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The aim of this article is a critical analysis of the changing landscape of American streaming and post-network television content offer in the context of Asians’ and Asian Americans’ representations. The focus of this analysis is primarily on the stereotypes — the mechanisms behind their construction and deconstruction, and their role in the shaping of the popular image of Asians and Asian Americans. The secondary goal is the attempt to show how the culturally constructed Other is constantly present in the common imagination of the TV and cinema audience, and how this construct influences production companies, audiences, and showrunners in the USA. The question of the postulated “change” in the representation of Asian and Asian Americans, and their visibility remains open for further debate. However, I have attempted to restrict it to the model example of two series over the past twenty years.

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 ...

In contrast to previous migratory waves to Hawai’i and California, the 189,000 Japanese in Brazil, who predominantly settled in Sao Paulo State, did so as families, not single men. Agricultural cooperatives backed by Japanese governmental and private interests further contributed to the stability of the Japanese colonies. Nevertheless, Yellow Peril fears were ever-present. The Constitutional Assembly of 1934 had already reduced Japanese immigration to an annual quota of 4,000. After Brazil severed ties with Japan, the immigrants faced punitive measures that included the prohibition to speak in public, publish, or teach their children in Japanese. Despite the real threat from German U-boats on the Atlantic coast and a German fifth column in the South, the Japanese immigrants disproportionately bore the brunt of anti-Axis sentiment in Brazil.

Russia and China rapidly restore communication after the Cold War, but the Chinese immigration issue is also widely exaggerated and even described as “Yellow Peril again” in Russia. The so-called Yellow Peril is not only a Russian object perception but also a cross-generational conflict between Russia and China. Furthermore, it will be related to the subsequent development of the Russian Far East and Siberia. The Chinese immigration constitutes psychological and survival non-traditional security impacts on Russia and also forms some kind of social competition with Russians. It is vital for Russia to cooperate with its eastern neighbor to accelerate the development of the Russian Far East and Siberia, but national security and social stability are the prerequisites for cooperation. Nevertheless, it is more significant to rebuild self-confidence of the Russians in the Russian Far East and acknowledge that the East will not be a threat to Russia. As long as Russia realizes that it can enjoy unlimited possibilities in the East, the non-traditional security impacts caused by the Chinese immigration will automatically alleviate and even disappear. Today, most Russians are trapped in the dilemma of welcoming or refusing the Chinese immigrants; however, cultural exchange still has some effects and at least causes Russians to begin to positively treat the Chinese immigration and consider whether to accept China and cooperate with China.

For the vast majority of TV history, Asian Americans have played a minimal yet nevertheless infamous role. From the “yellow peril” to the “model minority,” racial stereotypes have been used to characterize Asians and Asian Americans on the television screen. In the rare instances when Asian American actors did appear, they either were in minor roles or as figures from a bad racist dream. Research on Asian Americans on TV comes from many disciplines and cuts across multiple fields such as media studies and Asian American studies. This article discusses the early history of Asian Americans on TV, traces notable figures in contemporary television, and concludes with the role of digital convergence and the development of delivery and recovery platforms. It also provides an overview of scholarly literature written about Asian Americans on TV, including articles and books written about Asian American TV shows, the history of Asian American TV representation, and research on TV and digital media, including YouTube and other transmedia convergence cultural materials.

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 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.

This article introduces readers to the fiction of invasion, a paranoid literary phenomenon that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1870 and 1914. It begins with an overview of the development of this relatively unknown body of work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, charting assumptions of imminent large-scale war, fascination with the technology of warfare and the marked participation of military men who used the fiction to agitate for increased defence spending. While this alarmist brand of popular fiction provoked considerable contemporary commentary, modern critical engagement with it has been somewhat limited. Beginning in the 1960s and dominated by the work of the master bibliographer I. F. Clarke, the initial scholarly response necessarily took the form of classification and survey and evinced particular interest in adjudging the accuracy of fictional predictions about future war. More recent scholarship is concerned with reading the fiction in the context of its own times, probing its relationship with external imperial factors and internal domestic concerns and its effectiveness as a propaganda tool. In addition to offering an overview of this line of enquiry, this article seeks to broaden the understanding of the invasion narrative in fin-de-siecle popular fiction, drawing lines out to the recurrence of the invasion theme across a broad range of genres and modes exceeding that of future war fiction and including so-called ‘yellow peril’ narratives, crime and detective fiction and the gothic. In conclusion, a number of avenues complementing the textual and the historical are suggested for future exploration.

