The chapter looks at the representations of Californian Chinatowns in the 1870s. The accounts of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain manifest a multi-layered urban space and a perverted Romantic landscape, in which Chinatown emerges as a haunting presence. In their depictions of Chinatown artefacts and commodities, as well as the living spaces and daily practices of Chinese immigrants, both writers deploy disgust as a literary device and as a political response to the rising anti-Chinese sentiment of the time. Historically, these engagements foresee the eventual restriction of Chinese immigration to the United States. With respect to the recurring theme of disgust, strategies of digression and distortion, as well as the lingering sense of doubleness, their writings can be retrospectively understood as part of a body of work on what Sarah Jaquette Ray terms ‘the ecological other’.
This essay investigates Emily Dickinson’s depictions of Asia by looking at the notion of material, especially narcotic, consumption in five of her poems. Although she rarely travelled, her Asiatic landscape oscillates between literary Orientalism, sensationalist reportage, and patriotic commentaries to account for the geopolitical contestation between Asia, Europe, and the United States. The relationship between the East and the West in the mid-nineteenth century was punctuated by several international encounters, such as the Anglo-Sino Opium Wars and Sino- American peace treaties. These poems of Asian representation, with their focus on the intricate relationship between possession and consumption, especially as seen through the Western employment of Asian workers and consumption of Asian material and cultural goods, reflect Dickinson’s deeper understanding of the transglobal interchange of her time. The paper looks at how her Boston Chinese Museum experience, in which opium consumption featured prominently, might have influenced Asiatic representation in her poems. It also examines the depictions of Chinese immigrants in the American West by Dickinson’s correspondents, such as Samuel Bowles and Helen Hunt Jackson, to see how they provide a fertile ground for Dickinson to conceive her Asiatic landscapes. By exploring how the social and cultural portrayals of Asia are adopted and appropriated in these poems, the essay suggests that they indicate Dickinson’s consistent engagement with an emerging consumer society in America that involved a transglobal circle of production and consumption, and her poems expose its problematic process that promoted international exchange but did not necessarily guarantee equality, progress or liberty. Furthermore, Dickinson’s positioning of the United States between the old worlds of Asia and Europe implies her early receptiveness to the patriotic discourses of her time, and her later, more reflective stance on United States culture. Her Asian “consumption” in these poems, particularly her association of Asia with consumerism and narcotic consumption, simultaneously evokes and unsettles the intended control of contemporary Orientalist discourses concerning the racial other.
This essay investigates diverging transatlantic attitudes towards mechanisation in the mid-nineteenth century by looking at the portrayals of steam engines in Anglo-American Romantic literary works by Wordsworth, Emerson, De Quincey and Dickinson. Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes how time and space are ‘annihilated’ with the speed of industrialization. Walter Benjamin, alternatively, indicates how the metaphoric dressing up of steam engines as living creatures was a retreat from industrialization and modernization. Those conflicting perceptions of what David Nye calls the ‘technological sublime’ became sources of joy as well as sorrow for these authors. The essay examines how the literary representations of transportation show various literary attempts to make sense of and rewrite the technological promise of the future into distinct aesthetic experiences of modernity. Their imaginative engagement with the railway showcases a genealogy of metaphorical as well as mechanic transportation that indicates an evolving process of Romantic thought across the Atlantic Ocean.
Since the emergence of modernity, the perceived Eastern emphasis on the harmony between humanity and nature has been profoundly challenged and reshaped by the processes of globalization, industrialization, and militarization. Asia, as a geo-poetic imaginary and a geopolitical locus, projects both utopic imagination and dystopic anxiety. It juggles between tropical paradise and over-populated mega-cities, philosophical serenity, and militarized bio-hazard zones. It boasts both keen recyclers and key polluters in the world. Landscapes by both non-Asian and Asian authors about or in Asia magnify, problematize, and sometimes accelerate such disquieting and polarized projections. Recent publications on Asian literatures and cultures have offered new ecological perspectives and insights, showing the necessity of addressing global environmental crises through more diversified and situated methodologies and perspectives. 1 Built upon previous scholarship, this special issue on EcoGothic Asia is one of the very first scholarly attempts to address the intimate connections between Asian landscapes and ecological consciousness through the dual lens of ecocriticism and the Gothic mode.Syaman Rapongan, a contemporary Indigenous writer from Taiwan, once compared spearfishing in the subtidal zone in the Pacific Ocean at night as "drifting into the esophagus of the evil spirit" ("Let the Wind Take the Evil Spirit Away"). 2 While night diving has been a traditional way of living for the Tao (Tau) people of Orchid Island, an island situated to the southeast of the island of Taiwan, not only does the darkness in the underwater world instigate fear in the minds of Indigenous fishermen, but the subtidal zone Rapongan frequents is also a treacherous terrain for both men and animals, with deep trenches connected to a valley nicknamed "The Valley of Cattle Grave" by the local tribesmen as, in the past, Tao people would chase straying cattle out of their sweet potato fields into the valley, and thus send these animals to their early death. It is also a place where people might find floating bodies of their relatives, victims of accidental drowning. The cove where Rapongan fished, facing another nearby island, Jiteiwan (in Tao language, or "Lesser Orchid Island" in Chinese) is called by local people as "the evil spirit's
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