Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy professor of Literature and Health in the University of New England School of Arts and Humanities and 2021-2022 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will present at the upcoming American Literature Association (ALA) Conference in Boston, to be held July 8-10.
At the conference, Tuttle will present "Writing the Rails in Edith Eaton's West." The talk considers Edith Eaton's 1904 serial travelogue, "Wing Sing of Los Angeles on His Travels," published in the California promotional newspaper the Los Angeles Express.
Eaton herself traveled the route followed by the pseudonymous Wing Sing: north to Canada, east to Montreal, south to New York, and west to Seattle, a journey undertaken in the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act and in a period of rampant Sinophobia.
Tuttle explores how Eaton, sending dispatches from the train and writing as a Chinese merchant, transforms the railway from an instrument of colonization and white supremacy to a vehicle for reclaiming the humanity of Chinese immigrants in North America.
The presentation previews an essay that Tuttle will publish later this year in "The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West."
