Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health and professor of English, presented a paper November 8, 2019 at the American Studies Association Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.
In her paper, titled “Unsettled Transits: Chinese Bodies in Edith Eaton’s Railway Travelogue,” Tuttle presented her ongoing research on Eaton, a Eurasian writer whose portrayals of Chinese immigrants in California countered attitudes and policies that were Sinophobic (that is, demonstrating opposition or hostility to the people, policies, culture, or politics of China) and that fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Tuttle’s work seeks to reframe studies of California’s place in the American imagination at the turn of the 20th century, not as the final destination of westward conquest, but as a porous site of cultural exchange looking east from the Pacific world.
