Counting the Bodies: Ferguson and Ferguson1

This article examines the political and interpretive possibilities of Romantic Idealism for understanding contemporary American race relations. Working with Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime, it puts Romantic aesthetics into a mutually constructive dialogue with afropessimist thought. That is, the underlying logic of Black Lives Matter proves to be one composed of Romantic “counting” as well as an afropessimist stance on Black alterity. Black Lives Matter, in this sense, features an aesthetics of omission and accumulation that reveals how Romantic Idealism intersects with a more expansive notion of materiality. Turning to Ferguson’s reading of William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” the article contends that any analysis of Romanticism’s political stakes should make use of the Idealism central to it, and that such a use does not attenuate the urgency or efficacy of Romanticist work.

Asian Americans in Pre–World War II Cinema

From the dawn of cinema in 1895 to the coming of World War II, the representation of Asian immigrants on the American screen shifted from unwanted aliens to accepted, if exotic, citizens—in other words, from Asian immigrants to Asian Americans. Since World War II, American race relations have been defined mainly through the comparison of white and black experiences; however, in the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, white American fears about racial and cultural purity focused on Asian immigration. Although there was immigration from other Asian countries, at the time, the vast majority of Asian immigrants were arriving from China. In newspaper articles and popular fiction, writers exploited and extended Yellow Peril fears about Chinese immigration through tales of Chinese immorality and criminality. American filmmakers then capitalized on these familiar stories and repeated the stereotypes of the evil “Oriental villain” such as Dr. Fu Manchu and the benign “model minority” such as detective Charlie Chan. American culture more broadly, and American film more specifically, conflated different Asian peoples and cultures and represented Asian immigration, for the most part, through white American attitudes toward Chinese immigrants. In film, this resulted in Japanese and Korean American actors playing Chinese and Chinese American characters before the war, and Chinese and Korean American actors playing Japanese characters during and after the war. More notoriously, however, American films often cast white actors in Chinese roles, especially when those characters were more prominent in the narrative. This practice of “yellowface” contributed to the continuance of stereotyped representations of Chinese characters in film and exposed the systemic racism of a film industry that rarely allowed Asian Americans to represent themselves. With World War II, the Japanese replaced the Chinese as America’s Yellow Peril villain, and American race relations turned from the question of Asian immigration to that of African American civil rights.

Hissing, Bidding, and Lynching: Participation in Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon and the Melodramatics of American Racism

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2016 An Octoroon encouraged Boston theatregoers to hiss and cheer like the audiences for Boucicault’s 1859 The Octoroon, then encouraged them to bid for slaves and scream for a lynching. For some, participation may have encouraged a self-satisfied post-racial bliss; for others, it may have bolstered psychic investments in racism and misogyny. Many, however, were confused: What is an appropriate response to the melodramatic extremes of American race relations?