(2015), Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War (2023), and Against Exclusion: Disrupting Anti-Chinese Violence in the Nineteenth Century (2024). She teaches literary theory and Asian American Literature at USNA. In her research, she is interested in Asian American intellectual history and wellness. She is currently the Book Reviews Editor of the Society for US Intellectual History. She has also published articles in Amerasia, The Asian American Literary Review, and Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies.
Clark applied the "Page 99 Test" to Against Exclusion and reported the following:
Page 99 of Against Exclusion uncannily exemplifies the crux of the book’s argument by falling on my analysis of Chinese American writer and editor Wong Chin Foo’s efforts to obstruct the 1892 Geary Act, one of the Chinese exclusion acts which required all Chinese to register with the possibility of imprisonment and deportation for undocumented immigrants. This page features Wong as a radical in contrast with his liberal counterparts in the book, Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing, who sought and received the help of William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. who links Black liberation to Asian American civil rights. This relation gets at the heart of the book, which contextualizes the driving-out era of Chinese Americans, which included lynching by rope and other methods, in the larger post-Civil War era of rampant African American lynchings. The book differentiates between the lynchings of African Americans and Asian Americans in the late nineteenth century as quotidian and exceptional, respectively, but both spectacular and part of the liberal state of exception which requires what Agamben calls a homo sacer, a killed but not sacrificed other. Against Exclusion is the first monograph that contextualizes the first Chinese American court cases of Ah Toy and Mary Tape and the autobiographies of Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing, which have been documented as the first Asian American literature, within the driving-out era of the 1870s and 1880s in which Chinese Americans were lynched or driven out of West coast cities in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado en masse. The violent expulsions led, in part, to the 1875 Page Act, which prevented the immigration of Chinese women on the premise that they were all prostitutes, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented the naturalization of Chinese immigrants, deeming then “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Surviving this period of rampant violence and legislated objectification, Ah Toy, Mary Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing “enfleshed” and humanized themselves through court cases and their autobiographies as acts of defiance and protest.Visit Audrey Wu Clark's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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