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...

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This chapter examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime after early 1942.

In 1915, O. A. C. Lund directed his first Universal release, Just Jim (1915), "a thrilling four reeler" with Harry Carey in the title role. After serving a prison term for smuggling, Jim goes to a "hop joint" where a "rich Chinese mandarin" offers him a chance to make "big money smuggling in Chinese." Jim refuses, declaring that he has gone straight, but returns to the "old game" after he is "shanghaied" by Chinese smugglers. Ultimately, Jim circumvents the smuggling ring (Moving Picture World, 14 August 1915, 1227). By linking opium dens with cross-border flows of Chinese laborers, whose entry into the United States had been prohibited by the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the film encouraged a racialized perception of Chinese communities as both vice-ridden and detrimental to the interests of the white working class. More importantly, by spanning the Pacific Northwest down to the southwest borderlands, the production indicated to filmgoers that the so-called "Chinese Problem" and the opium scourge was a continental phenomenon linked to what Erika Lee refers to as global flows of Asian migration and exclusion in the Americas ("The Yellow Peril" 537).Just Jim was not unique in using border zones as a narrative setting to dramatize the perceived nexus between the Chinese diaspora and the opium epidemic to highlight the alleged threat of Asian peoples on a transnational scale. In the early twentieth century, the US film industry produced a cycle of films set in North American border regions, which were symptomatic of widespread fears surrounding addiction to smoking opium and the perception of the Chinese as an incursion. As Erica Lee argues, although "the U.S., Canada, and Mexico were structured by their own unique systems of race relations and hierarchies as well as colonial legacies," the three nations "defined the Chinese as a threatening invasion," and categorized Chinese immigrants as dangerous, immoral, and unassimilable ("Orientalisms in the Americas" 238-389).Indeed, the rise and subsequent fall of a particular film cycle depend upon its ability to exploit the audience's perceived desires by drawing from current events, trends, and the financial and/or critical viability of similar film productions. As such, the study of a particular film cycle can help shed light on social anxieties and contemporary politics within a discreet time frame (Kleine 5). Motion pictures that tackled such hard-hitting social issues as drug addiction and smuggling demonstrated the cinema's active engagement with the broad goals of the Progressive Era, which roughly spanned the 1890s through the end of the First World War. Although progressivism was a movement marked by tremendous diversity, the spirit of reform and the perceived need to impose order for the betterment of the United States and its citizens generally defined this period (Diner; Flanagan; Wiebe).In keeping with this objective, reformers clamored for the eradication of both opiate usage and of the opium trading networks that appeared to facilitate the clandestine entry of excluded Chinese laborers via Canada and Mexico. Given the topicality of Chinese immigrant and opium smuggling, the film industry produced motion pictures dealing with these interrelated subjects. Specifically, the filmic borderland settings, as spaces of intercultural contact and collision, offer a unique representational framework to comprehend contiguous patterns of racial exclusion toward Chinese immigrant communities in the early twentieth century. This film cycle underscored perceived anxieties about the porosity of borderlands, thereby accelerating the desire for stricter enforcement along the perimeters that surround the United States. The ongoing practice of smuggling in excluded Chinese workers, as well as the unlawful entry of other unsanctioned migrants, via the leaky borders that the United States shares with both Canada and Mexico would eventually culminate with the establishment of the US border patrol in 1924. …

