MEILIN CHINN

Race Magic and the Yellow Peril Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021

abstract Among the many historical examples in which the Orient has been imaginatively associated with magic, one of the most fascinating involves an actual overlap between race and magic in the popular performances of yellowface magicians at the turn of the twentieth century. I use this example to show and analyze some of the dynamics between magic and the aesthetics of race, especially as these play out through one of the most influential and long-standing contradictions of the “Yellow Peril”: Chinese people are unassimilable, yet Chinese aesthetics are easily appropriated.

The Master said: ‘The people of the South have a saying: English, “Oh my God. Something’s happened. ‘Someone without constancy cannot be a magician.’” Lower the curtain.” He collapsed on stage and —The Analects of Confucius (Lunyu  13:22) was dead by morning. In the legal investigation and media circus following his death, the secret to his bullet catch trick was inevitably revealed, but i. the case of the rival chinese magicians the more astonishing unmasking was Soo’s true identity as William Ellsworth Robinson—a New On the evening of March 23, 1918, the Wood Yorker of Scottish ancestry. Green Empire Theater in London overflowed Complex sociocultural, political, and aesthetic with an audience eager to see the most popular factors contributed to the success of Robinson’s Chinese magician at the time, in a show billed as act, but the first and simplest truth of the matter “Chung Ling Soo, The World’s Greatest Magician, is that he stole the persona of a real Chinese in a Performance of Oriental Splendor and Weird magician named Ching Ling Foo, “The Original Mysticism, assisted by Miss Suee Seen, presenting Chinese Conjurer,” to become Chung Ling in rapid succession the most Beautiful, Baffling, Soo, “The Marvelous Chinese Conjurer” (see and Interesting Series of Illusions even submit- Figure 1). Ching Ling Foo was the stage name of ted to the Public.” On this soon to be historic oc- Zhu Liankui  (born in Beijing in 1854), a casion, Chung Ling Soo performed his signature practitioner of traditional Chinese magic skilled bullet catch trick for the last time. In the trick, enough to have performed as the Court Conjurer called “Condemned to Death by the Boxers— to the Empress Dowager Cixi. He also performed Defying Their Bullets,” Soo used a porcelain plate in European-owned theaters in China before to catch marked bullets shot at him by assistants, finding fame in America, including sold-out who were dressed as a Boxer firing squad in a shows at Keith’s Union Square Theater in New nod to the 1900 anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion York. On June 3, 1899, in an article entitled “A in China. This evening, however, one of the rifles Wonderful Conjuror,” The New York Dramatic malfunctioned and a real bullet rather than a blank Mirror said of him, “He is no ordinary professor of fired, striking Soo in the chest and piercing his legerdemain, is Ching Ling Foo, but a past master lung. Having only ever spoken “Chinese” onstage, in the art of fooling people before their very eyes, Soo shocked his audience by crying out in native who has come all the way from the Far East to

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77:4 Fall 2019 C 2019 The American Society for Aesthetics 424 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021

figure 1. Chung Ling Soo: Condemned to Death by the Boxers: Defying Their Bullets. Film still from The Saturday Evening Post History Minute: “Chung Ling Soo and the Deadly End of an Illusion.” C Copyright 2018 Saturday Evening Post Society. All Rights Reserved. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] show us a few tricks we have never seen before” than that, his performance was possible, desirable, (16). He went on to tour internationally with and believable because of a confluence of factors his troupe of acrobats and jugglers as well as his beyond his individual abilities. For one, there was daughter Chee Toy, who was billed at one point as a public audience willing to ignore evidence of “the only small-footed girl singing coon songs.” In his true identity in their desire for Chineseness this bizarre atmosphere of ethnic entertainment, more exotic and exaggerated than any actual Robinson was not the first magician to imitate Chinese magician could deliver. This was the era Ching Ling Foo, nor was he a stranger to copying of vaudeville, circus, and wildly popular ethnic another magician’s racialized act. In 1887, Robin- performances through which audiences lived out son had performed as “Achmed Ben Ali” in an act their stereotyped, racialized, and racist fantasies lifted from the German magician Max Auzinger in especially cartoonish fashion—the more unbe- also known as “Ben Ali Bey.” Robinson did not lievable the better.1 This period was also shaped find success copying a German imitating an Arab by what Chris Goto-Jones (2014, abstract) has magician, but in 1900, his fortunes shifted when, in helpfully theorized as the “cultural and political response to the call for Chinese magician to per- nexus of secular (stage) magic, modernity, and form at the Folies Bergere` in Paris, he adopted the Orientalism.” As he details it, this Golden Age persona and much of the magic act of Ching Ling of Magic was marked by a shift away from “real Foo. He went on to become one of the highest paid magic” (occult, spiritual, irrational, and feminine) and most popular magicians of the era despite toward “modern magic” that embraced assump- Foo’s repeated attempts to expose him as a phony, tions about scientific and technological progress, including challenging him to publicly prove both was predominantly practiced by men, and was his Chineseness and originality as a magician. mirrored in the broader struggle between the dis- How did Robinson pull off his most infamous enchantment and re-enchantment of the modern illusion? world. Adopting “Eastern” personas (Arabian Robinson’s successful masquerade as a Chinese genii, Indian yogi, Chinese mystic, or Japanese sor- magician for eighteen years surely owed some- cerer) allowed stage magicians to appropriate the thing to his skills as a magician (he was known as aesthetics of “real magic” without violating mod- a technically adept magician, but a poor showman ern skepticism toward it and, in effect, “displacing prior to adopting his Chinese persona). But more the problem of magic in the modern world to the Chinn Race Magic and the Yellow Peril 425

