Becoming Yellow

The story of how East Asians became "yellow" in the Western imagination—and what it reveals about the problematic history of racial thinking In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase "yellow peril" at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow. Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

The WWII Soviet guerilla training manual that became an essential text for freedom fighters across the globe—complete with illustrations. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II, the Red Army began recruiting local partisans to help mount a resistance. This edition of The Partisan’s Companion is the last and best Red Army manual used to train these men to fight Nazi invaders. Besides field craft, it covers partisan tactics, German counter-guerrilla tactics, demolitions, German and Soviet weapons, scouting, camouflage, anti-tank warfare, and antiaircraft defense for squad and platoon-level instruction. It contains the Soviet lessons of two bitter years of war and provides a good look at the tactics and training of a mature partisan force. While this handbook was a vital part of Soviet victory over the Nazis, its usefulness outlived the Second World War. It was later used to train guerrilla groups in the developing world during their wars of national liberation in the 1950s–70s. Even the fedayeen guerrillas who fought US and coalition forces in Iraq relied on this manual for training, tactics, and general approach to combat. A selection of the Military Book Club.