Ecogothic Chinatown

Abstract

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’.