Abstract
In the visual and dramatic climax of The King and I (1951 stage/1956 film), the King of Siam, Maha Mongkut, throws a lavish state dinner and entertainment for a group of British diplomats in order to impress upon them his country’s cultural sophistication and consequent right to self-rule. Unknown to him, the play his palace slaves and concubines will perform is no less than a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, complete with an anti-slavery lesson in self-determination aimed at the tyrannical monarch himself. In a stunning dance sequence choreographed by Jerome Robbins, the women of the palace depict Eliza’s flight across the Ohio River using the conventions of a veritable smorgasbord of Asian theatrical genres: Thai Khon, Balinese Gamelan, and Japanese Bunraku (Figure 1.1). The story is narrated by his concubine Tuptim, a woman in love with another of Mongkut’s slaves, but bound to the King as a peace offering from neighboring Burma. As the evil “Simon of Legree” pursues Eliza and her small child across the icy river where he drowns, Tuptim loses control. She ventriloquizes Topsy’s gleeful guilt over Legree’s death, crying, “I ‘spects I’s de wickedest critter in de world,” and then breaks out of her role as narrator to exclaim, “but I do not believe Topsy is ‘wicked critter,’ because I too am glad for death of King! Of any king who pursue a slave who is unhappy, and who tried to escape!”1
“Simon of Legree” pursues Eliza in Tuptim’s “Small House of Uncle Thomas,” from The King and I (1956). Photo courtesy of Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts.
The Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of present, and the Pacific is the ocean of the future.
US Secretary of State John Hay, 1903
It is here in the Pacific that the future drama of our expanding commerce will be enacted. The play of rival forces now finds the Pacific for its stage.
San Francisco Chronicle, 31 August 1925 on the occasion of the first non-stop California — Hawaii flight
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Notes
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I, dir. Walter Lang, starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1956).
Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” in American Literature 70.2 (1998), 635–68; Caren Kaplan, “Getting to Know You: Travel, Gender, and the Politics of Postcolonial Representation in Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Roman de la Campa, Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1995), 33–52;
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
For readings of the constructions of race in the other Rodgers and Hammerstein orientalist musicals, see Andrea Most, “‘You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught’: The Politics of Race in South Pacific,” Theatre Journal 52.3 (2000), 307–37; and David Palumbo-Liu’s discussion of The Flower Drum Song in Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 156–70.
In recent decades, the representation of blackness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin has come to be seen as problematic as Stowe’s celebration of femininity and her anti-slavery critique have come to be lauded. For critical evaluations of the construction of blackness in the novel, see James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955),
reprinted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 495–501;
Hortense Spillers, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), reprinted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 542–68;
Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric Sundquist (London: Cambridge, 1986).
For a discussion of the relationship between Stowe’s deployment of sentimentality, her assertion of feminine morality, and the anti-slavery critique she forwards in the novel, see Ann Douglas, “Feminine Sentimentalism: The Bitterness of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston, MA: G. K. Gall, 1980), 235–43; Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” Glyph 2 (1978), reprinted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 501–22. The controversy over the construction of race in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is due in no small part to the novel’s close kin to blackface minstrelsy — both in Stowe’s direct importing of minstrel dialogue for the black characters, and in its extra-literary performance life as a blackface show — no small matter given that, as Thomas Gossett has argued, for every person that actually read Stowe’s novel, roughly fifty saw the stage version. Robbins’s version does rely on the minstrelsy versions of Stowe’s novel in ways other than in the retention of Topsy’s line: the addition of bloodhounds who pursue Eliza across the Ohio river, and the concentration of the novel into her escape call to mind the draconian and mercurial editorial practices that characterized nineteenth-century minstrelsy adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Significantly, Uncle Tom is barely present in The King and I, in which his story of martyrdom is rewritten as the reunion with Eliza after she escapes Simon Legree’s clutches. For a more detailed explanation of the adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the minstrelsy stage, see David Grimstead, “Uncle Tom from Page to Stage,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56.3 (1976); Barnard Hewitt’s red-baiting, “Uncle Tom and Uncle Sam,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37.1 (1951); Bruce McConachie, “H. J. Conway’s Dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Theatre Journal 34.2 (1982);
Thomas F. Gossett, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Play in the 1850’s,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 260–84.