‘pre-modern’ peripheries, or drawing on an origi- stereotypical Chinese cultural aesthetics, public nation in such peripheries as a means to claim au- ignorance about and willful denial of real Chinese thentic magical potency” (Goto-Jones 2016, 111).2 people, and the possibilities of mixed-race visual In addition to these cultural and political forces ambiguity to conjure an image born of white driving the association of the Orient with magic, cultural and biological appropriation of Chine- the craft of magic itself was pivotal in the aesthetic seness. While he dressed in traditional Chinese production of Chineseness Robinson offered his fashion, wore his hair in the symbolic queue, audiences. Specifically, the simultaneously real adopted stereotypical mannerisms, and spoke to and unreal art of stage magic offered a para- journalists solely through an “interpreter” (in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 doxically believable context for his yellowface fake Chinese gibberish), it was the racialized persona. As Jason Leddington argues in “The mysteriousness of being Eurasian that lent his Experience of Magic,” theatrical magic has an performative identity more persuasive aesthetic ironic, antinomic structure in which impossible force than other white magicians pretending to events are presented as impossible. When a magic be Chinese.4 (Consider the familiarity of the trick is successful, “it appears to be what it simul- question—What are you?—to mixed-race people, taneously admits cannot be” (Leddington 2016, not to mention the ontological puzzle.) 256). That is, the audience must believe the trick is It was also critical that Robinson’s masquerade impossible and is happening anyway. Magic fails as a Chinese magician took place during an era in in the absence of this paradox. Following this line which anti-Chinese racism and violence were at an of analysis, the sense for and subversion of the all-time high in the United States and the preju- limits of the possible in theatrical magic helped dices that came to characterize the Yellow Peril— set the cognitive stage for the kind of race per- the belief that East Asian peoples pose a unique formance Robinson pulled off. While he did not threat to the West—were formed and fomented. explicitly present his Chineseness as impossible Racism against the Chinese was deeply entwined in his show, he did not and could not fully conceal with economic anxieties about cheap Chinese la- his true identity in ways that will be discussed bor and structured in part by the widely held belief later. The broader philosophical point here is that that the Chinese were unassimilable. Rather than Robinson presented as Chinese in the context of assimilate, Chinese “hordes” would “devour” an art (stage magic) in which odd things happen Christian America with the backward culture of to normal belief structures—more unbelievable Confucius and, as Senator John Miller of Califor- is not only better, but paradoxically believable. nia put it, the “gangrene of Oriental civilization.” Another important and complex factor in the Eleven different bills calling for Chinese exclu- racial aesthetics of Robinson’s performance is sion were submitted to Congress with speeches that he never presented himself as fully Chinese. illustrating the Chinese threat in visceral imagery: Rather he claimed to be the mixed-race son of a Scottish missionary father and Cantonese mother. Senator Aaron Sargent: Should we be a mere slop-pail According to Robinson, he was orphaned at age into which all the dregs of humanity should be poured? thirteen, after which he was taken in by a Chinese . . . The Chinaman can live on a dead rat and a few magician named “Arr Hee.” This father figure handfuls of rice . . . and work for ten cents a day. (Con- magician trained him in a mix of ancient Chinese gressional Record 1879, 1266) and modern European magic which Robinson began to perform upon Hee’s death. With this Senator John Miller: The Chinese are machine-like. . . . backstory, Robinson played upon the possibilities [T]hey are automatic engines of flesh and blood; they of mixed-race “sarkaesthetics,” to adopt Paul Tay- herd together like beasts. . . . We ask you to secure the lor’s terminology here. “Sarkaesthetics” are “the American Anglo Saxon civilization without contamina- practices of representational somatic aesthetics— tion or adulteration. (Quoted in Moyers 2003) which is to say, those practices relating to the body, as it were, as flesh, regarded solely ‘from Senator Salisbury: The Chinese do not and will not as- the outside’” (Taylor 2016, 108).3 These practices similate with our people, they come only to get money include norms and principles for aesthetic evalu- and return. They secretly maintain laws and a govern- ation of the body, which are different and vaguer ment of their own. They bring with them their filth and for mixed-race bodies. Robinson leveraged frightful diseases. (Quoted in Moyers 2003) 426 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

