Five years after the end of the Civil War, one of the most pressing political issues in America was the “Chinese question.” For journalists, lawmakers, and authors, debates about the growing numbers of Chinese immigrants seen as “coolie” labor were inseparable from anxieties about freed African slaves. After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Congress argued over revisions to the 1790 law that had restricted US citizenship to “free white person[s].” Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner proposed the removal of the word “white” from this law; however, fearing the extension of citizenship to Chinese immigrants, other members of Congress declined to ratify Sumner's proposal. Instead, the revised law added those of “African nativity and persons of African descent” as newly eligible for naturalization. As Caroline H. Yang notes in The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery, whiteness was thus retained as “the original and authentic marker of citizenship” (p. 2), fortifying the racial exclusion of Chinese (and later, other Asian) immigrants, and further ingraining the oppressive “afterlife” of slavery.

Tracing racial representations in American literature during Reconstruction and the decades immediately following, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how “antiblack racism was recalibrated, not dismantled, through the non-Black Chinese worker figures in U.S. literature after emancipation” (p. 19). In particular, Yang emphasizes how slavery's violence against black bodies was perpetuated through the characterizations, situations, and dialogues of blackface minstrelsy. Focusing on the fiction of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), and Charles Chesnutt, the book makes original and insightful connections between theatrical performances and literary works and illuminates the intersecting logics of black and orientalist racial formations.

Even writers such as Harte, who characterized minstrel humor as “pointless” and “inferior” (p. 45), were not free from its influence. Harte's rendition of the “heathen Chinee,” made popular by his poem “Plain Language From Truthful James” (1870), bore a strong resemblance to blackface minstrel types such as the infantilized and unruly figure of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. While eschewing the raucous foolery of the minstrel stage, both Harte and Stowe still employed the ways in which Chinese and black characters were staged as “peculiar” and “heathen.”

Twain, on the other hand, openly declared his fondness for minstrelsy, incorporating its uses of dialect and comic caricature into well-known works such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Yang argues, minstrelsy conditioned the Chinese characterizations in Twain's fiction as well as his 1877 theatrical collaboration with Harte, Ah Sin. Twain's representations of black and Chinese characters, along with his openly racist portrayals of American Indians, undercut assessments of his writing as uniformly liberal and antiracist. In contrast, Bierce pointedly linked his critiques of anti-Chinese sentiment with his disgust at minstrelsy (perhaps one of the reasons that he never gained the popularity of either Harte or Twain). Yang offers an excellent reading of Bierce's “The Haunted Valley” (1871) as “a deliberately failed minstrel show” (p. 126) and illustrates how gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism also factor into portrayals of the Chinese immigrant in the American West.

Yang makes a compelling case for the ubiquity of the minstrel form and its influence on Chinese figuration as part of the everyday repertoire of American cultural expression. While the book's first half emphasizes Reconstruction-era literature, Yang also considers later works by Eaton and Chesnutt, two formative figures in Asian North American and African American literature. Particularly revealing are Yang's discussions of Eaton's stories “Ku Yum” (1896), and “Away Down in Jamaica” (1898). Centered on the story of a Chinese woman and her female slave, “Ku Yum” participates in the larger translation of the terms of chattel slavery into a more abstract metaphor for the condition of white or Chinese women under patriarchy, which in turn further obfuscated black female captivity in the United States. While Eaton may have openly challenged the popular stereotypes of Harte's “heathen Chinee,” she also employed minstrelsy's figurations of the mixed-race “yellow girl” and the mammy in “Away Down in Jamaica,” her only short story with prominent black characters.

Even though histories of antiblackness and anti-Chinese racism are intricately connected, they are nonetheless incommensurable in nature. Yang's nuanced reading of Chestnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition drives this point home, making clear the connections between minstrel performance and the violence of lynching under Jim Crow. Writers such as Chestnutt were labeled as bitter for depicting slavery's continued effects at the same time that other writers’ works were praised for their exotic orientalism. The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery not only warns us of the dangers of oversimplifying Afro-Asian relations, but also provides cogent models for understanding how literature and theater illuminate these fraught interracial dynamics.