For an example of one of the minstrelsy adaptations, see George Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Representative Plays by American Dramatists, Vol. 2, 1815–1858, ed. Montrose J. Moses (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964). Aiken’s version is the major surviving textual version of minstrelsy adaptation from the nineteenth century, the version that Stowe herself saw in 1853 (of which Lott and Gossett give accounts), and also from which the tradition of isolating Topsy’s line from her various misadventures with Miss Ophelia is drawn.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994);
David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002);
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1992).
Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” in Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001);
Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994);
Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Racism and Colonialism. (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–45.
For his account of British dominance of the Atlantic, Roach relies on J. S. Bromley, The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 6, The Rise of Great Britain and Russia, 1688–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Margaret Werry, “‘The Greatest Show on Earth:’ Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific,” Theatre Journal 57 (Autumn 2005): 355–82; 359.
Delber L. McKee, Chinese Exclusion and the Open Door Policy 1900–1906: Clashes Over China in the Roosevelt Era (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 17.
See also Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers (London: H. Hamilton, 1937).
On the mistaken notion of China’s market potential — a misapprehension that still drives US-China policy today — see Michael Schaller, The United States and China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
For a more detailed history of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company 1998) (especially the chapters “Gam Saan Haak” and “Ethnic Islands,” which deal primarily with the dynamics of Chinese exclusion; other chapters treat the exclusion of other Asian national groups);
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) (especially her chapter “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization”); and Palumbo-Liu, 1999 (especially “Pacific America”).
Hallet Abend, “Chiang Plans to Attack North: American Guard in Action, Turns Machine Guns on Bandits who Fire on Standard Oil,” New York Times, 19 February 1930: 8; Anonymous, “Bandits Terrorize Interior of China,” New York Times, 9 February 1930: 8; Anonymous, “Bandit Gangs Ravage Chinese Provinces,” New York Times, 16 February 1930: E8; C. Martin Wilbur, The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The oil boats were particular targets of anti-foreign attack for both strategic and symbolic reasons, as companies like Standard Oil had been one of the first American companies to attempt commercial penetration of China. Its head had been the first chair of the American Asiatic Society, a group established specifically to engineer US economic dominance in China, and an influential proponent of the “Five-Hundred Million Market” theory. See Crow (1937) and Schaller (1990).
See Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1985).
E. Franklin Frazier, “Some effects of the depression on the Negro in Northern Cities,” in Black Communities and Urban Development in America 1720–1990, Vol. 6, Depression, War, and the New Migration, 1930–1960, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 18.
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University California Press, 1996).
George Lipsitz, “‘Frantic to Join … the Japanese Army’: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia-Pacific War,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 353–4; Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds, The Afro-Asian Century, special issue: Positions: East Asia cultures critique 11.1 (2003).