In 1882, such rhetoric became officially draconian these are discussed in relation to the persistent when President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chi- idea that the Chinese cannot assimilate, yet are nese Exclusion Act into law, barring Chinese la- easy to aesthetically appropriate. borers from entering the United States and mark- ing the first and only time an entire racial or ethnic group has been banned from the country.5 ii. unassimilable: bone rituals But as is typical of racial prejudices, there were contradictory attitudes at play: Chinese people They send their gains away to China; they send their were reviled and even outlawed, yet their enter- bones back after their death; they even spurn our soil as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 tainment and aesthetics held unique esteem for a final resting-place for their bodies. audiences. In fact, Ching Ling Foo leveraged this —Senator Sargent of California, contradiction and his identity as an entertainer speaking to the 43rd U.S. Congress, February 13, 1879 in order to circumvent the anti-laborer bias of the (Congressional Record 1879, 1266) Exclusion Act and enter the United States. He was originally given access through an exception to the The great company of Negro slaves has been replaced by Exclusion Act for Chinese involved in construct- another one just like it of Chinese laborers. All day long ing and operating exhibits of the Trans-Mississippi I see the stupid faces of these men who are so civilized Exposition in Omaha. Despite his acclaimed per- and refined in the arts and so brutish in their customs formances, which resulted in a vaudeville contract and habits. with “Colonel” John Hopkins, he and his troupe —Ramon´ Gil Navarro, Gold Rush miner, June 17, 1850 were ordered back to China under the Exclusion (Navarro 2000, 126) Act once the Omaha Expo ended. He appealed, and in April of 1899 a U.S. District Judge ruled The Yellow Peril and the Chinese Exclusion Act that the Act did not apply to Ching because he were both driven in part by a fear that still circu- was an entertainer rather than a laborer. Still, lates today: the Chinese are too foreign to ever as popular as Ching Ling Foo the real Chinese fully assimilate, whether by custom, ideology, or magician became, Chung Ling Soo the imposter temperament. In an 1879 speech before Congress, satisfied the racialized aesthetic desires of white Senator Sargent of California argued that the audiences in ways Foo could not. A Chinese ma- Chinese were unique among foreigners in their gician whose Chineseness was impossible was per- inability to assimilate into any other culture and fectly matched to American audiences at the time, were especially at odds with Americanization. which is to say Robinson’s yellowface act was as The Chinese were, as he put it, “the same as they believable as it was desired in the cultural nexus of were when they first came, entirely in every sense Yellow Peril, the Exclusion Act, and the racialized of the word, indigestible” (Congressional Record and ethnic vaudeville performances of the day.6 1879, 1267). The supposed shift of Chinese Amer- Amid the reasons for Robinson’s success as icans to “model minority” status in the latter Chung Ling Soo sketched so far, the question half of the twentieth century complicated but of how race and magic dynamically intersected did not extinguish the idea that the Chinese are stands out. As noted, the ironic and paradoxical interminably foreign, and it is easy to find this still cognitive requirements of stage magic helped expressed in media, scholarship, and everyday establish the conditions for a white magician to conversation. The idea is no longer couched pass as Chinese in a bizarre kind of racial Turing in exclusively negative terms—the supposed test. What is stranger, in thinking further about Chinese resistance to assimilation is sometimes the relationship between magic and race, one used to exemplify and even valorize the mainte- wonders whether some of the cognitive conditions nance of cultural integrity many generations past for magic can also contribute to the aesthetic immigration—but the foreignness of Chinese production of race. If so, then “race magic” takes people remains. (Consider the familiarity of the the double meaning of race performed in the art questions—Where are you from?—But where are of magic and magic at work in the production and you really from?—to Chinese-Americans.) performance of race more generally. Race magic These tensions between racism, assimila- in both senses abounds with ironies, paradoxes, tion, and cultural integrity are manifest in a and contradictions; in what follows, just a few of recent art installation titled Requiem ,by Chinn Race Magic and the Yellow Peril 427

Chinese-American artist Summer Mei-Ling Lee. white cloth scrolls partially obscured the scenes, In 2017, to mark the 135th anniversary of the and migrating geese projected on the ceilings came Exclusion Act, the Chinese Cultural Center and went as the viewer’s flashlight moved. At the of San Francisco commissioned Lee to create center of the last bay was a single, worn bone box Requiem, which explores the history of the “bone upon an altar. The name remained, but the body boxes” that carried the remains of Chinese was gone. migrants back to their ancestral villages in In response to the question of what she sought China for burial. To migrants, arranging for their to invoke with Requiem, Lee has said: “Welcome bones to be returned home after death honored home to un-home. Also absence and presence. I Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 essential and long-standing cultural practices. really do think that what I was looking at in that To non-Chinese, this was one of most “brutish” box they first presented to me was this empti- and vulgar Chinese customs standing in the way ness that exploded into a huge presence” (Wil- of assimilation and in contrast to the “refined” son 2017). Like