ABSTRACT
According to Amy Kaplan, the nineteenth century was marked by a discourse of “manifest domesticity,” a double signifier which not only linked “the space of the familial household to that of the nation” but which was also “related to the imperial project of civilizing” (2002: 25)—both within the borders of the nation and beyond. “Domestication,” she argues, “implies that the home contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed” (Kaplan 2002: 25–6). Over the course of the twentieth century, the ‘Victorian’ rhetoric of the American civilizing project was slowly and gradually replaced by modern, more subtle formulas to discipline both the self and the community. Focusing on the changing representation of Donaldina McKenzie Cameron, a well-known Presbyterian missionary in San Francisco’s Chinatown around the turn of the nineteenth century until the 1930s, this chapter identifies turning points in the rhetoric of the twentieth-century ‘civilizing project’ and analyzes how those changes corresponded with representations of the famous Chinese quarter.
