Mirror of self-consciousness: the 'Chinaman' in Oscar Wilde's identity politics

This essay situates Oscar Wilde's writings on Chinese people in the context of and against late Victorian imperial culture. The description of Chinese people by Wilde reflects the development of his identity politics of being both the coloniser and the colonised. His exclusion of the Chinese from 'beauty' in Oxford days implied a kind of English imperialist attitude, and his later admiration for the Chinese labourers in San Francisco signalled his warmer embrace of Irish national identity. It is suggested that the change of Wilde's attitude towards the Chinese people was associated with his thinking on his dual English and Celtic cultural identities. Wilde questioned the racial hierarchy of the empire and the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon. In his condemnation of the empire, Wilde used the Chinese coolies to revalue the 'superiority' defined by the imperialists and replaced the political, military and economic powers with the power of beauty.