UCLA

This project is concerned with the foreign-executed trade in contracted Chinese labor (the “coolie trade”) to the Americas that spanned from 1847-1876. The first part of the project explores the many violences that the coolie trade visited upon Chinese persons, whether those who were themselves directly victimized by the trade, or those who suffered more indirectly (persons whose families were torn apart, who lived in fear of kidnapping, or who were forced to contemplate the meaning of foreign-imposed racial hierarchies, commodification of racialized Chinese labor, and the general decline of late Qing China’s geopolitical position). As Chinese from a variety of backgrounds began to respond to and apprehend these traumatic violences, they gave rise to a set of “conceptual vocabularies”—including terminologies, subjectivities, conceptions of racial and geopolitical hierarchies, and understandings of servitude and personal liberty—that gave voice both to the ongoing traumas, and to the shock and simmering outrage that resulted therefrom. The second part of the project then details how nationalist authors writing in the early twentieth century were able to repurpose and manipulate these powerful, already-extant, shared vocabularies of violence in order to urge a crystallizing reading public to take an interest in the future of an endangered China. In the respective moments of the 1905 Anti-American Boycott and the 1904 Movement to Enlighten the Lower Classes in Beijing, several pieces of “coolie fiction” emerged, making use of the traumatic memory of historic coolie trade violences to advocate immediate political agendas—in this case anti-foreign activism and socially-oriented educational reform. At the same time, however, these pieces also gestured on a much broader level toward the formation of a “people” united by a collective memory of victimization, and shared determination to prevent further subjugation by foreigners in the contemporary moment. The coolie trade vocabularies would ultimately prove a very effective means first of eliciting a strong, unified emotional response from a media-consuming public; and second, of offering prescriptive visions for how a Chinese “people” might condense around particular social and political challenges and anxieties in the twentieth century.