New York Before Chinatown Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882

"Tchen's book makes a convincing case for the ubiquity of the Chinese question in the shaping of American culture, and his readings of overlapping orientalisms-through explications of, for example, the discordance between antiracist content and stereotypical form in Thomas Nast's cartoons-are admirably dense. Still, there is something slightly dispiriting about this history. Though Tchen limns self-proclaimed multinational 'heathen rebel' Wong Ching Foo, who blazed across the American scene in the 1870s tweaking racists and founding the first Chinese civil-rights organization, he avers that Wong 'was not terribly effective.' One measure of the ultimate reach of orientalism may be the scanty evidence of resistance in even this sympathetic and sophisticated archaeology of New York's multiculture."Tchen, John Kuo Wei is the author of 'New York Before Chinatown Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882', published 2001 under ISBN 9780801867941 and ISBN 0801867940.