https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/splitting-hairs/
"As the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and his team worked to
construct the Statue of Liberty in the early 1880s, a brash illustrated
newspaper thousands of miles away envisioned what the equivalent statue might
look like if it were located in the bay of San Francisco instead. This mockup,
published on
The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp’s back cover in 1881, shared
some elements with Bartholdi’s final design; both featured a single figure
standing on top of a tall pedestal, draped in layers of loose fabric, with one
arm aloft. There was, however, one major difference: Wasp cartoonist Thomas
Keller fashioned his central figure not as an allegorical female symbolic of
liberty, but as a Chinese male.
The most distinctive feature of the figure at the center of Keller’s design is
his hair, which unfurls high above his left shoulder, curving through the air
like a snake through sand. This is a queue: the long, braided, black ponytail
that had been mandated by China’s Qing government for men of Han ethnicity
since the seventeenth century. During the nineteenth century, most Chinese
immigrants to the United States were Han men who wore queues. By the time this
cartoon appeared in the
San Francisco Wasp, the queue had become the subject
of white Americans’ fascination, disgust, and even regulation: for example, an
1876 San Francisco law, which required all men sent to the county jail to have
their hair shorn to a length of one inch, was overturned three years later by a
federal circuit court. Despite its purportedly race-neutral language, the law
so transparently targeted Chinese men that, the court ruled, it violated the
equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. By the
1880s, the queue had become not just synonymous with Chinese people in America,
but — like the Statue of Liberty herself — symbolic of broader conversations
about American citizenship and belonging."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ****
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
