A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson

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СКАЧАТЬ of Times Square, before eventually disclosing her whiteness, to their great disappointment. There is little doubt that Bergere looked completely ludicrous shuffling down Broadway near midnight in what she described as the “short, quick steps of the Japanese,” dressed in a kimono while speaking in “broken English.”⁴⁷ The spectacle onstage was probably no less stupid. However, the audience’s refusal to acknowledge what was no doubt a clear act of racial mimicry evidences a regulation of the color line so staunch that audiences believed that “no white woman could ever play such a role.”

      Belasco’s dramatic adaptation eliminates the debate over the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s family. It begins after Pinkerton has already abandoned Cho-Cho-San, as she earnestly awaits his return. Again, the importance of the locks are highlighted as in the opening scene, in which Cho-Cho-San explains to Suzuki why her husband put the locks on the door: “to keep out those which are out, and in, those which are in. Tha’s me.”⁴⁸ “Tha’s me” identifies Cho-Cho-San’s confused status between interior and exterior, Japan and the United States, linking the regulation of Asian female sexuality to the practice of constituting proper national and racial borders. This form of racial and national confusion between interior and exterior is lifted from Long’s novella and brought to life before the audience’s eyes in the form of the set, described in the script thus: “Everything in the room is Japanese save the American locks and bolts on the doors and windows and an American flag fastened to a tobacco jar. Cherry blossoms are abloom outside, and inside.”⁴⁹ The symbolic blend between interior and exterior is represented by potent symbols of US and Japanese nationalism (the US flag and the sakura) cohabiting the home. This confusion of cultural and national distinction is embodied in a less harmonious form by the character of Cho-Cho-San. This is specifically realized through her spoken dialogue.

      Linguistic utterance becomes a primary method by which Cho-Cho-San’s confused status between the United States and Japan is performed. It is the medium through which the audience can identify her inability to properly perceive her exclusion from both spaces at the very moment she attempts to perform her inclusion in them. The structure of the dialogue signifies the peculiar place of the gendered Asian-immigrant and Asian American subject as always, somehow, located outside the United States. In the opening scene, for example, Cho-Cho-San insists that Suzuki speak English only:

      Madame Butterfly: (Reprovingly) Suzuki, how many time I tellin’ you—no one shall speak anythin’ but those Unite’ State’ languages in these Lef-ten-ant Pik-ker-ton’s house? (She pronounces his name with much difficulty.)⁵⁰

      She speaks in a pidgin that draws on and embellishes the dialect spoken by the heroine in Long’s novella. Her insistence on English is at once significant of a desire to enter the United States and indicative of her cultural inability to properly perform ideal US subjectivity. In the novella, she explains that Pinkerton has insisted that she speak “United States’ languages” in his absence.⁵¹ If she does this, upon his return, she claims, “he go’n’ take us at those United States America.”⁵² Cho-Cho-San’s failed attempt to speak in “Unite’ State’ languages” reinforced dominant arguments in support of exclusion: namely, no matter how much Asians in America may attempt to perform ideal US subjectivity through the guiles of cunning and artifice, their innate racial, national, and cultural difference marks them as incapable of fully assimilating into the dominant white culture.

      Popular media in the nineteenth century, from news reportage to stage shows such as Madame Butterfly, commonly represented Asian subjects as speaking broken English. The figuration of Asian immigrants burdened with accented English was shorthand for Asian racial difference as that which impedes proper assimilation or the performance of proper national subjectivity. Thus, representations of broken English were inherently tied to the narration of Asian subjects as those that should be excluded from the national body politic. Take, for example, the Times’s description of the final words of Chae Chan Ping, just before his removal from the United States: “He said in pigeon [sic] English: ‘I don’t want to go back to China; I want to stop in California.’”⁵³ Emphasizing his “pigeon” (a spelling error that figures him as both foreign and animalistic, or at least less than human) at the exact moment that he decries his removal from the nation confirms the article’s insistence that the Chinese must be removed and excluded from the United States. Like Cho-Cho-San, his “pigeon” is a means of representing the racialized Asian immigrant’s inability to perform as a proper national subject. It thus justifies his or her exclusion.

      The use of dialect to mark the inferiority of racialized bodies was not new. Cho-Cho-San’s dialect, in both Long’s and Belasco’s treatments, is reminiscent of the “darky dialect” central to blackface minstrelsy. This form of dialect was also widely popularized in representations of African Americans in nineteenth-century US American melodrama and literature. As Eric Lott argues, blackface minstrelsy was significant of both a practice of domination and the desire for the dominant white culture to consume black racial difference.⁵⁴ “Darky dialect” represented African Americans as unintelligible, inferior racialized subjects who were ripe for domination, while staging such subjects as projection screens onto which fantasies about the “liberties of infancy” could be displayed.⁵⁵ The adoption of similar forms of dialect for the representation of Asian and Asian American subjects achieved similar ends and highlights the ways in which Asian racialization occurred across the differentiated representational landscapes of race in the United States.

      That Long’s and Belasco’s adoption of a dialect that was at the very least referential to the dialects of blackface traditions is in keeping with the comparative racialization of Asian and African American subjects in both aesthetic and legal traditions of the era. Krystyn Moon shows how US composers in the nineteenth century, eager to satiate audience desires to consume exotic sounds of the “Orient,” turned to familiar “musical representations of difference” found in blackface minstrelsy: “By combining African American traditions with European Orientalism and transcriptions of Chinese music, they again played to notions of difference and inferiority and expanded on the conflation of the non-Western world.”⁵⁶ This form of racial triangulation was similarly present in the law, most notably in Harlan’s Plessy dissent, figuring nonwhite racial difference as that which could be simultaneously consumed and excluded in the construction of ideal (white) national subjectivity. Thus, as Julia H. Lee observes, “the figure of the Asian was vital in mediating the relationship between blackness and American national identity, and in turn . . . blackness was key in imagining Asian racial difference in relation to the nation.”⁵⁷ While the outcomes and effects of such processes were varied for different minoritarian groups, their mutually subordinate construction by the dominant culture bolstered the stability of whiteness as an ideal national subject position.

      White audiences reveled in the ability to consume Cho-Cho-San’s dialect as that which signified the fetish of her exotic racial difference, while confirming the subordinate position projected onto racialized bodies by the logic of white supremacy. Her speech patterns thrilled the cosmopolitan New York crowd, as documented by one newspaper reporter who described Bates’s “delivery of Mr. Long’s curious patois as exceedingly interesting.”⁵⁸ But they also confirmed the fact that she was utterly incompatible within the parameters set by the dominant culture to define ideal national subjectivity. The charming naïveté of Cho-Cho-San’s assumption that the language she is speaking would in any way pass for English is encapsulated by her failure to name it properly. She refers to English erroneously in the plural as “Unite’ State’ languages.” Her radically incommensurate relationship to the United States is thus figured through her speech, which breaks down and becomes incomprehensible as her status between Japan and the United States grows increasingly and tragically confused. Spectacularly exhibiting this contention, her final lines in the play are nearly gibberish: “Well—go way an’ I will res’ now. . . . I wish res’—sleep . . . long sleep . . . an’ when you see me again, I pray you look whether I be not beautiful again . . . as a bride.”⁵⁹ Belasco and Long make Cho-Cho-San a tragic figure СКАЧАТЬ