Publications by Spencer Tricker
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, 2025
This book chapter from the Cambridge Companion series provides an introduction to nineteenth-cent... more This book chapter from the Cambridge Companion series provides an introduction to nineteenth-century Asian American literature and the early history of Chinese immigrants in the United States. In the first section, I address the history of the Chinese in America, focusing on key economic issues and laws related to immigration. In the second section, I track the widely known figure of the “Heathen Chinee” through works of the 1870s and 1880s, highlighting how this literary trope directly mediated political and economic issues of the period, while also illustrating its shaping role in English-language writings by early Chinese immigrants (Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee). Some of this latter work, I conclude, anticipates the later emergence of Asian American politics and the contemporary racialization of Asians as America’s model minority.
MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States, 2024
In her pathbreaking book on Eurasians (mixed-race people of East Asian and Caucasian ancestry liv... more In her pathbreaking book on Eurasians (mixed-race people of East Asian and Caucasian ancestry living at the turn of the twentieth century), Emma Teng notes that such individuals were represented in two main ways. First, “as a ‘problem,’ portending racial extinction, the decline of civilization, or social unrest. At other times, Eurasians were hailed as the embodiment of the best of both worlds, as harbingers of international peace or a cosmopolitan future” (5). This problem-promise dynamic is useful for situating cultural representations of the early twentieth century. However, it can also contribute to a resilient trend in which allegorical dimensions of white-Asian romance and the Eurasian person are stressed above other layers of literary and social meaning. Teng warns against reductive analyses of Eurasians, calling for scholars to develop “a more nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which biracial subjects negotiated their identities within the constraints of American racial hierarchies” (170). Still, the figure of the Eurasian in literature continues to be read as a referendum on the history of racial injustice, the promise of an anti-racist society, or the resolution of imperial or other geopolitical conflicts abroad.1 In literary studies, such concerns are impelled by the practice of ideology critique, which, as Anna Kornbluh eloquently reminds us, remains as vital a project as ever. Yet debate over the relative merits of critique and postcritique can obfuscate the utility of reading practices that work not to supplant critique but to supplement its goals of “‘negative’ diagnoses” and “affirmative projections of emancipation” (Kornbluh 769). I consider how analyzing Eurasian artworks that resist allegorical interpretation and decenter the traditionally overriding question of white-Asian race relations sensitizes us to an important but underacknowledged facet of life for Eurasian writers and artists: an evident desire, especially among those raised outside Asian ethnic enclaves in North America, to create and dwell in Asian atmospheres where belonging—however vexed by competing understandings of identity and community—can be experienced as aesthetic pleasure. These works do not offer emphatic critiques of American imperialism or white supremacy. Nor do they especially invite a scholarly critique of the authors’ veiled complicity with the same. Instead, their implicit desires and strategies of execution help us understand how racial atmospheres, and the aesthetic pleasures to which they may give rise, enabled marginalized Eurasian and other diasporic subjects to survive and thrive.
Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (ed. Edward Sugden), 2022
“The color line belts the world,” remarked W. E. B. Du Bois; yet this “line” did not always affor... more “The color line belts the world,” remarked W. E. B. Du Bois; yet this “line” did not always afford a stable aesthetic demarcation of white and non-white bodies. In this essay, I illustrate the shifting nature of the color line in relation to America’s colonization of the Philippines, conducting an analysis of two versions of Rowland Thomas’s prize-winning short story “Fagan” (published in 1905 and 1909, respectively). Re-imagining the real-life figure of David Fagen, an African American soldier who defected to the Filipino cause during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), “Fagan” exhibits a self-contradictory racial logic: one that reveals a subversive rupture in dominant racializing aesthetics—the supposedly obvious sensory data of race—during the post-Reconstruction years. In the revised version of the story, this conceptual break is distilled by an odd remark from a white soldier: “I’m not in favior [sic],” he says, “Of payin’ gu-gus [derogatory slang for Filipinos] for killin’ white men, no matter whether they’re white or black. It’s a catchin’ habit.” This confused moment of racial identification, which underscores the artificiality of Whiteness itself, highlights a key problem for the US government’s exploitation of African American troops in colonial campaigns. Although the Black press and Black soldiers mostly denounced Fagen's desertion, the inability of mainstream white media to coherently process the racial dynamics of his radical assertion of Afro-Asian solidarity undermined the stability of the color line as a cultural trope of imperial race-making at the turn of the twentieth century.
American Literary Realism, 2020
In this article, I examine the development of Sui Sin Far's short stories about Eurasian women ov... more In this article, I examine the development of Sui Sin Far's short stories about Eurasian women over a period of three decades. I make two related arguments. Firstly, I illustrate how Far gradually moves away from the sentimental figure of the "tragic mulatta" and towards an increasingly distinct Eurasian figure whose interracial identity is intimately bound up with intertexuality and the act of reading. Secondly, I show how Far's regionalist appropriation of universalist sentiment in the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow forms the premise for a nuanced statement about the cosmopolitanism's unequal conditions of possibility during the era of Chinese Exclusion. In the process, I introduce a heretofore undiscussed (and anonymously authored) story entitled "Her Burden" (1893), which seems to prefigure Far's better known Eurasian story "'Its Wavering Image'" (1912).
Winner of the Melville Society's annual Hennig Cohen award for "for the best article, book chapte... more Winner of the Melville Society's annual Hennig Cohen award for "for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville" in 2017.
My argument unfolds in four parts. In the first, I establish the context of Melville’s Gothic intervention by examining representations of the Malay and related figures of the Manilla-man and Lascar in American periodicals of the antebellum years. I also highlight how prevailing accounts of Malay hostility tend to obscure or diminish histories of Western violence, a practice that problematizes their empirical pretensions. The second section, which begins with Mardi and “Benito Cereno” before moving to Moby-Dick, highlights Melville’s recurring deployment of these Malay-coded figures as threatening symbols
indispensable to his Pacific Gothic mode. In the third section, I analyze this mode’s full elaboration in Moby-Dick and articulate the future-oriented, biopolitical implications of its imaginary. In a brief conclusion, I examine Melville’s treatment of Manilla rope, a material object whose mutable aesthetics reaffirm the transformative power of the Pacific
Gothic as a technology of racialization and provide an opportunity to reconsider Moby-Dick’s significance in the longue durée of U.S. involvement in the Asia-Pacific region, a history punctuated by the colonization of the Philippines in 1898 and a series of military
interventions thereafter.
Papers by Spencer Tricker
Imminent Communities: Transpacific Literary Form and Racialization, 1847-1920
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Publications by Spencer Tricker
My argument unfolds in four parts. In the first, I establish the context of Melville’s Gothic intervention by examining representations of the Malay and related figures of the Manilla-man and Lascar in American periodicals of the antebellum years. I also highlight how prevailing accounts of Malay hostility tend to obscure or diminish histories of Western violence, a practice that problematizes their empirical pretensions. The second section, which begins with Mardi and “Benito Cereno” before moving to Moby-Dick, highlights Melville’s recurring deployment of these Malay-coded figures as threatening symbols
indispensable to his Pacific Gothic mode. In the third section, I analyze this mode’s full elaboration in Moby-Dick and articulate the future-oriented, biopolitical implications of its imaginary. In a brief conclusion, I examine Melville’s treatment of Manilla rope, a material object whose mutable aesthetics reaffirm the transformative power of the Pacific
Gothic as a technology of racialization and provide an opportunity to reconsider Moby-Dick’s significance in the longue durée of U.S. involvement in the Asia-Pacific region, a history punctuated by the colonization of the Philippines in 1898 and a series of military
interventions thereafter.
Papers by Spencer Tricker