Research on black-Asian racial interactions and formations has expanded at a rapid pace during the last decade, from the conferences hosted by Boston University’s African American Studies Department (2002, 2003, 2004), to special issue editions on AfroAsian studies in Souls: A critical journal of Black politics, culture, and society (2002) and Positions: East Asia cultures critique (2003), to the numerous essays and books generated by scholars across a number of disciplines. For a partial bibliography of AfroAsian studies see: Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, Politics, History (New York: New York University Press, 2006);
Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds, Afro/Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African-Americans and Asian-Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds., The Afro-Asian Century, special issue: Positions: East Asia cultures critique 11.1 (2003); Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 4 (2002);
Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002);
Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” in Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001);
Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001);
Claire Jean Kim and Taeku Lee, “Interracial Politics: Asian Americans and Other Communities of Color,” Political Science & Politics 34.3 (Sept. 2001): 631–7;
Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000);
Marc Gallichio, The African American Encounter With China and Japan: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
Kwang Chung Kim, ed., Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1999);
Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1.4 (Fall 1999): 6–41;
Reginald Kearney, Africann American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998);
Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994);
Yuri Kochiyama, “The Impact of Malcolm X on Asian-American Politics and Activism,” in Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Urban America: Status and Prospect for Politics and Activism, ed. James Jennings (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994);
Sumi Cho, “Korean Americans vs. African Americans: Conflict and Construction,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Lisa Ikemoto, “Traces of the Master Narrative in the Story of African American/Korean American Conflict: How We Constructed ‘Los Angeles,’” Southern California Law Review 66 (1993): 1581–98;
Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112.
There is, of course, much debate over this definition of performance within performance studies. Ever since Peggy Phelan’s famous declaration in Unmarked that “the ontology of performance is its disappearance,” there has been some debate over the assumptions of her argument. Philip Auslander, for example, has asked compelling questions about what forms of performance we exclude when we take her claims about the ephemeral nature of performance as axiomatic, arguing that several popular culture forms (for example early film, television, pop music) are dependent on the conventions of live performance for their own legibility. Moreover, the circulation of these forms through what Walter Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction” and what we now experience as “digital reproduction” in no way diminishes the experience of these forms as performance by the audiences that view them. For that reason, although I focus primarily on live performances in this project, I also include film in some examples, although film is not my primary focus. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1992),
and Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).
See, for example, Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995);
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blabckness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2003);
Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Blackface to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993);
William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003);
Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t : Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 205.
E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 50.
See both versions of this story, revolving around the Lady Sonn Klean, who is an early favorite of the King, but who has fallen into disregard. Her story becomes conflated with Tuptim’s in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, although the episode in which she frees her slaves under the influence of Stowe’s novel is left out of the 1946 film version with Irene Dunn and Rex Harrison altogether. See Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (London: The Folio Society, 1980), 248–9; and the Margaret Landon adaptation which formed the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in which Lady Klean doesn’t release her slaves, but does take on Stowe’s name in her correspondence with Anna: Anna and the King of Siam (New York: John Day, 1944), 229.
“The Wonderful Leaping Fish” was Henry James’s irritated moniker for Stowe’s novel, based on its ubiquitous cultural presence. Eric Lott argues that the stage adaptations wedded two already popular performance genres — minstrelsy and melodrama — to produce a new cultural institution so wildly popular that it confounded writers (such as James) and politicians (Abraham Lincoln, who apocryphally attributed the US Civil War to Uncle Tom’s Cabin) alike. See Lott, “Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production” in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 211–33.
See Richard Martin and Harold Koda, Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 28.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993);
Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism (New York: Oxford, 1994).
Siyuan Liu, “The Impact of Shinpa on Early Chinese Huaju,” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (Fall 2006), 342–63; 345.
“Hon’anmono (adapted foreign tales) served Meiji authors as a mutable lens whereby they could reexamine the foreign, revising, even appropriating, the texts as familiar Japanese images.” J. Scott Miller, Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 11–12.
Quoted in Siyuan Liu, “Adaptation as Appropriation: Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China,” Theatre Journal, 59 (2007), 411–29.
Siyuan Liu, The Impact of Japanese Shinpa on Early Chinese Huaju, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2006, 53–4.
Quoted in R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds, Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 79.
Colin Mackerras, “Tradition, Change, and Continuity in Chinese Theatre in the Last Hundred Years: In Commemoration of the Spoken Drama Centenary,” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 1–23; 3.
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© 2010 Shannon Steen
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Steen, S. (2010). How Uncle Tom’s Cabin Killed the King of Siam. In: Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297401_1
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