Shih-I Hsiung

In his documentation of Asian American experiences in his work in 1988, historian Roger Daniels coined the term "negative history" to recapitulate the phenomenon that "for a significant part of their history in this country, Asians have been more celebrated for what has happened to them than what they have accomplished."Daniels's observation foregrounded two problematics that unsettled Asian American experiences and achievements historically.First, because so little on Asian American history and culture had been covered by the mainstream media since 1850, Asian Americans remained invisible in American culture and society.Second, any representation of Asian America, by which Daniels specified Chinese and Japanese Americans, had to be mediated by the dominant Euro-American perspective and had to revolve around the Euro-American grand narrative of progress and democracy.In essence, what Daniels cautioned us in his framing of the ethnic experience was that Asian Americans had often served as the object rather than the subject of American history.If Daniels's warning reflected how difficult it had been for historians to retrieve early Asian American history and culture in the United States, then it certainly sounds more challenging if not impossible to recover the experiences of Chinese in diaspora, whose racialized identities, geographical movements, and cultural locations have to be constantly renegotiated and reinterpreted at different historical junctures and for different reasons, from the political to the cultural, from the linguistic to the social economic.Moreover, such studies also make it imperative for historians to assume the role of a comparatist, whose cultural sensibility and linguistic capability may generate connections across geopolitical spaces and illuminate meanings and implications in both shared and differentiated temporalties of the national and the global.It is in this sense that I situate and consider Da Zheng's recent work, Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman.As a literary studies scholar and cultural historian

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