Hsuan L. Hsu's Sitting in Darkness joins Selina Lai-Henderson's Mark Twain in China (2015) in thoroughly engaging the “shadow archive of writing about China, Chinese immigrants, and transpacific imperialism” (4). Comprehensive critical investigation of Twain's fascination with Asia and Asian Americans is long overdue and, undoubtedly, the quality of Hsu and Lai-Henderson's works will ensure the ongoing vitality of these lines of inquiry.
As his title suggests, Hsu's analysis extends beyond this specific “shadow archive” to explore how the plight of Asian Americans, as witnessed during formative periods spent in California and Hawaii, is contained within a more familiar corpus of Twain's writing, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins. Hsu reveals that even though these novels engage racism most directly through the treatment of black slaves and European immigrants, Twain's representations of certain peculiar qualities of antebellum racial animus can be more...
