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The History of the World travels from East to West for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the Beginning (Hegel, 1956, p. 103).In 1721 Christian Wolff gave a lecture on Confucius at Halle...

Anti-Asian xenophobia and discriminatory acts against Asian Americans have increased significantly as the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spread across the US. But connections between diseases, racis...

This article explores how racial prejudice in the West forms at least part of the ideational foundation in how the rise of China has been perceived, and how such racial prejudices to some extent in...

Over the past several years there have been a number of racially-tinged incidents in South Africa involving ‘the Chinese.’ Simultaneously, the love affair between Chinese and South African governme...

Equal opportunity is elusive to Japanese Americans in Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride (1987) due to explicit anti-Asian acts during the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States. As a re...

The emergence of COVID-19, or the Coronavirus, has sparked a wave of anti-Asian attacks around the world. The cultural logic that does not distinguish among Asian cultural and ethnic groups, as wel...

How do understandings of China emerge in the U.S., where racial paradigms rooted in orientalism and Yellow Peril frameworks collide with newer discourses of China’s rise? And how does the presence ...

Using contemporary science fiction as a barometer, we can see the African imaginary to be seemingly preoccupied with the idea of China and with forecasting various dystopian scenarios regarding the...

South Asians, despite their positioning as a “model minority,” have not been immune from the consequences of the heightened racist and nationalist rhetoric witnessed lately in the United St...

Chinese are often said to ‘self-segregate’ in Africa. Chinese ethnocentricity is typically offered as an explanation for the putative non-interaction. Meanwhile Chinese are not compared to other no...

Print media has had a profound impact on shaping conservative ideology, political practice, and racial boundary making. While scholarship on US conservatism contributes important elements of its ec...

As an outcome of the dialectical narrative of European superiority in the nineteenth century (expressed in racial terms), the military and economic development of Japan and China created anxieties ...

One of the most compelling qualities of Melbourne artist Eugenia Lim's Yellow Peril is its multi-layeredness. Lim's aesthetically precise, conceptually rich project explores complex histories and c...

An old paper lantern is hung on a dying tree at a temple graveyard —a quintessential image of Japanese ghost stories. Suddenly that paper lantern breaks into half and turns into a scary face of the...

Historically, Asians have been defined by a range of negative and positive images that include the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, and the model minority. However, the negative images have been slowly and robustly replaced with ones that portray Asian Americans as high achievers, smart, and a model – especially when compared to other students of color. For many Asian American students, ‘smartness’ as a cultural practice and an imposed attribute has become synonymous with whiteness – impacting their academic, social, cultural, and language identities. Utilizing reflexive ethnography, I share what I name ‘cultural wealth as smartness’ as a Vietnamese refugee student growing up in a predominantly white community and the cultural capital gained and lost as a result. This article provides a counter-narrative to the Asian American experience and the deficit assumptions imposed upon immigrant families in the US.

Focusing on Guy Maddin's 2002 film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, this essay argues that by rejecting Hollywood's iconic images of Dracula in favor of a silent, montage-heavy ballet performance film, Maddin calls attention to the exclusion of Dracula's own perspective from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. As a result, Maddin makes parallels between Dracula's otherness and a multicultural Canada attempting to navigate American media influence. In addition, Maddin's casting of a member of Canada's largest minority group as Dracula allows the film to investigate identity constructions of Asian-Canadians, founded on the nation's relationship to its indigenous populations and molded by American categorizations such as ‘yellow peril’. Through the film's embrace of silent film esthetics, Maddin denies not only Dracula but also the entire Canadian cast a voice, probing the definition of settler colonials who must contend with the lingering ramifications of British colonialism, their complicity in indigeno...

This study examines the evolution of yellow peril tropes in a subset of US political discourse by conducting a close textual analysis of Mitt Romney’s rhetoric during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. I argue that Romney revised yellow peril tropes of the Chinese as immoral, ruthless scapegoats to construct China as an economic yellow peril. In turn, the threat posed by this peril is augmented by Romney’s use of anti-communist tropes, which draw upon deeply entrenched Cold War fears to position the United States and China as adversaries. This project provides insight into the functions of anti-China appeals in U.S. presidential campaign discourse.

This article examines the work of a forgotten novelist, Anne Duffield, whose early novels set in China merit re-examination. Utilizing but also subverting the romance novel formula and alert to the utopian appeal of entertainment, Duffield’s The Lacquer Couch and Lantern-Light create a dream of China that invites intercultural connection, friendship and understanding. As China in the 1920s was rocked by anti-foreigner violence, the vision of these two novels was an appealing and hopeful alternative to the resurgent fears of malevolent fiends reminiscent of an earlier ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse. In addition, Duffield’s China, though romanticized, is also a modern and cosmopolitan one—an important counter to a tendency to imagine China as antiquated and entombed in the past.

The Yellow Peril! … The peace of the world is at stake.—Sax Rohmer 1913, The Insidious Dr. Fu ManchuOur inner lives are something we ignore at our own peril.—The 14th Dalai Lama 2011, 75, Beyond Religion: Ethics for the Whole WorldThis essay is concerned with the contemporary convergence of Western and Eastern metaphysical paradigms as witnessed in and expressed through detective fiction written by Western writers, but with settings in, and influenced by, historically Buddhist cultures of East and Southeast Asia. The essay argues that the traditional Western detective fiction novel is symptomatic of a scientific-materialist mindset that has reached an existential dead end with its loss of faith in the possibility of self-transcendence, a mindset that has become trapped in a deterministic world in which evil and violence, perpetually arising, inducing guilt, require perpetual dissipation and solution. In their various manners, each of the three novelists discussed in the essay puts forward the Buddhistical...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries China’s Qing dynasty was falling, the Australian colonies were united as a Federation, and New Zealand was beginning to assert its own national ...

