Engaging habits and besotted idolatry: viewing chinese religions in the american west

Abstract

Through an analysis of late-nineteenth century “Asian invasion” literature and periodicals of the American West, this article compiles Protestant representations of Chinese religious practice in America. In pulp fiction and studies published by Bret Harte in his Overland Monthly, white Americans translated the peculiarities of the Chinese Other into manageable symbols and narrative conventions. While these representations appear flagrantly racist and reductive, they also reveal a genuine struggle for interpretation and commensurability. However, most scholarship in religious studies addressing Asian American encounter emphasizes the elite enjoyment of Asian theological and philosophical documents, avoiding the messier moral viewpoints of these pastoral observers and urban American Christian missionaries. I suggest that focusing instead on popular images of Chinese religions allow us to begin to reconstruct a history of religious encounter that ushers us into a different material world, one that highlights the interaction of physical bodies, buildings, and artifacts in time and space. Unless we can rewrite that Euro-American history of encounter (and include the physical and material dimensions as part of the equation), and link it conceptually to the experiences of real Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans, the story of those lost voices will always remain an interesting sidelight to the main show.

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