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Situated within comics and graphic life writing scholarship, this article examines the rhetoric of serially illustrating Chinese labour in David H.T. Wong’sEscape to Gold Mountain. It reads the alignment of dead, murdered, injured, and struggling Chinese labourers alongside Indigenous characters and Chinese North American trailblazers as part of the book’s commemorative impulse to memorialize these historical figures and relationships in the (trans)national imaginary. It also claims that the narrative’s rhetorical shifts, from satire to irony, melancholy to condemnation, all form an ethical appeal to the reader to remember and honour the lives and contributions of the Gold Mountain migrants when their presence in the visual and historical archive has been dehumanized by Yellow Peril discourses. However, the article concludes that Wong’s anti-racist memorial project also problematically reinvests in the model minority myth, indigenizes the figure of the Chinese labourer, and upholds a settler colonial relationship to the land.

Rohmer is often credited with the success of the ‘Yellow Peril’ school of mystery thrillers due to his most famous creation, the evil genius Fu Manchu. Rohmer was born as Arthur Henry Ward in Birmingham. His mother was an alcoholic whose deranged ramblings often included the claim that she was descended from the seventeenth-century Irish general Patrick Sarsfield. Rohmer later added the name Sarsfield to his own. In 1905 he met Rose Elizabeth Knox, and they married in 1909, staying together for the next fifty years.

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...

This paper focuses on how Japan was represented in the most popular Belgian comics at a particular period in time, right after the Second World War and just before the image of Japan as an economic superpower (that exported many commodities to Europe or the USA) became widespread from the 1960s on. Within the field of European comics, Belgian comics played a crucial role in the decades after the war with major artists such as Herge, Franquin, Jacobs, Vandersteen and many others. Moreover, the Belgian comics industry attracted many artists from other countries and exported her products to various countries (especially France). The comics published in dailies, journals and albums formed at that time an important means of entertainment for the youngsters (television started only in the 1950s in Belgium). Furthermore, the Belgian comics culture is interesting since it involves two different traditions: a French language one and a Dutch language one. In various stories, published between 1945 and 1960, we find representations of Japan. On the whole, two basic approaches of the Japanese Otherness stand out: - the “Yellow Peril”, strongly referring to the last World War (for instance Jacobs' Blake et Mortimer , Le Secret de l’espadon , Hubinon & Troisfontaines , Charlier's Buck Danny , Les Japs attaquent ). Usually these comics were drawn in a more realistic style. - the “touristic ancient or exotic Japan” without any reference to WWII (for instance Vandersteen Suske en Wiske , De Stemmenrover , Will & Ros y Tif et Tondu , Le Fantome du samourai ). Usually comics of this approach combine adventure and humour. The first kind of comics is typically for the comics produced in the first years after war, while the second kind is rather typical for the late 1950s. So, even in this brief period of 15 years already an important shift of the image of Japan is noticeable, from a belligerent enemy to an exotic and touristically interesting culture. The paper will offer a more detailed analysis of some examples and formulates some possible explanations for this shift.

Andrew explores the first appearances of boy detectives as assistants to adult professional detectives in the Harmsworths’ boys’ story papers of the 1890s and early 1900s. Examining the Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee series, the chapter considers how the adult master detectives’ civilisation of their boy assistants addresses and assuages anxieties about internal and external threats to the British Empire. Andrew links the representation of Nelson Lee’s street-urchin assistant, Nipper, to the emergence of the concept of adolescence and anxieties surrounding the threat of the “delinquent” adolescent and the “blind-alley” labourer. The chapter also explores how the Anglicisation of Sexton’s Blake’s Chinese boy assistant, We-wee, responds to the threat of the foreigner and, specifically, the “yellow peril” in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion.