a magic trick in which something and admired Chinese arts. To those fearing the appears out of nothing, viewing the empty bone Yellow Peril, it was telling that even the bones box summons all that was embodied in one per- of the Chinese could not be taken into the soil of son’s migration as a synecdoche for the Chinese America. But for Chinese, burial in one’s home diaspora. How this is possible can be explained ac- village maintained sacrosanct cultural rituals and cording to a rather unusual conception of the body resisted the material assimilation of the body into in early Chinese culture: the ti  body. There are a land that had ruled them permanent aliens. a surprising number of distinct conceptions of the However, the bone boxes did not always make body in early China; one thing that distinguishes it home. The Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong, a the ti body is that it is both the most corporeal charity that oversaw the repatriation of thousands and the most transmutable. It overlaps and ex- of migrants’ bones, still shelters many of these un- tends into other ti bodies, creating larger bodies, claimed boxes. Some of them are empty, having or divides while still retaining wholeness.7 As a been vandalized during shipment. This is how Lee result, one person can have several ti bodies, or describes the moment of weeping upon seeing an many people can form a common ti body (tong empty bone box for the first time: ti ). Ti also means “embody” and is associ- ated with ritual (li ) through this meaning; for There were a lot of conditions that led to that ineffable example, in the Liji or Book of Rites ,where moment, like my being a descendant of Chinese immi- ritual is compared to a “great body” (da ti ) grants and understanding it tied into this Chinese cul- that can be embodied by individual participants. tural tradition and understanding of ancestral sacrifice (The two Chinese characters for ti and li share for my own ability to even make art. I’m very aware of , meaning “ritual vessel.” In ti, the radical for that, and that’s part of the context I was raised in by my “bone” () is added, whereas li contains “altar”). Chinese grandmother. I was a descendant, in a strange As the body of the senses, the corporeal ti body is a way, of that emptiness in the box and it made me reflect transforming site of cultural meaning; it is subject on the fragility of my own existence. (Wilson 2017) to the aesthetic force of perception upon imagina- tion, memory, self-understanding, and deep em- Inspired by the untold stories of dislocation, mi- bodiment. As aesthetic rituals, the caretaking at gration, and loss evoked by the empty bone Tung Wah in Hong Kong and Requiem in San box, Lee created Requiem (Figure 2) to be a Francisco shaped a common ti body of partici- ritual movement through place, time, and iden- pants that included those migrants who were, by tity. The installation required viewers to guide force or choice, in memory and imagination, not themselves with a flashlight through a series of assimilated. darkened rooms with overlapping scenes from the Chinese diasporic journey (Kaiping, Tais- han, Hong Kong, ocean steamers, Chinese “junk” iii. appropriation: race magic boats, Angel Island, San Francisco’s Chinatown). These large murals were painted with ash from The belief in the unassimilable and perpetually incense still burned daily by a caretaker for the foreign nature of the Chinese has existed in unclaimed bone boxes at Tung Wah. Translucent dynamic with the contradictory belief that the 428 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021

figure 2. Installation view of “Requiem” exhibition by artist Summer Mei-Ling Lee, presented by the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, 2017. Courtesy of the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] aesthetics of Chinese culture can be easily appro- Circlingbacktoanartmuchlesssolemn priated. Why are these beliefs contradictory? Why than Lee’s Requiem, did Robinson confidently is not easy appropriation implicated in, rather appropriate the sarkaesthetics of a stereotypical than contradicted by, the assumption that a peo- Chineseness because he believed there was ple are unassimilable? If a culture is impenetrably something authentic about his performance? We “other,” then I am restricted to appropriating it cannot know the answer to this question, but through superficial imitation and fantasy. Indeed, magic certainly helped sell the act in at least two as Rey Chow has remarked, fantasy is “a problem different ways to both audiences and Robinson. which is generally recognized as central to The first occurred at the sarkaesthetic or surface orientalist perceptions and significations” (Chow level where Chineseness is imaginatively associ- 2010, 126). Yet, while the supposed foreignness ated with, and conceptually structured by, magic of Chinese culture invites easy aesthetic appro- and abstruse knowledge. If the aesthetics of an priation or, in a darker vein, encourages what Orientalist Chineseness easily evoke magic, then Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan (172) named a magician pretending to be Chinese is not much “racist love,” the psychological compatibility of of a creative leap, especially when playing upon foreignness with appropriation does not make the imaginative possibilities of mixed-race aes- this relationship non-contradictory.8 Humans live thetic ambiguities. The public also contributed to comfortably with all manner of contradictions the race magic operating at this level by refusing when it comes to race. Additionally, is not some clear evidence of Robinson’s real identity. For of the pleasure taken in appropriation the feeling example, at one point Ching Ling Foo attempted that something authentic has been grasped or at to prove Robinson was not Chinese by publicly least