Before Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu became household names, San Francisco-born detective Mr. Wang and his rival Jugatai, the Manchu head of the Secret Society of Federated Asia, entertained young British readers in the early twentieth century. This article examines these under-explored characters, created by the prolific military officer-turned-writer Charles Gilson. It explores how Gilson developed a fictional formula that appealed to young readers and made slight variations to it in order to keep those readers interested. The characters of Mr. Wang and his nemesis Jugatai are also examined in terms of the conventions of the adventure story; in particular, the classic detective story stereotypes of the Chinese and fears of the yellow peril are subject to analysis. It is seen that Gilson created Mr. Wang as a respected character possessing many positive traits. However, to some extent, Mr. Wang is also a mouthpiece to support Western involvement in China, while Jugatai is an evil plotter destined to fail because of the superiority of the British. Therefore, although Gilson pushed some boundaries in detective fiction by featuring a Chinese detective more than a decade before the creation of Charlie Chan, he still conformed to certain formulaic plotlines of the boy’s adventure story genre.

John F. Coales was a remarkable contributor to the field of control engineering with a wide scope of activities in the profession until his death in 1999 at the age of 92. Following his undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge, he devoted his engineering talents to radio direction finding and radar while working for various agencies of the British government. This work was instrumental in the defense of Great Britain during World War II. At the end of the war, he was employed in British engineering industries and in 1953 accepted an offer from the Engineering Department of Cambridge University to create and head a graduate teaching and research program in advanced automatic control systems. His career included many honors and leadership positions such as a term as president of the IEE. An oral history of John Coales may be found in the IEEE Global History Network [1].

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.

This chapter argues that poison does not only appear to be the signature weapon of Fu Manchu, but that the characteristics of poison apply to the master villain himself. The ‘logic of spread’ (Mayer 2013) inherent to the serial figure is linked to the danger of racialized contamination through expansion, evoked by the term “yellow peril.” Focusing on the 1960s Fu Manchu film series, primarily produced for the West-German market, the essay traces the emergence of the trope to German Imperialism and analyses the series’ historical displacements. It shows that in the films, the poison motif rather reflexively points to the serial poisoning by Fu Manchu’s cinematic returns, which can be understood as an attempt to immunize against his imagined ‘toxic’ nature. This becomes especially apparent when, in the last entry The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969, D. Jess Franco), the poisoning leaves the narrative and spreads onto the screen.

This paper explores the processes of serial narration in view of the serial enactment of Fu Manchu. Its contention is that seriality is a principle rather than a technique and that this principle cannot be deduced to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a ‘machinic’ momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding. It is no mere circumstance that the most successful serial narratives—like the Fu Manchu narratives—were initiated in the ‘long’ 19th century with its expansionist ambitions regarding the spread of global capitalism and the modern nation state, and then were propelled by the engines of 20th-century media modernity. The Fu Manchu narratives lend themselves to an investigation of the principle of seriality because they vent the serial logic of expansion, excrescence, and spread both on a thematical and a formal level and tightly interweave structural and ideological functions. In consequence, the narratives have to be seen as serial performances or enactments, rather than representations, of the yellow peril theme. They do not so much express politico-social fears and cultural anxieties from the vantage point of an author or individual text, but work as engines in the serial machinery which generates and spreads ideological certainties. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 43.2 (Summer 2013): 186–217. Copyright © 2013 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. My attention fixed itself on the spinning roulette wheel and the little white ball whirling inside it. I experienced the sensation that I was the whizzing roulette ball, that the numbers I passed in my spin where the faces of all those I had known at Land’s End, and before: that I was myself and Petrie, that Smith and Fu Manchu were the same imago, and that the spin would never stop, the ball that was me would never come to rest on red or white, on 7 or 24, but rotate for eternity on that clicketing wheel. (Indiana 204) This is how the narrator of Gary Indiana’s The Shanghai Gesture (2009), which is arguably the most recent literary take on the subject matter of Fu Manchu, envisions himself at the end of the novel. By then, the fact that Fu Manchu is a cultural construct has been thoroughly driven home in the text. Fu Manchu is of interest to Indiana precisely because he has been of interest to so many other people before. The Shanghai Gesture approaches Fu Manchu as formula fiction, correlating its references to the figure of the Chinese master criminal with allusions to many other popular yellow peril fictions, such as the 1941 film from which the novel gleaned its title. Indiana’s narrative thus relishes in quotation, exaggeration, parody, and ironic inversion, while—for large stretches, at least—taking its material seriously enough to trust in its inherent potential, most notably the dynamics of serial narration. Or perhaps the material itself brings to bear its potential on Indiana’s novel? We’ll see that the answer to this question depends heavily on how we conceptualize the phenomenon of seriality. At the time when Indiana’s narrator Petrie, who happens to share the last name with the narrator figure of the first Fu Manchu narratives, identifies with a roulette ball, things have already become quite convoluted. The novel’s many narrative threads and layers have turned out to be complicatedly looped. Toward the end of Indiana’s novel the principle of seriality is no longer associated with the idea of a chronological evolution, in the sense of a sequence of past, present, and future. Edmund Husserl’s concept of a “field of sensuous data” (Indiana 204) is called up to suggest the idea of a time-space-continuum in which episodes and figures pertaining to different historical circumstances, distinct conceptual spheres, and diverse narrative enactments are tightly tangled. With this turn, the novel insists that, particularly as a narrative mode, seriality relies as much on the Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread 187