The cliched 1930–1950 Western cinematic images of Shanghai as a fascinating den of iniquity, and, in contrast, as a beacon of modernity, were merged in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As a result, a new standard emerged in science fiction films for the representation of future urban conglomerates: the Asianized metropolis. The standard set by this film, of a dark dystopian city, populated by creatures of all races and genetic codes, will be adopted in most of the representations of future cities in non-Asian cinema. This article traces the representation of Shanghai in Western cinema from its earliest days (1932– Shanghai Express) through Blade Runner (1982) to the present (2013– Her). Shanghai, already in the early 1930s, sported extremely daring examples of modern architecture and, at the same time, in non-Asian cinema, was represented as a city of sin and depravity. This dualistic representation became the standard image of the future Asianized city, where its debauchery was often complemented by modernity; therefore, it is all the more seedy. Moreover, it is Asianized, the “Yellow Peril” incarnated in a new, much more subtle, much more dangerous way. As such, it is deserving of destruction, like Sodom and Gomorrah.

What images has U.S. popular culture deployed in representing Asian societies and religious life? How might U.S. popular culture call for new critical engagements of Edward Said’s theories, as in his Orientalism? In what manner do popular impressions of the Asian sage, such as the “icon of the Oriental Monk,” as Iwamura terms it, catalyze such old stereotypes as “the inscrutable Oriental, the evil Fu Manchus, Yellow Peril, heathen Chinese and Dragon Ladies?” More particularly, how was the Oriental Monk icon and his “spirituality” variously reconstituted by media treatments in the 25-year period marked, first, by D.T. Suzuki’s impact in the U.S. (1950–58), then by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1966–69), and the television series, Kung Fu (1972–75)? How might the Oriental Monk icon still be at work today in the kid-friendly

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

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...

Norbert Weiner, eminent professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), wrote an elegant but difficult treatise (probably “Generalized harmonic analysis” published in Acta Mathematica in 1930) that was the source of many doctoral theses in the 1940s-50s by his graduate students. The treatise was dubbed “the yellow peril” because it was first conceived on yellow foolscap and its complexity made approaching it like deciphering hieroglyphics. But after Claude Shannon and Norman Levinson developed heuristic simplifications of the material, a burgeoning number of PhDs followed, leading to the formation of the Geophysical Analysis Group (GAG) at MIT.

Introduction Albert Baiburin, Catriona Kelly, Nikolai Vakhtin 1. Writing the History of Russian Anthropology Sergei Sokolovsky 2. Female Taboos and Concepts of the Unclean among the Nenets. Elena Liarskaya 3. 'The Wrong Nationality': Ascribed Identity in the 1930s Soviet Union Albert Baiburin 4. The Queue as Narrative: A Soviet Case Study Konstantin Bogdanov 5. `I Didn't Understand, But It Was Funny': Late Soviet Festivals and their Impact on Children Catriona Kelly, Svetlana Sirotinina 6. The Practices of `Privacy' in a South Russian Village (a Case Study of Stepnoe, Krasnodar Region) Alexander Manuylov 7. Believers' Letters as Advertising: St Xenia of Petersburg's `National Reception Centre' Jeanne Kormina, Sergei Shtyrkov 8. `The Yellow Peril' as Seen in Contemporary Church Culture Mariya Akhmetova 9. `Don't Look at Them, They're Nasty': Photographs of Funerals in Russian Culture Olga Boitsova 10. Historical Zaryadye as Remembered by Locals: Cultural Meanings of City Spaces Pavel Kupriyanov. Lyudmila Sadovnikova 11. Yerevan: Memory and Forgetting in the Organization of Post-Soviet Urban Space Levon Abrahamian

Dr Fu Manchu – assassin for and later leader of the secret Si-Fan organisation – is one of the most enduring villains to emerge from the British popular fiction market. Featuring in Arthur Sarsfield Ward’s first fulllength novel about the Yellow Peril, The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1913), he rapidly established himself as an instantly recognisable fictional character. Defined by a perverted brilliance, a penchant for sadistic tortures, physical deformity, and feline characteristics, Fu Manchu amplified an established style in pulp villainy. With his satanic pets, exaggerated politeness, immoral use ofWestern science, and legions of willing slaves housed in underground lairs, Fu Manchu bequeathed a lasting legacy to depictions of the criminal mastermind in cinema and in popular

