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policed boundaries of race, class, gender, culture, and sexuality in American cities. To better understand the significance of the narrative strategies that Sui Sin Far employs to undermine the predominant stereotypical portrayals of Chinatown, it is necessary to briefly examine the spatiality—spatial organizations of social relations and their effects—of identity construction in the dominant discourses of her time.

      While some middle-class white men, particularly members of the San Francisco Bohemian Club and the California Camera Club, such as Genthe and Irwin, found Chinatown a pleasurable place for a thrilling and aesthetic experience, many white San Franciscans regarded this “foreign” place and community with fear and anxiety, especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and when cholera and smallpox epidemics struck San Francisco in the mid- and late nineteenth century, followed by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1903.8 The intersections of racial formation and the fear of an impending epidemic catastrophe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shah contends, created “a new articulation of space and race” that made Chinatown “a singular and separate place that henceforth could be targeted in official inspections and popular commentary” (24–25). The production of fear reinforces the boundaries of the raced body and space.

      It is worth noting, moreover, that in Sawtelle’s argument against the Chinese women’s lethal contamination of the American national body, she inscribes the threat of Chinese immigrant’s racial Otherness and inassimilable foreignness in spatial terms: “In the very heart of San Francisco there is a Chinese empire. . . . Several streets are devoted to mercantile and manufacturing pursuit, while the alleys are lined with the tenements of the Chinese courtesans” (4). Sawtelle’s article offers a salient example of the predominant stereotypical representations of Chinatown by white Americans, in which Chinatown is turned into what Shah calls a “perverse geography” that “provided a schema of the dangers of Chinatown and Chinese residents to middle-class white society in San Francisco and beyond” (79). Inscribed as “a Chinese empire,” Chinatown, then, is neither simply a passive outcome of socioeconomic and political systems nor the end result of discursive identity construction; it becomes constructive material “evidence” of the supposedly innate racial attributes of the “Chinese race,” justifying racial segregation and exclusion. Like the Chinese body, Chinatown functions as an apparently stable site for simultaneous construction and naturalization of racial identities and social positions and for surveillance, containment, and exclusion of the Chinese from U.S. citizenship and the nation-space.9

      The raced, gendered, and sexualized space of Chinatown’s “third circle” also informs the works of Norris’s associates, Genthe and Irwin, “whose art,” Emma J. Teng notes, “was intimately associated with their flâneurie—their observations of and participation in the city’s street life,” particularly their slumming in Chinatown (“Artifacts” 59). Genthe evokes “The Third Circle” in his memoir, while portraying life and culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown in terms of a spatialized social hierarchy racialized as characteristically Chinese within a self-sustained architectural structure of a Chinatown theater: “The [theater] building itself was a study in ways Chinese. In it were housed all the strata of life to be found in the district. Above the theater, on the second story, lived the manager and stage director. . . . On the third flight down were the opium dens where the smokers in various stages drew their dreams from the long pipes. It was this retreat which was immortalized by Frank Norris in his story, The Third Circle” (qtd. in Teng, “Artifacts” 63–64). In her discussion of this passage, Teng notes that “[w]hat Genthe does here is reinscribe Norris’s trope as physical space: metaphorical circles become architectural structures—three stories segregating classes of people and activities. For Genthe, a building serves as a microcosmic articulation of socioeconomic relations in Chinatown society” (“Artifacts” 65).

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