Introduction

Before the popularity of urban ethnic tourism in the 1880s, Californian Chinatowns were often considered as a political difficulty as well as an ethnic curiosity, positioned haphazardly halfway between Oriental fantasy and authentic “Chineseness.” In his groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism , Edward Said explains the philosophy of orientalism as “a form of radical realism:” “Anyone employing orientalism […] will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. The tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength.” The systematic operation of repetitive and stereotypical images in orientalist discourse is elaborated by Homi K. Bhabha in “The Other Question,” in which Bhabha argues that colonial discourse as “the site of both fixity and fantasy” is deeply problematic, in which “a repertoire of conflictual positions” is played out and led onto “a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes,” giving “the stereotype both its fixity and its phantasmatic quality.” Late nineteenth-century Californian Chinatowns complicated such a “phantasmatic quality” of “fixity and fantasy” for its Western viewers. Characterized by both myth and reality, visual authenticity and semiotic indeterminacy, accounts of Californian Chinatowns emerged in the late-nineteenth-century US as a mobilized form of aesthetic “realism,” with its geographical concreteness paradoxically containing a plastic, ephemeral quality and pointing toward the arbitrariness, opacity, porosity, and contingencies of historical and political positioning.