MIAMI UNIVERSITY the Graduate School Certificate for Approving The
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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Tan-Feng Chang Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Director: Professor Yu-Fang Cho Professor Susan Morgan Professor LuMing Mao Professor Stefanie Dunning Professor Anita Mannur Graduate School Representative: Professor Liz Wilson ABSTRACT WRITING BETWEEN EMPIRES: RACIALIZED WOMEN’S NARRATIVES OF IMMIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONALITY, 1850-WWI by Tan-Feng Chang This dissertation examines transnational formation of race, gender, and empire through immigrant women writers’ engagements with the dominant trope of “women of empire,” a trope central to popular imaginations of the British empire and the U.S. empire during the period of 1850 and WWI. It analyzes ways in which narratives of migration and immigration could generate multiple and alternative forms of interracial relationship and cultural belonging. Rather than situating their works within one national tradition, it considers transnationalism as both an analytic frame and a cultural practice, thereby seeking to unravel how immigrant writers’ individual and cultural expressions were articulated through a series of complex negotiation and disarticulation with the empire. It traces the emergence of Asian and Caribbean immigrants as transnational mixed-race subjects, who borrowed, contested, and attempted to redefine imperialist conceptions of the home and the colony, and domesticity and otherness. Tracing immigrant writers’ non-essentialist articulation of subjectivity, it foregrounds their capacity to disrupt Anglo-American imperialism and coherence of whiteness in works including Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Anna Leonowens’s English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem, Edith Maude Eaton’s (Sui Sin Far’s) Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, and Winnifred Eaton’s (Onoto Watanna’s) “A Half Caste” and Other Writings. It thus conceptualizes Asian American and the Caribbean subjects as a kind of migratory position that appropriated and simultaneously undercut imperial cultures. As a transnational project, this dissertation contends that immigrant writers evoked and reworked the norms of white domesticity and womanhood in their attempt to imagine the possibility of transnational subjectivity and community building across the nations. The norms include women’s discourses on maternity, sympathy, kinship, and citizenship. Situating women’s discourses within the previously under-examined contexts of Caribbean-Asian-American racial triangulation allows for a rethinking of both Black/White and Asian/American dichotomies in current comparative studies of race and empire. This examination of race as an inter-subject and triangulated concept accords with scholarship of comparative racialization. Such an analysis enables a more nuanced study of the differently racialized and gendered immigrant population in British and American imperial worlds. WRITING BETWEEN EMPIRES: RACIALIZED WOMEN’S NARRATIVES OF IMMIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONALITY, 1850-WWI A DISSERTATION Summited to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Tan-Feng Chang Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2013 Dissertation Director: Professor Yu-Fang Cho © Tan-Feng Chang 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES iv DEDICATION v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE Creolizing the White Woman’s Burden: Mary Seacole at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea 13 CHAPTER TWO Siwilai-zing the Royal Harem: Anna Leonowens’s Siamese Court and Hidden Perfume’s Harriet Beecher Stowe 37 CHAPTER THREE Kin of a Different Kind: Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Transracial Adoption 61 CHAPTER FOUR Whiteness in Another Color: Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Intra-racial Citizenship 87 BIBLIOGRAPHY 115 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: “A Great Time for Ireland!,” Punch, 1861. 102 Figure 2: “The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy,” Harper’s Weekly, 1876. 103 Figure 3: “The Diary of Delia,” The Saturday Evening Post, 1907. 106 Figure 4: Claire Wolley & Delia O’Malley, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, 1907. 