[A couple
months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of
us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope
you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so
right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by
different layers to this phenomenal work!]
[NOTE: I
tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completely
be able to for the rest of the week. If you haven’t seen Sinners yet,
please do so and then come back to read this series!]
On a 1970s
book and 2010s article that help contextualize one of the film’s most unique
families.
In 1971,
the late, great historian and educator James
Loewen (whom I was profoundly proud to call a mentor and
friend after I landed him for the 2011 NEASA Conference keynote lecture) published
his first book, The
Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White. A revision of his Harvard
Sociology doctoral dissertation, if one no doubt significantly expanded after Loewen began teaching
at Mississippi’s historically black Tougaloo College, The Mississippi
Chinese utilizes both extensive interviews with current members of this
sizeable but often overlooked Mississippi community and historical
documentation of that community’s post-Civil War origins and growth over the
subsequent century. Although the exclusion of the community’s children from segregated
white schools was deemed Constitutional by the Supreme Court in Gong Lum v. Rice
(1927), Loewen makes a compelling case that this community were and are, his
title suggests, complicatedly located between the state and region’s two most prominent
racialized categories.
Loewen’s
book focuses on the Mississippi Chinese’s historical and sociological
realities, while the award-winning 2012 Philological
Quarterly article “The Foreigner
in Yoknapatawpha: Rethinking Race in the Global South,” authored by my college
friend and blog Guest
Poster Heidi Kim, is most interested in representations of this community,
especially in the fictions of Mississippi’s favorite literary son William Faulkner.
As Heidi describes her argument in that above hyperlinked summary, she both notes
“Faulkner’s extension of racial hysteria over miscegenation to include” the
Mississippi Chinese but also, and importantly, finds in his works “the
possibility of eventual social intermixture and inclusion in his American
South.” Which makes her argument at least roughly parallel to Loewen’s (if of
course informed by four decades’ worth of further research into this community
and its contexts) in seeing this community as part of its larger Mississippi
setting and society, yet also reflecting, in cultural works as well as in historical
and sociological realities, the possibility of something distinct within that
world.
It’s a
very nerdy thing to say, I realize, but nothing made me more excited while
watching Sinners (a competitive category I assure you) than realizing
that Coogler had included
the Mississippi Chinese among his central characters, with the family of
Grace Chow (Li Jun Li), her husband Bo (Yao), and their teenage daughter Lisa
(Helena Hu). As that hyperlinked Variety article highlights, Coogler has
familial connections to this community through his multiracial wife
Zinzi Evans, reminding us that, whatever the Supreme Court and other racist
entities might argue, all of these American communities are deeply intertwined in
our history and present alike. But in his representation of these Mississippi
Chinese characters, and especially in a long establishing shot early in the
film that takes audiences between the family’s two parallel grocery stores
located on the Black and white sides of Clarksdale’s main street, Coogler also
reveals his awareness of the community’s in-between status—and creates another
cultural work that, like Faulkner’s, illustrates while also ultimately
complicating that vision of the unique community known as the Mississippi
Chinese.
Next
SinnersStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
