Abstract When the Chinese junk Keying arrived in New York City in July 1847, it became an instant media sensation. This article examines several little-discussed sketches of the junk, later attributed to Herman Melville, that first appeared in the weekly magazine Yankee Doodle . Read alongside a broader archive of contemporary US reporting on China, these pieces reveal how Melville responded to the new Sino-US relations formalized by the Treaty of Wangxia (1844), the first treaty between the two nations, and to a rising popular print culture that shaped representations of China before large-scale Chinese immigration began at mid-century.
Abstract Though Gore Vidal seldom spoke of immigration in his nonfiction essays, his novel Duluth (1983) is centrally concerned with the question. Duluth presents a fantasy version of the American city, but one whose concerns are strikingly contemporary: sexual repression, racism, police brutality. In Duluth , Vidal suggests that these three elements are in fact linked. He suggests that race-based brutality against undocumented workers is, at the ground level, libidinal in nature. These brutalities are then used by government powers to stoke racial tensions and maintain power; however, even that governmental action is ultimately based in the libidinal drives of individual actors. This article argues that Vidal’s linkage of these two forces, the libidinal and the conspiratorial, makes an important intervention in discussions of race and immigration both in the 1980s and today.
