This chapter argues that anti-blackness lived on in the afterlife of slavery in Bret Harte's writings about the American West featuring the Chinese worker during Reconstruction. Through the evocation of minstrel figures in literature such as Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harte's fictional writings reveal the ways in which anti-blackness functions as cultural form, rooted in slavery and the representational practice of blackface minstrelsy. In particular, the character of Topsy lived on through his Chinese worker characters in the West, beginning with and exploited further after the phenomenal success of his poem "Plain Language from Truthful James." In addition to reading the poem in the context of Reconstruction debates on changing definitions of enslaved/"heathen" and free labor, I propose noting the residual representational practices of blackface minstrelsy that pervaded much of nineteenth-century US literature as formal attributes of Harte's poem. Doing so reveals that Harte's West and the Chinese worker were not separate from Reconstruction and the history of slavery, colonialism, and racial violence in the United States in the construction of "American humor."

This chapter investigates four representative plays from a quartet of writers that serve as precursors to the instantiation of Asian American theater: Bret Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Sadakichi Hartmann’s Osadda’s Revenge (c. 1890), Yone Noguchi’s published kyogen in English (1907), and Hong Shen’s The Wedded Husband (1921). These works reveal evidence of various textual migrations that provide different contexts in formal and thematic terms for the historiography of Asian American theater, in particular, and Asian American literature more generally. The Asian immigrant writers covered in the chapter suggest that the genre often thought to inaugurate an Asian American literary tradition – that is, life writing — overlaps with and is preceded by drama. This genealogy indicates that considerations of theatrical form might supersede the representation of immigrant experience.

Twain’s two most important contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells was a friend and champion of both writers, although Twain and James expressed distaste toward each other. Each in his own way was an important figure in the emerging literary realism. Although Twain claimed that he preferred reading history and biography over novels and literature, he was an avid reader of his contemporaries’ works, even if he often criticized them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was his next-door neighbor, and he entertained fellow writers in his Hartford mansion. Twain was a champion of some younger writers, although he wearied at the constant demands for advice and help from emerging writers.

Mark Twain had a positive and supportive stance toward the Chinese from his time in the West and throughout his lifetime. He recognized the ill treatment of Chinese immigrants in Nevada and California, and he spoke out against brutal police tactics against Chinese in San Francisco. He collaborated with Bret Harte on a play, Ah Sin, which employs Chinese stereotypes, but also makes a pro-Chinese statement. As efforts toward Chinese exclusion intensified in the 1870s and 1880s, he was a strong supporter of Chinese rights. Although he never traveled to China during his lifetime, he is considered by the Chinese as a friend of their people and their country.