107 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is completed by much guidance and support from my teachers. I owe special thanks to the primary readers, Susan Morgan and Yu-Fang Cho. Professor Morgan guides me to study the relations between women and empire, which initiates this project and remains a central concern of it. Professor Cho, Director of the Dissertation Committee, offers critical feedback and writing advice on each stage of the dissertation’s progress. Her classes and articles on transnational Asian American criticism are a major influence on the development and new approach of my argument. My classes and conversations with Professor Stefanie Dunning and Professor Anita Mannur broaden my thinking of what it means to be an “Asian American” in relation to an African American and an Asian American of a different racial origin. Their comments encouraged me to take differing situations and contexts into consideration. I thank Lu-Ming Mao, the Departmental Chair, for his genuine and continuous support of my study for the past five years and a half. More like a parental figure, Professor Mao shows his belief in my work and inspires me to go on with my writing. I am grateful to Miami University of Ohio for providing an excellent learning place and various funding opportunities that make possible the completion of this dissertation. I thank Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, the Humanities Librarian, for her technical support of my research, and Sheila Sparks, the Library Associate of the Interlibrary Loan and WorldCat services, for kindly approving my book requests all the time. For companionship, I would like to indicate my appreciation to Sonya Parrish, Chanon Adsanatham, and Elham Shayegh for sharing ideas, drafts, and laughter. My deepest gratitude goes to my family. Their love and unending support for me makes the occasional lacuna of my writing life whole. v INTRODUCTION Writing between Empires: Racialized Women’s Narratives of Immigration and Transnationality, 1850-WWI I. Introduction: Racialized Women’s Writings about Migration and Immigration In August 1870, the British nurse Florence Nightingale, who later became a national icon for her patriotic service, gave negative accounts of the Jamaican “Creole” woman Mary Seacole and her activity in the Crimean War. Responding to her brother-in-law, the MP Sir Harry Verney’s request for a reference to Seacole, Nightingale wrote, following a special note, “burn,” on the top of her manuscript letter, that She [Mrs. Seacole] kept—I will not call it a ‘bad house’ but something not very unlike it—in the Crimean War. She was very kind to the men and, what is more, to the Officers, and did some good, and made many drunk…I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs. Seacole’s advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question)... Anyone who employs Mrs. Seacole will introduce much kindness—also much drunkenness and improper conduct, wherever she is. (qtd. in Seacole, “Appendix” 180) Nightingale’s deprecating remark of Seacole’s “drunkenness and improper conduct” coincided with the period’s dominant conception of the nonwhite woman as a site of sexual, racial, and political anxiety for both Victorian England and the United States after the abolition of the slave trade in the 1830s and slavery in the 1860s. The association of Seacole with the image of the mixed-race female migrant worker who somehow became homeless and sexually stigmatized during the emancipation exposes the late nineteenth-century expansionist logics of British and American cultures, the working of which relied not only on the domestic racial polarization between blacks and whites but also on a triangulation of race, nation, and empire through international contexts of war, migration, and Anglo-American cultural expansion to the Caribbean and Asian-Pacific regions. Further, Nightingale’s allusion to Seacole’s “improper conduct” that “respectable Officers were entirely ignorant of what I…could not help knowing as a Matron and Chaperone and Mother of the Army” (Seacole 180) reveals the tenuous position of the 1 post-emancipation nonwhite woman in comparison with that of the white woman as the “Chaperone and Mother” of the empire. If, as scholars of Euro-American imperial cultures contend, empire was constituted as an extension of domesticity, and generally overseen by white women, what role did women of multiple or ambiguous racial heritages play? How did the figure of the migrant or immigrant participate in cultural productions of empire? Why is it significant to trace the literary voices of the racialized writers in studies of empires and their global manifestations? This dissertation examines how the nineteenth-century culture of empire has not just interpellated Anglo-American women as the subjects of empire, but it has simultaneously and discursively constructed “racialized”1 immigrant women as their nearest rivals. My interest lies in exploring how nonwhite women writers’ narratives of immigration borrow, contest, and attempt to redefine the norms of white domesticity that have positioned many of their white counterparts as what critics variously term “women of empire,” “agents of empire,” or “mothers of empire” (Burton Empire in Question; Chilton; Gikandi; Nussbaum; Sharpe). I build upon Amy Kaplan’s and Inderpal Grewal’s works