Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture

Description

Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker have fascinated the world since the nineteenth century. In her captivating book, Chang and Eng Reconnected, Cynthia Wu traces the 'original Siamese twins' through the terrain of American culture, showing how their inseparability underscored tensions between individuality and collectivity in the American popular imagination. Using letters, medical documents and exhibits, literature, art, film, and family lore, Wu provides a trans-historical analysis that presents the Bunkers as both a material presence and as metaphor. She also shows how the twins figure in representations of race, disability, and science in fictional narratives about nation building. As astute entrepreneurs, the twins managed their own lives; nonetheless, as Chang and Eng Reconnected shows, American culture has always viewed them through the multiple lenses of difference. Pt. 1. Material traces in the archive Labor and ownership in the American South Solving the mystery of their union Strange Incursions into medical science at the Mutter Museum Pt. 2. Reading literature and visual cultures Late-nineteenth-century visions of conflict and consensus Asian Americans bare/bear the hyphen Disciplining and normalizing the woman subject in contemporary literature and film Pt. 3. Observing and participating Our esteemed ancestors Epilogue - Alone or Together? Notes Index