Feeling Invaded

摘要

In 1882 Chinese workers were excluded from entering the United States. This law was effectively not repealed until 1965. Reinforcing this institutional racism was a visual fearscape of monstrous caricatures created by an Anglo-American culture of shared antipathy and a common public feeling of a "Mongolian" threat. Ever since the American Civil War, political cartoonists working for illustrated weeklies have narrated the politics of belonging, rights to happiness, and what whiteness might mean. The concept of "manifest design" is evocative here: manifest, as in a faith in the "manifest destiny" of Anglo-American occupation of the New World by divine right; design, as in the applied aesthetic sense of spatially translating the US Constitution and its adapted Lockean formulation of a male citizenry qualified by 'life, liberty, and property." Design, in this sense, was realized as a mapping of property, and visualizing who counted and who didn't. Founding father and Louisiana territories expansionist Thomas Jefferson tweaked "property" into a more Protestant democratic ethic of "happiness," leaving unresolved if the former led to the latter. Later, President Andrew Jackson articulated ownership and "self-ownership" as the right of a Protestant, white republic. Cartoonists played out the future fiction of an invasion-conjuring widespread attacks on white property, and thus, happiness.