A noted medical historian and museum curator, Canadian American Howard Dittrick was a Cleveland gynecologist who served as Directing Editor of Current Researches in Anesthesia and Analgesia (1940-1954). In the aftermath of World War II, even after Congresses of Anesthetists had resumed, Dittrick and his editorial board allowed their yellow, then tan-covered journal, the so-called "yellow peril," to languish into near irrelevance.

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.

A recent cause célèbre in the reporting of diversity in New Zealand was ‛Asian Angst’, an article published by leading magazine North & South. Following the influx of Chinese immigrants into New Zealand over recent years, ‛Asian Angst’ painted a picture of consequent rampant Chinese crime in the country. The article caused an uproar and the Press Council later ruled the piece was inaccurate and discriminatory. This analysis reveals how the article conformed to the traditional Western stereotype of Asians as the Yellow Peril, and concludes that the magazine adopted this stereotype because it was apparently determined to portray Chinese immigrants in a poor light and was unable to interpret the relevant crime statistics correctly.

This article describes the evolution of the image of China in the United States (US) during the Cold War. Aware that China–US bilateral relations have been influenced by periods of conflict and animosity, harmony and détente, the article argues that the image of China has always been embedded in a network of events—birth of the PRC (People’s Republic of China [PRC], Korean War, Sino-Soviet alliance) that prevented American public opinion from developing an objective and unbiased picture of the PRC. Since 1950s, China has always been linked to the idea of the ‘Yellow Peril’. Moreover, the lack of a direct contact between China and America further thwarted the opportunity of shaping a fair picture of the PRC. Although recognising that during the Cold War American political parties played a significant role in conveying a negative image of China, this article shows how media helped in strengthening Chinese stereotypes among the American public. Analysing all articles published by Time, National Geographic and Readers’ Digest from 1949 to 1972, the article highlights both similarities and differences of the way in which these magazines introduced China to their readers.

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...

This article examines the history of Asian migration and exclusion in the Americas by focusing on the intersections of national histories, transnational migration, and the globality of race. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a transnational conversation about race, migration, and national security circulated throughout North and South America. The subject was the global migration of Asians and the alleged threat they posed. By examining the circularity of Asian migration within the Americas as well as the transnational nature of anti-Asian racism, this article seeks to revise our understandings of transnationalism and contribute to the larger global history of race.

Through examining the various terms—tonal, rhetorical, thematic, and formal—by which Ezra Pound sought to present Chinese poetic culture and identity in Cathay, this essay delineates a "prehistory" of Asian American verse. For, departing from the reigning discourse of the "Yellow Peril," Cathay has come to embody the authority of the cultural dominant, thereby defining the framework of evaluation for other poetic voicings in English of "Chinese" and "Asian" cultural heritage.