touched, even if “just” aesthetically? The pointing out that he wore a Chinese woman’s point here does not depend on whether or not gown rather than a man’s, but audiences insisted that feeling is accurate. on his authenticity. In an even more striking Chinn Race Magic and the Yellow Peril 429 moment of public cognitive dissonance, Robinson as fiction or conscious fantasy. Instead, audiences himself revealed his identity after being beaten up experienced Robinson’s yellowface persona as by dockworkers who mistook him for a Chinese real. The experience of magic would have already coolie laborer. He permitted a newspaper to primed them toward violating the cognitive norms publish his true identity as a protective measure that prevent us from experiencing the impossible against further anti-Chinese racism, but his audi- as really happening, and there were certainly ences treated the report as a hoax! It is certainly features of their internal (racialized and racist possible that audiences did not have full faith in attitudes) and ambient (racialized and racist Robinson’s Chineseness and helped maintain the entertainment; Yellow Peril rhetoric and the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 illusion so the popular show could go on. Either Chinese Exclusion Act) environments that would way, in these moments, audiences upheld a pair of incline them toward the evidence-insensitive related contradictions—Chinese are impossible to alief that Ching Ling Soo was authentically assimilate yet easy to appropriate and Robinson’s Chinese. Chineseness is impossible yet believable—with Even if not all of Robinson’s fans were caught in parallels to the antinomic cognitive conditions the cognitive incoherence of alieving as real what of magic that allow us to experience magic as they do not believe, the public remained invested impossible yet happening and real and unreal at in the performance for other reasons that speak to thesametime. the dynamics between race and magic. For one, an Returning to Leddington’s account of the Orientalist inversion of Chinese authenticity para- cognitive conditions of magic, he offers a novel doxically encouraged their penchant for knock-off suggestion that may help clarify the public Chinese magicians. This can be contrasted with response to Robinson’s appropriation of Chine- certain historical notions of black expressive au- seness. According to Leddington, the dual nature thenticity. Whereas black identities have often of magic does not arise because of a suspension of been bound up with what Paul Taylor describes disbelief or a mere conflict of beliefs, as is often as “assumptions about rootedness—assumptions, claimed. Instead, magic involves belief-discordant in other words, about being empirically attached “alief,” a term he borrows from Tamar Szabo´ and ethically committed to some formative expe- Gendler, meaning an “evidence-insensitive, ‘as-if’ riences and to the hallowed sites of their occur- representation.” An alief is representational con- rence” (Taylor 2016, 133), authentic Chineseness tent in our cognitive system that is activated by in the Golden Age of Magic became paradoxically features of our internal or ambient environment, bound to detachment from and erasure of roots.9 inclining us to feel and act in certain ways but This, in turn, strengthened the belief that the Chi- not endorsed like a belief. But, quoting Gendler nese are easy to aesthetically appropriate while here, “if I believe that P and alieve that not-P, impossible to assimilate. Goto-Jones’s analysis of something is amiss. Learning that not-P may how Orientalism and capitalism shaped racial au- well not cause me to cease alieving that P—but thenticity during this time is useful here. As he if it does not, then . . . I am violating certain describes it, Foo was “radically disempowered” in norms of cognitive-behavioral coherence. No his claims to his own genuine Chinese ancestry such criticism is possible in the analogous case of by the twin forces of “commercial imperatives” imagining” (Leddington 2016, 257–258). When we and “pervasive Orientalism in society.” As a con- suspend disbelief by imagining, for example when sequence, Foo came to represent the irrelevant reading fiction, we do not violate any cognitive “real China” or “mundane Orient” compared to norms (I can imagine not-P while believing P), the desired “magical Orient” created in theaters of but magic requires that the audience does not stage magic by white, Western men and expressed believe what they are seeing is possible. This in Soo’s Orientalist persona. Thus, “Like magic, explanation of magic works as a potential account Foo could be from China without being Chinese, of the cognitive dissonance Robinson’s audiences and Soo could be Chinese without coming from maintained: they alieved, rather than believed, in China—Orientalism, not Soo’s pantomimical cha- Robinson’s Chineseness. In this case, the public rade (and not even the training required to carry denial of Robinson’s true identity was not a a bowl of water between his knees), was the secret suspension of disbelief, which is limited to to the great illusion” (Goto-Jones 2014, 1473). The possibilities we do not experience as real, such aesthetics of yellowface magic rang true because 430 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism of an Orientalist inversion of authenticity in which ti body as both externally discursive and internally the fake became the real. embodied. Transferring this to Robinson’s perfor- While Goto-Jones’s analysis insightfully details mance, it was not convincing acting that made the the Orientalist aesthetics of authenticity, it mini- magician “Chinese”; it was embodied magic that mizes the importance of physical skill and acting made the appropriation believable. as other ways that magic operated in Robinson’s race act beyond its