Yunte Huang

Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

Sprache: Englisch.
gebunden , 416 Seiten
ISBN 0871404478
EAN 9780871404473
Veröffentlicht April 2018
Verlag/Hersteller Liveright Publishing Corporation
29,50 inkl. MwSt.
Lieferbarkeit unbestimmt (Versand mit Deutscher Post/DHL)
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Beschreibung

Twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Yunte Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen.
Their rise from freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves is here not just another sensational biography but an excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannising the "other"-a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

Portrait

Yunte Huang, a Guggenheim Fellow, has taught at Harvard and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English. The author of the Edgar Award-winning biography Charlie Chan and Inseparable, both NBCC finalists, Huang speaks frequently about American popular culture.