This book is a collection designed to gather together, for the first
time, a conceptually wide and historically deep array of primary texts
which demonstrate Euroamerican attitudes toward the Chinese. Among the
many cultural artifacts generated by this encounter were plays written
by Euroamericans which contained one or more representations of the
Chinese. It would be reductive to say that such portrayals show merely
the racism of a dominant culture toward a distinctive and different
minority. Racism is of course present, sometimes of the coarsest and
crudest sort; but other themes appear in the many dramatic portrayals of
the Chinese as well, such as toleration, exoticism, and even
idealization. The book is intended for scholars, graduate students and
undergraduate students in the field of theatre, cultural studies,
nineteenth-century studies, and Asian-American studies.