association with the Orient. The relationship between magic and acting and iv. shanzhai  and the legacy of the the embodied skills required for both are noted in yellow peril Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 a well-circulated quote from Jean-Eugene` Robert- Houdin (2011, 43) in Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, “A conjuror is not a juggler; he is an actor Returning is the movement of dao. playing the part of a magician . . . ” He explains —Chapter 40, Dao De Jing  that a conjurer seeking to convince spectators of real magic should use quieter, less exaggerated The new emerges from surprising variations and com- movements; the magician is “an artist whose fin- binations. The shanzhai illustrates a particular type of gers have more need to move with deftness than creativity. Gradually its products depart from the origi- with speed” (43). Here he critiques the mismatch nal, until they mutate into originals themselves. between the word “prestidigitation” (“nimble fin- —Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction gers”; “sleight of hand”) and the art it describes: in Chinese “The word prestidigitation, therefore, only imper- fectly describes the art which it denotes. Instead In what precedes, I have endeavored to show that of creating new names, would it not have been the dynamic between magic and race is a unique better for the adepts of White Magic to have re- lens through which to view creativity, art, and aes- tained the term, at once appropriate and exhaus- thetics at work in performative ontologies of race tive, which we find in Plautus and in many dic- and to indicate one of many ways that the ordi- tionaries, both ancient and modern—prestigiateur nariness of race belies its phantasmagoric nature. (Lat: prestigiator), worker of wonders (prestiges)” As with the contradictory cognitive conditions re- (Robert-Houdin 2011, 43). Following this descrip- quired for magic and for unassimilable appropri- tion, an actor is a conjurer of sorts even when not a ation, race is maintained in part by our capacity magician and surely a “worker of wonders.” Pro- to perceive and experience something as real and ducing a giant bowl of water from under one’s unreal, or possible and impossible, at the same gown is impressive, but no more and perhaps time. Race in an essential sense is impossible— less than bringing to life an uncannily convinc- even the most devoted essentialists about race, ing and embodied character. Now Robinson’s per- such as antimiscegenists, testify to this in their anx- formance as Chinese was not good acting in any ieties about the fragility and instability of race. Yet deft or subtle sense of the craft and, like other recognizing the construction of race is not a mag- racialized performances of his day, was popular in ical moment in which its realities disappear. In virtue of being a caricature. But Robinson’s skills fact, the ways that race continues to happen right as a magician likely helped occlude his shoddy before our very eyes attests to the corporeal real- acting performance, for the cognitive and cultural ities of the aesthetic production of race via the ti reasons already discussed, and also because his body. While fears of miscegenation may be waning magic skills were embodied in a first person man- in favor of mixed-race people as objects of post- ner. While Robinson’s performance of Chinese- racial utopian fantasies, this further encourages ness was sarkaesthetic and poorly acted, his per- the experience of race as both real and unreal. In formance of magic was somaesthetic and skilled. the bodies of mixed-race people, the mutability of Given the deep association of Chineseness with race attests to its unreality while at the same time magic, could an adept physical performance of new racial chimeras are realized and old forms are magic have pushed an otherwise boorish race per- further reified. (Consider the familiarity of ironic formance toward authenticity? Outside the the- statements like—You’re so unique looking. You atrical arts, the construction, naturalization, and have a Chinese nose, White eyes, and Black hair— maintenance of race demonstrate the reality of the to mixed-race people.)10 Chinn Race Magic and the Yellow Peril 431

The ongoing return to the old by the new, movie star, race has been produced by brutality, whether through inspiration or plundering, is a violence, and oppression. This means racial imi- fundamental way—a dao —of creating. This tation is almost always morally fraught, even in mode of creativity presents itself in a new twist instances where it may overlap with shanzhai. to the story of the yellowface magician told here. Shanzhai also differ from Robinson’s perfor- China is now home to the world’s reigning knock- mance because they are not produced by the off artists. China, and to an extent contemporary cultural and cognitive contradictions that pre- Chinese culture, is now associated with forgery cluded Robinson’s authenticity, public percep- and fakery—or what in Chinese is called shanzhai tions notwithstanding. Shanzhai become original Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 (). Fake luxury goods like cell phones and without lying about their origins or as a result of an handbags are well known outside China, but as inversion of fake and real that depends on the era- the literal meaning of shanzhai as a bandit “moun- sure of roots. The impossibility of Robinson ever tain stronghold” indicates, it includes much more. becoming an original Chinese magician was insur- There are shanzhai books and movies, a shanzhai mountable at the outset because of race, for ob- Nobel Prize, shanzhai pop stars, and even politi- vious reasons, as well as the conditions upholding cians. Byung-Chul Han describes shanzhai as a the dynamic between race and magic. The racist “genuinely Chinese phenomenon” because