MCLC: Have they run out of provinces yet (1)

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Have they run out of provinces yet (1)
I think Timothy Yu makes some valid points about Calvin Trillin’s poem, especially the way it constructs “they” and “we”.   However, I note that Yu refers to Bret Harte’s poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” (a.k.a. “The Heathen Chinee”) as “one of the iconic anti-Chinese poems of the nineteenth century.”   Surely the point of Harte’s poem is that it is a satirical attack on the anti-Chinese prejudices which Yu rightly states were widespread in America at the time?   The narrative voice in the poem is indeed racist, but the narrator is not the poet, and indeed the narrator is the butt of the satire.
As someone currently writing a book on satire, I am interested in ways in which satire is understood or misunderstood.   Harte’s poem was certainly taken at face value by contemporaries who failed to get the satirical point, and Yu is correct in noting that “it was later taken up by others as a rallying cry of racism.”
I would be very interested in any comments other list-members may have.
Yours sincerely,
John Gilmore <J.T.Gilmore at warwick.ac.uk>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 16, 2016
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