A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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Asian nations that were seen as rife for conquest and dominance by the masculine US military that is represented by Pinkerton.
Just as Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San stand in for an aggressive US military and passive Japan, the “American hardware” on the Japanese doors can be seen to reflect the US assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction, the practice of claiming US sovereignty within Asian countries. In the novella, this occurs by way of a link to domestic structures of normative heteropatriarchy. On the one hand, a struggle over the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s Japanese relatives (those “who are out”) is an opportunity for Pinkerton to assert the sovereign right of exclusion, while it is also a means for taking possession of his wife. As Teemu Ruskola observes, the US assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction in Asia (and China specifically) fundamentally transformed previous notions of sovereignty as being contained within the nation-state because “in China, among other places, American law did not attach to US territory but to the bodies of American citizens—each one of them representing a floating island of American sovereignty.”25 Pinkerton and his home mirror practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction performed by the United States, whereby sovereignty is delinked from the geographic boundaries of the nation and attached to the traveling body of the US agent abroad. His assumption of a home “in Japan!” with “American hardware” and his quick exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s Japanese relatives neatly reflects the US government’s imperial practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction and exclusion as a means of constructing the nation and national identity.26 The result is that the space of sovereign exercise, which is to say the territory of US legal and cultural independence and self-determination, is dominated by Pinkerton, while transforming Cho-Cho-San into a figure that exists inside the United States from outside its borders, cut off from Japan while inside Japanese territory. Properly speaking, she is neither a US American nor Japanese subject. As such, she emerges as a transnational figure that floats between and is denied a proper place in both.
In defining the term transnational, Aihwa Ong places emphasis on trans as that which “denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something.”27 The transnational body is not only in a state of flux as she moves between spaces; she carries the potential to “change the nature” of the spaces that she traverses. This highlights the fact that, as Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young argue, a border must be conceptualized “as simultaneously a geographical locale and a condition/form of movement.”28 The border is realized through performance as the body moves between, across, and in relation to its often-porous limits. The body in performance thus poses a threat to the border because, “when bodies walk, drive, sail, or fly, their movements blur the here and there, constantly reorganizing the spatial relations and negotiating the consequences (political, social, economic, cultural) of their crossings.”29 In order to manage this threat, immigration law choreographs the immigrant’s body, placing limits on her range of movement or even her ability to cross into the geographical territory of the nation. For the Asian subject in the United States, this took the form of an exceptional juridical regime that was developed to control the threat of her perceived dance across borders. Cho-Cho-San’s figuration in Long’s novella and the struggle over who, precisely, is excluded from Pinkerton’s home is significant of this fact.
After Pinkerton explains his reason for installing the locks, Cho-Cho-San happily performs the mantle of authority created by the decision to exclude. This performance is quickly disrupted, however, when she learns just who it is that her husband wants to keep out: “She was greatly pleased with it all, though, and went about jingling her new keys and her new authority like toys,—she had only one small maid to command,—until she learned that among others to be excluded were her own relatives.”30 Cho-Cho-San repeatedly petitions Pinkerton to allow for her relatives to enter the home. However, he dismisses the family as “a trifle wearisome” and definitively rejects her attempts to bring the outside in.31
It should be noted that while much of the early exclusion legislation specifically targeted the Chinese, these technologies were expanded to similarly exclude other immigrants. And while US legislators were worried that targeting Japanese immigrants would offend the Japanese government, thus resulting in largely administrative means for securing Japanese exclusion (such as the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907), there was a general domestic consensus that all Asian immigration was undesirable by the turn of the century.32 Reading a narrative about a Japanese character alongside Chinese exclusion law and jurisprudence can be a useful exercise insofar as it helps to clarify the ways in which the domestic dispute in Long’s novella functions as an “allegorical narrative” significant of the national and legal debates born from “collective thinking” and, more specifically, collective anxieties about Asians in America. Long’s readers would have been well aware of the general anti-Asian sentiment that pervaded the country. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the nation was engaged in vigorous debates over what to do about a perceived influx of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants. As Shirley Hune argues, “the division within Congress and especially the conflict that took place between the legislative and executive branches over the Chinese issue centered largely over the means and not upon the goal of restriction itself.”33 With Asian immigrants figured as a threat to the national order, only a very small minority voiced support for a pluralist embrace of Chinese immigrants. Pinkerton’s desire to “keep out those who are out” would have resonated with popular sentiment about Asian subjects in general at the time.
Madame Butterfly was published nearly a decade after the US Supreme Court upheld Congress’s right to enact the first Chinese Exclusion Act.34 By the time that Long’s story hit the masses, it is likely that most readers would have been aware of the Court’s decision, Chae Chan Ping v. United States, which itself became something of a national drama. Indeed, media outlets turned to the rhetoric and narrative form of dramatic melodrama to report on the case, demonstrating the powerful role that aesthetic conventions play in mediating legal knowledge about Asian immigrants. The New York Times, writing about Chae Chan Ping’s deportation in 1889, described him thus: “The name of Chae Chan Ping is now familiar to American ears. He is a Chinese gentleman who has given the United States courts a great deal of trouble in his endeavors to force his unwelcome presence upon the citizens of this fair and free country.”35 Demonstrating the ways in which legal spectacles take on the conventions of fictional narrative forms, his legal battle is framed with the language of literary or theatrical melodrama. He is cast as an aggressive villain struggling to “force his unwelcome presence” on an innocent victim, “the citizens of this fair and free country.”36 The judiciary, in turn, is figured as a heroic patriarch, instructing him to “pack up his traps and be off.”37
In Chae Chan Ping, Justice Stephen Johnson Field issued the first articulation of Congress’s plenary power to, in Pinkerton’s words, “keep out those who are out”: “That the government of the United States, through the action of the legislative department, can exclude aliens from its territory is a proposition which we do not think open to controversy. Jurisdiction over its own territory to that extent is an incident of every independent nation. It is a part of its independence.”38 Thus, Field understood the right of exclusion as a fundamental component of the constitution of sovereignty and the composition of national independence.
Three years later, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this principle in a case that applied the Chae Chan Ping holding to an ethnic Japanese petitioner in Nishimura Ekiu v. United States.39 This 1892 case involved a woman who immigrated to the United States aboard a steamer, pursuing a husband who had previously arrived in the country. Resonating with Cho-Cho-San’s ultimate foreclosure from national belonging and reflecting the particular will to keep Asian women from immigrating to the United States (discussed in greater detail in the next chapter), she was denied entry. Once more, the right of exclusion was defined as a foundational power of the state. But the Nishimura Ekiu court, even more than in Chae Chan Ping, reveals the border as performance by focusing not on territory but instead on the regulation and choreographing of the immigrant’s body as it moves into and across the national space. As Justice Horace Gray wrote, “It is an accepted maxim of international law, that every sovereign nation