Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in "The Alaska Widow" by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11272504
AutoresMary Chapman (0000-0001-8359-9423, University of British Columbia, autor de correspondencia)
Año2013
Volumen38
Número1
Páginas155-163
Fecha de publicación2013-03-01
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mls002
OpenAlexW2007456140
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas10

When her work was recovered in the 1980s, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) was credited with founding the canon of Asian-North American literature.1 The earliest Eaton scholarship focused on her resistance to yellow-peril discourse through her sympathetic portrayals of diasporic Chinese and Eurasians.2 This scholarship contrasted Edith Eaton’s “authentic” self-presentation as the half-Chinese “Sui Sin Far” with her sister Winnifred’s posturing as Japanese noblewoman author “Onoto Watanna.” Although fascinating in many ways, this scholarship was circumscribed by both an exclusive focus on the politics of race as it intersected with gender—and the lack of access to Eaton’s complete and more internally self-contradictory oeuvre. Scholars relying on the same handful of anthologized works—“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” (1910), “Her Chinese Husband” (1910), “In the Land of the Free” (1909), “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910), and “The Inferior Woman” (1910)—explored only a few of Eaton’s themes, most notably Eurasian marriage, tricksterism, and American anti-Asian racism. By focusing on Eaton’s depictions of North American Chinatowns, scholars have rarely recognized the broader transnational political contexts in which Eaton wrote or the cross-racial collaborations depicted in many of her works. Most have understated the significance of Eaton’s British, Canadian, Jamaican, and Chinese cultural referents and ignored significant interactions with the native communities—French Canadian, Caribbean, and even Native North American—that she depicts in much of her work. Nor have scholars adequately appreciated the carefully framed politics of what Sean McCann dismisses as Eaton’s “ordinary, mundane and domestic” settings (76).

Political science · Politics · Racism · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Sister · Sociology · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society