Focusing on Thomas Burke's bestselling collection of short stories, "Limehouse Nights" (1916), this book contextualises the burgeoning cult of Chinatown in turn-of-the-century London. London's 'Chinese Quarter' owed its notoriety to the Yellow Perilism that circulated in Britain at the fin-de-siecle, a demonology of race and vice masked by outward concerns about degenerative metropolitan blight and imperial decline. Anne Witchard's interdisciplinary approach enables her to displace the boundaries that have marked Chinese studies, literary studies, critiques of Orientalism and empire, gender studies, and diasporic research, as she reassesses this critical moment in London's history. In doing so, she brings attention to Burke's hold on popular and critical audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. A much-admired and successful author in his time, Burke in his Chinatown stories destabilizes social orthodoxies in highly complex and contradictory ways. For example, his writing was formative in establishing the 'queerspell' that the very mention of Limehouse would exert on the public imagination, and circulating libraries responded to Burke's portrayal of a hybrid East End where young Cockney girls eat Chow Mein with chopsticks in the local cafes and blithely gamble their housekeeping money at Fan Tan by banning Limehouse Nights. Witchard's book forces us to rethink Burke's influence and shows that China and chinoiserie served as mirrors that reveal the cultural disquietudes of western art and culture.
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Anne Witchard is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Westminster, UK.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Paul
Format:Hardcover
Witchard's book is a wonderfully fascinating trip back to the world of old Limehouse - both as it really was and how it was represented in literature and film. Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights is, to us these days, problematic but still an interesting read. Witchard puts his creation of a hyperrealised Chinatown in the East End into context. Limehouse is changed beyond recognition now but with this book I captured a little of the tastes and smells of London's old Chinatown.
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