In Dr. No, Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel, Cold War hero James Bond must defeat the Cold War villain Doctor No and his Jamaican Chinese henchmen, who Fleming calls “Chinese Negroes” or the “Chigroes.” This article examines the characterization of hybridity as a threat to British purity and empire represented in Doctor No, who is of German and Chinese ancestry, and his mixed-race African, Chinese minions. Set in Jamaica, the novel, the sixth of the James Bond series, provides a fascinating, intimate portrait of pre-independence Kingston and Afro-Asian intimacies. Though the representation of these Afro-Asian intimacies are largely erased from the 1962 film, Dr. No, the first of the major James Bond movies, race is coded in various Orientalist forms, including yellowface. In many ways, both the novel and the film can be viewed as responses to the crisis of decolonization for Britain. The Chigroes and Doctor No come to represent a Black and Yellow Peril perhaps triggered by the Afro-Asian coalitions that were beginning to form at conferences such as Bandung in 1955 that threatened to decenter Europe.

Since her critical recovery in the early 1980s, Edith Maude Eaton has been celebrated as the first Asian North American writer and as an early, authentic Eurasian voice countering "yellow peril" discourse through sympathetic literary representations of diasporic Chinese subjects. Eaton, a half-Chinese, half-English writer who wrote under variants of the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, is best known for Mrs. Spring Fragrance, her 1912 collection of Chinatown stories, and for the stories and uncollected journalism reissued in the 1995 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Recent discoveries of unknown works by Eaton made by Martha J. Cutter, Dominika Ferens, and June Howard have begun to complicate our scholarly understanding of both her biography and her oeuvre. Late one night in 2006, I typed Edith Eaton's name and her best-known pseudonyms ("Sui Sin Far" and "Sui Seen Fah") into the search bar of Google Books. Instantly, a link came up (one that is, alas, no longer there) to a story signed "Edith Eaton" that appeared in the April 1909 issue of Bohemian Magazine. "The Alaska Widow" is not mentioned in Ferens's detailed bibliography, in Annette White-Parks's biography, or in the collection White-Parks co-edited with Amy Ling. It is also uncharacteristic of Eaton's works. Unlike the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, many of which are set in North American Chinatowns and/or feature Eurasian children, this story takes up the cultural dynamic produced by the Alaska gold rush and the Spanish-American War, and it features a child born to a Native American mother abandoned by a Caucasian adventurer father who later dies in the Philippines. "The Alaska Widow" is also unlike most of the works Eaton published after 1898 in that it is signed "Edith Eaton" without any parenthetical reference to her pen name. Because "The Alaska Widow" is so different from other works by Eaton, it made me wonder: How many other unknown stories by Eaton exist, and how might they challenge scholars' understanding of the author? In the years Eaton actively published (1888-1914), US print culture changed profoundly. The number of newspapers and periodicals quadrupled. While nascent mass newspapers cultivated advertising dollars by becoming politically neutral and purportedly objective, many periodicals marketed themselves to niche audiences organized by class, age, gender, aesthetics, vocation, and other categories. Together Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Ind Other Writings have made available to scholars only about fifty (mostly Chinatown-themed) publications by Eaton. My archival research, combined with contributions from other scholars, including Cutter, Ferens, and Howard, has uncovered nearly two hundred additional texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and politics published in more than forty different Canadian, United States, and Jamaican periodicals between 1888 and 1914. (1) In her early career, between 1888 and 1896, Eaton placed signed poetry and fiction in small-circulation Montreal publications such as the Dominion Illustrated and Metropolitan Magazine. She also filed regular, unsigned journalistic contributions (primarily about Montreal's Chinatown) and sent impassioned letters to the editor (signing herself E. E.) about racist policies toward the Chinese in Canada to two local newspapers: the Montreal Daily Witness and Montreal Daily Star. In addition, she filed stories about smallpox outbreaks, fires, and murders from northern Ontario, where she worked as a stenographer from 1892 to 1893. Between 1896 and 1897 she wrote daily society and women's page news for Jamaica's Gall's Daily Newsletter. But Eaton recognized early on that it would be almost impossible to earn a living publishing fiction in Canada. In 1896, therefore, she began to submit Chinatown stories, signed "Sui Seen Far," to periodicals in the United States--the fin de siecle little magazines Fly Leaf and Lotus, as well as the regional emigration magazine Land of Sunshine and popular magazine Short Stories. …