The rise of popular literature at the end of the nineteenth century increased the production of books from authors who had never been to China, based on second-hand sources. From the context of Chinese immigration in Europe and in the USA, inconclusive commercial strategies on the Chinese territory and the threat of the ‘Yellow Peril’ led popular writers to fabricate Asian characters. These characters are the embodiment of the fears and anxiety of the Western world, losing power on the international scene. In spite of the conflation of all types of Asians, the Chinese are the most affected by this negative image. Fu Manchu, the Asian villain created by Sax Rohmer in 1912 (Rohmer 1912/2007), has been a model for all the Chinese villains in the world literature and in the cinema until today. This chapter will review its American and British foreshadows and the European characters based on the same features. Demonic, powerful, overcoming the stereotypes of the petty, swindling Chinaman, at the turn of the century the representation of Chinese people in the popular literature and movies reveals the feeling of guilt related to Western behaviour in China, the vast ignorance of Asia, and the concerns of a diminished Europe.

“Asian” culture has long been fodder for films and television shows produced in the United States. Four main stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans emerged from the imagination of primarily white cultural producers in Hollywood: “Yellow Peril,” “Dragon Lady,” “Charlie Chan,” and “Lotus Blossom.” These images can be understood as “controlling images” in the sense that negative stereotypes provide justifications for social control and positive stereotypes provide normative models for Asian thought and behavior. Resistance to these images became substantial in the 1960s when Asian American filmmakers developed “triangular cinema,” a strategy for Asian American community building, political mobilization, and the creation of an Asian American film aesthetic. The films of triangular cinema are “liberating images” that stake out a position for independence and autonomy for Asian American communities.

In his article "Laughter and the Cosmopolitan Aesthetic in Lao She's 二马 (Mr. Ma and Son)" Jeffrey Mather discusses Lao She's (pseudonym for Qingchun Shu 1899-1966) texts and their naturalist portrayals of social life in China during a tumultuous period. Lao She's most celebrated works include the 1937 novel 骆驼祥子 (Rickshaw Boy) and the 1958 play 茶馆 (Teahouse), both of which were made into films in China. Rickshaw Boy was translated into English in 1945 and became an international bestseller, making Lao She one of the first modern Chinese writers known in the West. Lao She wrote Mr. Ma and Son in London during the 1920s: the novel was first published in installments in 1929 in the prominent modernist literary magazine 小说月报 (Fiction Monthly). Set in London and drawing from a range of literary and popular sources, Lao She's novel engages with humor as a way to challenge distinctions between East and West and to present readers with the possibilities of a cosmopolitan literary aesthetic. While the novel points an accusatory finger through its satirical aims and along the way empowers a nationalist sense of self-defense seemingly, there is at the same time an ironic laughter that disrupts the rational integrity of the text, one that is spontaneous and slippery in its ambivalence.

