Yellow Peril

From invading hordes to enemy agents, a great fear haunts the West! The “yellow peril” is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia. Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema. The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, then considers later films such as Shanghai Express, Madame Butterfly, and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now. Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.

An entirely new perspective on current scaremongering about China’s global ambitions, and on the Western media’s ignorance of Chinese culture A hundred years ago, a character who was to enter the bloodstream of 20th-century popular culture made his first appearance in the world of literature. In his day he became as well known as Count Dracula or Sherlock Holmes: he was the evil genius called Dr. Fu Manchu, described at the beginning of the first story in which he appeared as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.” Why did the idea that the Chinese were a threat to Western civilization develop at precisely the time when China was in chaos, divided against itself, the victim of successive famines and utterly incapable of being a “peril” to anyone even if it had wanted to be? Even the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu novels, Sax Rohmer, acknowledged that China, “as a nation possess that elusive thing, poise.” And what do the Chinese themselves make of all this? Is it any wonder that they remember what we have carelessly forgotten–the opium wars; the “unfair treaties” that ceded Hong Kong and the New Territories; and the stereotyping of Chinese people in allegedly factual studies? Here cultural historian Christopher Frayling takes us to the heart of popular culture in the music hall, pulp literature, and the mass-market press, and shows how film amplifies our assumptions.

China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions worldwide. Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple. The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection—experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise—offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia. Contributors: Christos Lynteris David Walker Kevin Carrico Magnus Fiskesjö Romain Dittgen Ross Anthony Xiaojian Zhao Yu Qiu

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.

"This timely book reveals how the increase in traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" beginning in the late nineteenth century, when mass quantities of nursery stock and other agricultural products were shipped from large, corporate nurseries in Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Jeannie Shinozuka marshals extensive research to explain how the categories of "native" and "invasive" defined groups as bio-invasions that must be regulated-or somehow annihilated-during a period of American empire-building. Shinozuka shows how the modern fixation on foreign species provided a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that gained ground in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia fed concerns about biodiversity, and in turn facilitated the implementation of plant quarantine measures while also valuing, and devaluing, certain species over others. The emergence and rise of economic entomology and plant pathology alongside public health and anti-immigration movements was not merely coincidental. Ultimately, what this book unearths is that the inhumane and unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II cannot, and should not, be disentangled from this longer history"--