“FEW AMERICANS know the history of the Chinese in the Deep South. In colonial times, China was a distant source of material goods for Americans (tea, silk, porcelain), but after the Civil War, Chinese male workers were recruited to the South to fill the labor vacuum”
“They came to pick cotton in place of former slaves, or to build infrastructure. By the 1870s, in the Mississippi Delta, many of these Chinese immigrants, resistant to the exploitation of indentured labor, left plantation labor to open family-run grocery stores that largely served the Black community.”
“Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, set in the Jim Crow South of 1932, references not only this little-known history of Asians in the United States but also the larger, multiracial, and multiracially mediated landscape of the Mississippi Delta”
“The film itself is a testament to boundary and genre crossing: a vampire movie that aspires to be a musical, a Western set in the Deep South, a frontier story where the “cowboys” are Black and Brown”
“the early Chinese in the American South, merchants and laborers alike, lived in the cracks of a segregated system designed for Blacks and whites, maligned by whites who found them subhuman and resented by Blacks who saw them as competition. They took jobs that white men were unwilling to do. They socialized within their small communities and only ventured out to places they knew were safe. They were cognizant of their precarious position in the Black-white schism and survived on tenterhooks of uncertainty, mostly ignored, barely tolerated, and always on the edge of being victims of violence”
“Lisa running between her two parents and their stores plays out like the daily shuttling between “Black” and “white” that Asians in the United States have always had to navigate, the Scylla and Charybdis between which all immigrants have had to pass. Even without vampires, Smoke and Stack’s dream of running a Black-owned business in the heart of the segregated South is wildly ambitious and precarious”
“We might see Coogler’s barn—a light box itself—as a salve to what Get Out’s Jordan Peele had called the “Sunken Place” (the dark, silent crypt that traps the Black subject), an alternative space of fierce Black celebration in the provisionally safe enclosure of the barn-turned-community”
“Freedom in a segregated world is only possible and felt in the moment, can only be prospective in this world of Afro-Asian pessimism—a world, in short, that has no place for people of color”
“Freedom in such a world of unfreedom can only live within the brief duration of the aspirational that existed when Smoke and Stack had a vision; when they had the hope, in spite of both paranoia and perspicacity, of a community-to-be; when the dream of a future could be held in the mind, suspended between pastness and (no) future”