John Hersey's "Hiroshima" was first published in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker. A relatively liberal and sophisticated magazine, The New Yorker devoted its entire contents to Hersey's story that week, deleting its usual light-hearted cartoons and humorous editorials. The response was sensational: the text was republished in full by several newspapers, ABC radio broadcast a reading of the entire text over four nights, and the book version of the text became an immediate bestseller (Boyer, 203-05; Lifton and Mitchell 86-88; Weart 107-09). "Hiroshima" has remained in print continuously since its initial publication and has been required reading for generations of American high school and college students (Huse 35-36; Yavenditti 24-25). It is difficult to overstate the importance of Hersey's text in the history of the Atomic Age: as one reader of The New Yorker put it, Hersey showed the world "what one [atomic] bomb did to people as distinct from a city, the Japanese people or the enemy" (qtd. in Luft and Wheeler 137). The atomic bombing of Hiroshima provides a definitive example of a technology that radically alters history and challenges the prevailing view of the world. As a response to this technology, Hersey's "Hiroshima" struck a chord with a huge number of Americans, providing us with a unique and powerful example of how narrative structures arise to make sense out of new technologies. Using the "wasteland" imagery of literary modernism, Hersey encapsulated for his American audience the horror of the atomic bomb within a familiar framework. At the same time, Hersey criticized the widely held view that the atomic bomb was a justified, science-fiction-style attack against an evil and militaristic Yellow Peril. In the year between the attack on Hiroshima and the publication of Hersey's story, American culture was engulfed in debates about the meaning of the atomic bomb. American newspapers, magazines, films, and radio programs were littered with representations of this new ultimate weapon, as Americans tried to make sense out of what this new technology really meant. So what was it about Hersey's text that made it so influential and that distinguished it from the scores of other representations that permeated American culture? Part of the answer to this question becomes evident when we look at the half-century before the atomic bomb was realized. As recent theories of genre have shown us, new discourses do not emerge out of thin air; rather, they draw on preexisting discursive structures to make sense of some new situation. A genre, which Todorov describes as a "historically attested codification of discursive properties" (19), functions as a discursive frame that arises to solve recurring communication problems fa ced by members of a community (Bazerman). The problem of representing the atomic bomb after the Hiroshima attack was vexing: the United States government used its monopoly on information about the new technology to greatly limit the possibilities for representing the attack. Yet both the government and the public had access to one preexisting genre that had in fact predicted the atomic bomb and given it a name. The genre was known as science fiction. Science-fiction representations of the atomic bomb developed Out of the future-war-story genre that became popular in the late nineteenth century. The popularity of future-war stories can be traced to May 1871, when an English military officer published a short story entitled "The Battle of Dorking" in the middle-class English monthly Blackwood's Magazine. As I.F. Clarke has shown, this short story caused an immediate sensation around the world and led to numerous imitations and controversies for years to come. More importantly, it established the future-war story (or what Clarke calls "the tale of the next great war" Tale 1) as a recognizable genre that still thrives in American culture today. The best-known example of the futurewar story from this period is H. …

Beginning in the mid-1990s and gathering particular force in the first decade of the new millennium, an “Asian Invasion” — as some critics have described it — emerged in Hollywood.1 The fact that this multivolume history of American cinema devotes an entire chapter to the subject of Hollywood's relationship to Asia specifically within the context of American film's contemporary history (1999 to the present) testifies to the significance of this cross-cultural phenomenon. But this temporal historicist bracketing of Hollywood and Asia as a recent cultural occurrence offers a convenient disjunctive moment to reflect on the discursive and material continuities and discontinuities that have characterized this fraught relationship. I speak of continuity in a sense that, materially, American film has always had an intimate connection to Asia in terms of both film production and market distribution since the very beginning of cinema's technological emergence,2 a point that reinforces the notion of film as a transnational capitalist commodity, with global Hollywood as a prime instance (Miller et al. 2001). The developed film industries of China, India, Japan, and Hong Kong, for instance, have often confronted Hollywood competition reactively, thereby inflecting the aesthetic and technological development of these national cinemas, while innovations emerging from Asia, in turn, have helped reconfigure and challenge cinematic culture in Hollywood.3 Or, as Bliss Cua Lim more effectively puts it, “Hollywood … pillages from its rivals, a conspicuous instance of national-regional counterflows, in which the centre imitates its cinematic elsewheres, lest we forget that film is truly global” (2007, 124). On the discursive front, Hollywood has also deployed, throughout its history, “Asia” as a representational category of cultural otherness invoking, for example, fears of the “yellow peril” which, according to Gina Marchetti, “combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East” (1993, 2). Historically, these fears were visually embodied in the Orientalist stereotypes of the evil Fu Manchu, Flash Gordon's arch nemesis Ming the Merciless, and the voluptuous prostitute Suzie Wong. While these figurations have now deservedly been relegated to Hollywood's overtly racist historical past (and a relatively recent past at that), their discursive underpinnings persist today, often in a liberal multiculturalist guise. In briefly registering these continuities, I am not only making the obvious but necessary contextual point that the contemporary Asian invasion, as we are witnessing it so far, does not occur in a historical and discursive vacuum, but also bringing in the notion that these continuities suffer elision — a convenient historical amnesia — in Hollywood's current politically correct propensity to embrace exotic ethnic cultures, now in the spirit of liberal multiculturalism, in order to sustain its global hegemony. Keywords: asians in hollywood; asian cinemas; martial arts films; bollywood; ethnicity; multiculturalism

