current Western trends’.8 This case study offers a critiqueofsuchsilences,bydrawingattentiontothe collectionofhairand 3 FLD7/147/20/20, Alfred W. Sanders, District Surgeon, to Deputy Governor of Pretoria Prison, 9 October 1906. 4 The Prince, 22 September 1906. 5 T. Ballantyne and A. Burton, “Postscript: Bodies, Genders, Empires: Reimagining World Histories,” in Bodies in Contact, Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, eds. Ballantyne and Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 406. 6 Michele Mitchell and Naoko Shibusawa, with Stephan F. Miescher, “Introduction: Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges,” Gender and History 26, no. 3 (2014): 393–413. 7 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13, 31. 8 Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, eds., The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer, 2008), 7. Bright: Mastering the Queue 3 other body parts within settler societies, and places this within the broaderliterature ofwhatSimon Harrison has called‘human trophyism’.9 Third, this article explores the ways newspapers in South Africa, Britain, Australia and New Zealand covered this story, situated within recent scholarship about the increasing globalisation of news coverage within the English-speaking world.10 South African newspapers were largely created by British or Australian male migrants, with a huge increase in the number of English-language newspapers in the 1890s and 1900s, especially concentrated in the mining areas. The increasing reliance on news services like Reuters disseminated news stories and spread out the expense of telegrams amongst several newspapers. This meant that many stories were duplicated in Britain and South Africa, and stories about the Chinese were also frequently repeated in United States, Australian and New Zealand newspapers.11 This ensued that the scalping incident was a global story, which fit within broader Yellow Peril discourse. ‘Yellow Peril’ was a term originating in Germany in 1898, but was widespread by 1900, and often became associated with fears of an ‘Asian’ invasion, spurred on by the rise of Japan as a global power, increasing Chinese migration abroad, and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion.12 The fact that China and Japan remained uncolonised by Europe was also a significant factor. Despite the small Chinese population of just over 2,000 in 1903, South Africans were fascinated with China and the Chinese hairstyle.13 The fluid colonial population on the Transvaal gold mines in particular fostered sustained networks of 9 Simon Harrison, “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2006): 817–836. See also A. G. Morris, “Trophy Skulls, Museums and the San,” in Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, ed. P. Skotnes (Cape Town: University Press, 1996), 67–79; Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 8, 88–90; Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond c. 1770–1880,” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 3 (2007): 471–513. 10 Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11 See Rachel K. Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa: Race, Violence and Global Spectacle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), esp. chapters 3 and 5. 12 For a history of Yellow Peril, see David Glover, “Die gelbe gefahr, le peril jaune, the yellow peril: the geopolitics of a fear,” in Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear, eds. Kate Hebbllethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), esp. 49–50; Ross Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 98–129; Gregory Blue, “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and the Critique of Modernity,” Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999): 93–134. 13 Figures for the 1904 Census were published in Indian Opinion, 8 October 1904; John P. R. Maud, City Government: The Johannesburg Experiment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 384. 4 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, DECEMBER 2017 communication between settler colonies, especially with regards to contemporary debates about Asian migration. By 1904, at the height of Yellow Peril discourse, there were over 5,000 Australians on the Witwatersrand (Rand) region in the Transvaal, and a couple thousand Americans, ‘bringing with them a strong union tradition and marked antipathies to Asian and “coolie” labour’.14 When, in 1904, the unelected Transvaal government, with British approval, allowed the controversial importation of Chinese indentured labour despite strong local opposition, the entire settler colonial world took notice. Overall, 63,695 Chinese were imported between 1904 and 1907