these erasure of the origins of his act was necessary to counterfeits adapt to “particular needs and sit- the performance, in contrast to the best shanzhai uations” more quickly and ingeniously than the which rely on open engagement with their origins originals. Their adaptive agility, as well as inno- as a way to bring forth something genuinely new, vative technological and aesthetic modifications, much like a great cover song. The aptly titled song give shanzhai products and personas their own “Shanzhai,” released in 2014 by Fatima Al Qadiri, identity and distinguish them from crude forgeries brilliantly illustrates this.12 The song features He- (Han 2017, 787). The culture that supposedly can- len Feng singing “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written not be assimilated has mastered the repurposing by Prince and made famous by Sinead´ O’Connor. of cultural artifacts, both foreign and domestic.11 The old form of this song about incomparability In at least this sense, the Yellow Peril legacy of exists as a new aesthetic creation standing as a unassimilable appropriation continues, but with compelling work of art in its own right; a single the Chinese as appropriators. listening sets this version as an original by which Could we retrospectively describe Chung Ling any future covers will be judged and as something Soo as a shanzhai Chinese magician? Racially, his never heard before. The title is not just apt and performance was a crude forgery; yet he was also ironic; it is perfectly eponymous for a shanzhai a skilled magician who innovated upon difficult work created in an ongoing time of Yellow Peril. tricks in Chinese magic. He certainly adapted to circumstances, going so far as to become, at least MEILIN CHINN aesthetically, “Chinese.” And Robinson was able Department of Philosophy to pull this off because of an inversion of authen- Santa Clara University ticity in which the fake became seen as the real. Santa Clara, California 95053 However, shanzhai are not usually meant to be deceptive—their appeal, as Han puts it, “lies in internet: [email protected] how they specifically draw attention to the fact that they are not original, that they are playing references with the original” (Han 2017, 828). Shanzhai are “A Wonderful Conjurer.” 1899. The New York Dramatic Mirror, honest expressions of the creative (and capitalist) June 3, 16. power of copying or mimesis and demonstrate that Chin, Frank, and Jeffrey Paul Chan. 1972. “Racist Love.” In any sufficiently creative process produces some- Seeing Through Shuck, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 65– thing original. Robinson, in contrast, relied on 79. New York: Ballantine. Chow, Rey. 2010. The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bow- Yellow Peril racism and only reluctantly acknowl- man. Columbia University Press. edged his fakery for reasons of self-preservation, Chude-Sokei, Louis. 2006. The Last ‘Darky’: Black-on-Black not creative ingenuity. While there are no norms Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Duke University Press. Congressional Record: The Proceedings and Debates of the Forty- preventing the production of racist shanzhai, un- Fifth Congress, Third Session. 1879. Washington, DC: Gov- like a fake iPhone or handbag or even a fake ernment Printing Office. 432 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Frayling, Christopher. 2014. The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu & ‘test’ claims and to showcase the (still rather mysterious) capabilities The Rise of Chinaphobia. New York: Thames & Hudson. of the emerging material and psychological sciences. (2016, 15) Goto-Jones, Chris. 2014. “Magic, Modernity, and Orientalism: Conjuring Representations of Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 3. In Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aes- 48: 1451–1476. . 2016. Conjuring Asia: Magic, Orientalism, and the thetics, Taylor distinguishes between “sarkaesthetics” as the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge University Press. somatic aesthetics of external, third-person perspectives on Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. the body that treat it as an object of aesthetic value and Translated by Philippa Hurd. The MIT Press. “somaesthetics” (following Richard Shusterman’s work) as Leddington, Jason. 2016. “The Experience of Magic.” The Jour- the somatic aesthetics of embodiment or the way the body is nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74: 253–264. experienced through the inner senses of proprioception that

Moon, Krystyn R. 2005. Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in enable the body to be a site for the “creation of aesthetic Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s. value” (Taylor 2016, 107–108). Rutgers University Press. 4. As much as Robinson does not look Eurasian to Moyers, Bill. 2003. “Gold Mountain Dreams.” Moyers & contemporary eyes, he is not more unbelievable or ridicu- Company. March 23. https://billmoyers.com/content/gold- lous than the ongoing examples of Hollywood whitewash- mountain-dreams/. ing, too numerous to list here, but including recent stand- Navarro, Ramon´ Gil. 2006. The Gold Rush Diary of Ramon´ Gil outs such as casting Emma Stone as a hapa haole named Navarro. Edited and translated by Marıa´ Del Carmen and Allison Ng in the 2015 film Aloha or Scarlett Johansson David S. Reher. University of Nebraska Press. as Major Motoko Kusanagi, the cyborg heroine of the Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugene.` 2011. Secrets of Conjuring and 2017 adaptation of the beloved Japanese manga Ghost in Magic: Or How to Become a Wizard, edited and translated the Shell. by Louis Hoffman. Cambridge University Press. Sommer, Deborah. 2008. “Boundaries of the Ti Body.” Asia 5. The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until Major, 3rd series, 21: 293–324. 