Caroline H. Yang

Caroline H. Yang received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, Boston College, and the University of Washington, Seattle, respectively. Before coming to UMass, she was an assistant professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a visiting fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. She is the author of The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Minstrel Form and the Chinese Worker in American Literature, which focuses on blackface minstrelsy as a US cultural institution that played a crucial role in literary representations of the Chinese during and after Reconstruction. She is currently working on a second book project titled The Korean War in Black America.

Book:
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form. Stanford University Press, 2020.

Peer Reviewed Articles/Essays:
•  “‘You’re not even a real human woman’: Contrarecognition and Black Women’s Epistemologies in Gayl Jones’s The Healing.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, 13, no. 2 (2024): 155–174.

•  “Imagining Freedom in Slavery’s Future: Iron City’s Fugitive Othertime in the U.S. Carceral 
Empire-State.” American Quarterly, 75, no. 4 (2023): 731–752.
    
•  “Multi-Ethnic Fictions of the US Empire: Why Read Twentieth-century African American and 
Asian American Novels Together?” A Companion to the Multiethnic Literature of the United States, edited by Gary Totten (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023): 199–209.

•  “Scenes of Slavery and the ‘Chinee’ in Uncle Remus and a Minstrel Picture Book.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 3.1, Article 4, Special Issue on Minstrelsy and Racist Appropriation in Youth Literature and Culture, guest edited by Brigitte Fielder and Katrina Phillips (2021). 

•  “Bret Harte’s ‘Heathen Chinee’ in US Literature after Slavery.” Asian American Literature in Transition Volume I (1850-1930), edited by Julia H. Lee and Josephine Park (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 156–170.

•  “Slavery in Sui Sin Far’s Early Fictions.” Journal of Asian American Studies, 22.2 (June 2019): 207–234.

•  “The Asian-Owned Store and the Incommensurable Histories of War in Narratives of the City.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 43.2 (June 2018): 172-195. Winner of the 2018 Katharine Newman Best Essay Award

•  “Indispensable Labor: The Chinese Worker as a Category of Analysis in China Men.” Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010): 63-89.
 

•  African, African American, & African Diaspora Studies
•  Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies
•  Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies
•  American Literature
•  Gender and Sexuality Studies
•  Theory and Cultural Studies
•  Colonial, Postcolonial, & Transnational Studies
•  20th Century and Contemporary Literature