In this book, University of Texas professor of history Madeline Y. Hsu states that her aim is to trace events in international politics and fiscal considerations as forces which propelled shifts in...

The active movement of the Russian Empire to the East for three centuries and its colossal success led to the need for some Russian thinkers and publicists to analyze this unique phenomenon as part of the general European colonial ‘movement’ to the East. The problem became more relevant than ever after the Sino-Japanese war (1894–1895), when the expansion of Russia to the East intensified, and all the world powers started to formulate their interests in China. Conflicts with and around China among these countries became widespread. Here the Russian press played a great role, accompanying and commenting on each step made by Russian diplomats and military. The discussions gradually highlighted two different problems. These were the ideas of ‘yellow peril’ and ‘Russia’s special mission in the East’.

Mayer is the Chair in American Studies at Leibniz University, and her book is a timely entry into the opening field of Yellow Peril studies, with other recent texts on the subject including John Ku...

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.

Present study critically investigates the cinematic depiction of leading Chinese masculine figures in Hollywood film productions, with a specific focus on how the positioning of white female characters romantically involved with Chinese martial arts fighters serves to construct Chinese masculinity. In noted films such as The Tuxedo (2002), Kiss of the Dragon (2001), and Dragon: Bruce Lee Story (1993), Chinese martial arts fighters not only managed to fight off white antagonists but also succeeded in winning the ‘heart’ of white heroines. Drawing on Gestner's theoretical assertion that white women's falling for a man of color signifies the invasive movement of a new masculine discourse into the space traditionally bounded by the ideal of white masculinity, and grounded on Hall's conception of articulation, my critical examination of these three film texts revealed how the privileged cultural and racial position of whiteness was reformulated and rejustified via the strategic dramatic construction of romanti...

In 1980 a large yellow steel sculpture by the Australian sculptor Ron Robertson-Swann was installed in the City Square in Melbourne, Australia. Commissioned by the Melbourne City Council, the sculpture attracted enormous media scrutiny and its tenure in the Square was a regular agenda item on City Council meetings from the time that a maquette of the proposed work was first displayed. Over the next 20 years the sculpture, later named Vault, was twice dismantled and reassembled at other sites. In this article I approach the sculpture through an object-oriented method, one that attributes agency to the human and nonhuman actors in these events. In so doing I seek to locate what Bruno Latour might have described as the “hidden geographies” of the sculpture. This close examination of the life of the work, and the many and varied interactions with the sculpture on the part of the people of Melbourne, demonstrates how Vault far exceeded Robertson-Swann's intentions for it.

Chinese emigrants or kakyō occupy an important but little acknowledged niche in the history of modern Japan. They mediated Japan's relations with China and the West in the Meiji period, they competed against Japanese economic interests in Korea before and after it became a Japanese colony, and they were a controversial source of labour for the Japanese economy. This article recovers the history of Chinese migrants in Japan and Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century paying special attention to the ambivalent Japanese attitude toward them. This study not only contributes to a fuller understanding of modern Japanese history but also offers historical insights into Japan-China relations in the twenty-first century as Chinese migration to Japan again causes public concern.

The World War II combat film Bataan depicts the Japanese "yellow peril" enemy not only as hostile to both white and black Americans, but as even more racist to blacks than white Americans, displacing the history of white racism towards blacks onto the Asian enemy.

The female body and the social constructions that define it, can literally be “read’ in fiction and non-fiction, and in a genre which combines elements of both literary styles: the biographical nov...

In a series of lectures on Nietzsche delivered in 1940, Heidegger enumerates the varieties of ‘consciously posited bindings’ that in the modern age secure for ‘mankind’ the possibility of its ‘abso...

A strong characteristic of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s was its fascination with all things “oriental,” or generally exotic. It was expressed in a multitude of areas, including furniture, fashion, movies and architecture. It was also evident in quiltmaking, an extremely popular pastime of the era, in the preponderance of patchwork patterns that had an exotic theme or name. Sometimes the designs of these patterns directly reflected their exotic names; most often they did not. The reasons for the popularity of exotic pattern names are varied. Certainly, pattern designers were capitalizing on the fashion for anything oriental. But, as this paper will propose, ladies' magazine publishers and quilt column writers also were reacting to Americans' ambivalence about Asians—their fear of the “yellow peril” mixed with their admiration for Eastern design. By naming and renaming patterns and, more importantly, by mixing oriental, “colonial,” and modern imagery and verbiage, they diluted the...

The model minority stereotype is viewed as the most influential and pervasive stereotype for Asian Americans today. In this article, the author argues that this seemingly positive stereotype, the m...

(2001). Frankenstein, racial science, and the yellow peril. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-28.

For a self-proclaimed summary and synthesis of the existing literature on Chinese New Zealand, White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 covers an impressive amount of terrain. By...

Chinese men were brought to New Guinea initially by the German New Guinea Company as labourers on plantations. The climate, harsh working conditions and disease reduced their numbers drastically. The sporadic flow of labourers soon stopped, but Chinese were brought to New Guinea by the Company and — later — by the German Administration as artisans and domestic servants. Most returned to China but some remained to become small traders. Hard work and determination to succeed saw many become a threat to European, enterprises. The German and subsequently Australian Administrations were urged to restrict their entry and control their enterprises. At the same time European attitudes prevalent in Southeast Asian colonies were transplanted to New Guinea. Chinese were seen as desirable, if not essential, but were kept at a social level between local villagers and the colonisers. Their status was clearly shown when European, but not Chinese, women and children were evacuated at the threat of Japanese invas...