1943, when China became a wartime ally against Japan. In Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black recent years, the Chinese Exclusion Act has received re- Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. newed attention due to its political, legal, and cultural rele- Wilson, Emily. 2017. “The Chinese Exclusion Act and the vance to current debates over immigration. ‘Bone Boxes’ That Carried Immigrants Home.” Inter- 6. Krystyn Moon straightforwardly defines the reflex- view with Summer Mei-Ling Lee in Hyperallergic.Dec. ive dynamic between yellowface and perceptions of authen- 19. https://hyperallergic.com/417833/the-chinese-exclusion- ticity as, “White audiences who often saw Yellowface as act-and-the-bone-boxes-that-carried-immigrants-home. authentic and true to life [came to expect] Chinese and Chi- nese Americans to reaffirm the caricatures that whites had previously produced in print media and on the stage” (Moon 1. Robinson was one of a number of white magicians 2005, 259). who have pretended to be Chinese. For example, David 7. See Sommer (2008) for a seminal treatment of this Bamberg (1904–1974), the last of seven familial genera- topic. She describes the ti body as tions of esteemed magicians (including Dutch court ma- gicians and an alchemist, necromancer great-great-great- a polysemous corpus of indeterminate extent that can be partitioned great-grandfather), attained widespread fame performing into subtler units, each of which is often analogous to the whole as Fu Manchu in South America. In 1928, historian of con- and shares a fundamental consubstantiality and common identity juring Sidney W. Clarke wrote that, following Robinson’s with that whole. Ti bodies can potentially extend in all directions success as Chung Ling Soo, “soon Yankee Chinamen, En- and can exist in multiple, overlapping layers or valences. Boundaries between valences are often unmarked or are obscure. When a ti body glish Chinamen, and Chinamen of all nationalities but Chi- is fragmented into parts (literally or conceptually), each part retains, nese were thick as pebbles on the beach” (quoted in Frayling in certain aspects, a kind of wholeness or becomes a simulacra of the 2014, 178–179). Frayling connects the popularity of Chinese larger entity of which it is a constituent. (294) magicians—genuine and fake—to the origins of the tran- shistorical Fu Manchu character, writing, “One thing is for sure, though: Fu Manchu was born in the Edwardian Music 8. In “Racist Love,” Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan Hall” (Frayling 2014, 180). criticize Chinese in America who, having internalized the 2. Goto-Jones points out that during this time period, stereotype of being unassimilable, strive to become the “as- there was “an explosion of magicians who adopted stage- similable alien” and object of white acceptance over and names involving academic titles such as ‘professor’ or ‘doc- above the “bad example of the blacks.” They see this as a tor’” and a “magician’s patter would be full of references to result of the “genius” of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which scientific advances, the powers of electricity, and mechan- generated self-contempt and humiliation among Chinese ical devices” (Goto-Jones 2014, 1456–1457). Elsewhere, in and Chinese-Americans and encouraged their self-erasure Conjuring Asia: Magic, Orientalism, and the Making of the as “neither black nor white in a black and white world.” They Modern World,hewrites, write, “At worst he’s a counterfeit begging currency. At best he’s an ‘Americanized Chinese,’ someone who’s been given a treatment to make him less foreign” (Chin and Chan 1972, The modernity of modern magic was taken very seriously indeed. The 79). Golden Age was a time of top hats and tails, of gentlemanly magi- cians who conducted ‘experiments’ and ‘demonstrations’ (rather than 9. Taylor also stresses the critical importance of recent performing tricks). Positioning themselves as ‘professors of magic’, work in which the association of black identities with roots stage magicians seemed to embrace the positivism and empiricism of has been called into question by showing “the centrality of the scientific revolutions. Not only entertainers, magicians sought to uprooting and rerouting to black life-worlds” (Taylor 2016, Chinn Race Magic and the Yellow Peril 433

133). But even in what Paul Gilroy named routes and routes, 10. These are not neutral aesthetic observations, if such and what Taylor calls “multiply rooted or rhizomatic” life a thing is even possible; rather they are synecdotal, to adopt paths of black migration and mobility, the truth of history Taylor’s terminology again. He writes, “This business of as- and place remain connected to authenticity, even if only as signing meanings, and of borrowing the resources for this an ideal and only minimally as a method of orienting dias- process from prevailing discursive, sociopolitical, and epis- poric movement. This differs from the Orientalist fantasy of temic currents, is what I mean to signal by referring to race Chineseness in which the truth of history and place, whether as synecdotal” (2016, 10). This is clear in media and beauty as roots or migration, must be decoupled from authenticity. industry preferences for mixed-race people with white For a more radical cartography of the black diaspora that heritage. is not structured by roots and movement as a binary, one 11. It is easy to immediately notice that Chinese art

must look to the work of Louis Chude-Sokei, especially The history has a precedent for shanzhai. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 Last ‘Darky’: Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African 12. Track 1 of Fatima Al Qadiri, Asiatisch. (2014, Com- Diaspora (2006). pact disc: Hyperdub HDBCD024).