Situating the Essential Alien: Sui Sin Far’s Depiction of Chinese-White Marriage and the Exclusionary Logic of Citizenship

Situating the Essential Alien: Sui Sin Far’s Depiction of Chinese-White Marriage and the Exclusionary Logic of Citizenship

MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2008
pages 654-688
E-ISSN: 1080-658X Print ISSN: 0026-7724
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1561

Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Assistant Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This essay looks at how Sui Sin Far’s [born Edith Maude Eaton] short stories contested an emerging model of national citizenship that attempted to expand the rights of blacks and women by excluding Chinese immigrants. It argues that her depiction of Chinese-White marriage strategically redresses anxieties about black-white miscegenation that were fueled by Progressive and post-Reconstruction reform. While Sui Sin Far counters Chinese national exclusion by strategically pointing up the more offensive threat of black racial difference, she also exposes the disingenuous logic that attempted to situate national and racial exclusions on opposite sides of a hinge.

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