| dc.description.abstract | Tea is one of the most popular and pervasive commodities: it has started wars and fuelled nations’ economies. Despite the brew’s longstanding presence and significance within U.S. society, it has been relatively unexplored by cultural historians of the United States. This thesis investigates the extent to which representations of tea in U.S. literature might provide an index of the exclusion of Chinese Americans from full participation in national life. Drawing on U.S. food and drink studies, diaspora studies, and critical race theory, this thesis argues that tea’s singular position within the United States has provided writers with a lens through which to portray, negotiate, and challenge Chinese American marginalisation from 1900 to 2020.
The study explores how tea signifies in works both sympathetic and hostile to Chinese Americans. It chronologically analyses well-known and obscure novels, autobiographies, plays, and short stories, beginning with tea scenes in early twentieth-century periodical fiction, and how such episodes either protest Chinese exclusion or support “yellow peril” fears. The thesis then considers how, in the 1930s and 1940s, when stereotypes of effeminate Chinese men were popular in pulp fiction, depictions of tea-drinking in autobiographical texts express patriarchy and women’s growing rejection of subjugation within Chinese American communities. The study moves on to examine the extent to which tea- drinking in novels portrays the relationship between ethnicity and masculine anxiety during the 1950s and 1960s. The final chapter investigates how, in novels published in the last quarter of the twentieth century, tea ceremonies present the importance of mother-daughter relationships in the development of Chinese American women’s self-care and sexuality. The study closes with a consideration of how tea in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy illustrates the interconnections between taste, wealth, and citizenship in the twenty first century. | en_GB |
