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Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures
Eric Hayot, Associate Professor, Dept. of English, Univ. of Arizona; Global Fellow, International Institute, UCLA
April 26, 2007

Why did the coolie's body speak so relentlessly to the American nineteenth century of its future? And how did its loquacious, obscene ventriloquism shape the imaginary scaffolding of America's utopias, its science fictions? I propose some answers to these questions via a reading Arthur Vinton's Looking Further Backward (1890), one of the first American novels to imagine a Chinese military invasion of the United States.