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

New Perspectives on “The War-Prayer” Essays on “The War-Prayer” “I Come from the Throne”: “The War-Prayer,” The Bible, and Anti-imperialism Wesley BRITTON The history of Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer,” in terms of its composition, publica- tion, and critical and popular responses to it, is of special interest in Twain studies. While some matters regarding the story remain open to speculation, others are established in Twain criticism. For example, it is well known Twain himself had strong feelings for his creation. It was in reference to “The War-Prayer” that Twain claimed in this story he “had told the whole truth” and “only dead men can tell the truth.” It is also certain that Twain wrote this “truth” when he was grinding on his late-life anti-imperialistic axe. As Louis Budd noted in Mark Twain: Social Philosopher, in the early years of the new century, among other issues, Twain wrote letters condemning Roos- evelt’s armament policies, blaming governments for much of human suffering (180-81). Twain mused about “The Great Yellow Peril,” and the Boer War and “dashed off essays” denouncing America’s power politics.” In Budd’s view, “A polished result of such mus- ings was ‘The War Prayer’ ” (181). During this period, Twain also repeatedly denounced the institution of kingship. Twain’s attitude toward hereditary royalty had been made manifest in A Connecticut Yan- kee (1889), and he was even harsher in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (Foner 385). As Justin Kaplan noted in Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, one of Twain’s turn-of-the-century con- cerns was his belief that “America’s democracy was heading toward ‘monarchy’ (or dicta- torship),” and he wrote “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” “the most effective and most widely circulated piece of American propaganda in the cause of Congo reform” (366). This in- dictment of Belgium’s monarch was, according to E. Hudson Long, “so blistering that it was not thought suitable for magazine publication but was issued as a pamphlet . . . most scathing of all, however, was ‘The War Prayer’ which Twain did not publish in his life- time” (240). According to both Philip Foner and Justin Kaplan, one concern about “King Leopold” likely directly affected the publication of “The War-Prayer,” composed in 1904-05 (Foner 385). Twain worried that “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” would affect his literary reputation and declined to publish any further pamphlets, writing “I am a lightning bug not a bee” (Kaplan 366). Likewise, it has been claimed Twain had great misgivings about publishing “The War-Prayer,” and his daughter Jean vetoed publication because she felt the story

Review(s) of: Ways of Seeing China: Front Yellow Peril to Shangrila, by Timothy Kendall, North Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Association with Curtin University Books, 2005, Paperback, $29.95.

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.

Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril (1991) represents the return of political fiction of the future not seen in China for decades. Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) brings the imagination to a full dystopian vision. Reading the two novels side by side, this paper argues that Chinese fiction of the future in the early 1990s responded to the country’s struggle for direction when the bloody crackdown of the Tiananmen protest wiped out collective idealism in society. In the twenty-first century, such fiction is written in response to China’s rapid rise as one of the world’s superpowers, bringing to domestic society a seemingly stabilised order that has deprived it of intellectual vision.

Author(s): Lee, Sharon S | Abstract: Two predominant representations of Asian Americans in higher education are the yellow peril foreigner and the model minority. Using Omi and Winant's (1994) framework of racial formation and racist projects, this essay describes the construction of these representations, articulates their dialectical inter-connection, and demonstrates how their manifestations in higher education reinforce white dominance. The author discusses racist projects of the yellow peril foreigner (which depicts Asian Americans as overrepresented in institutions of higher education) and the model minority (which depicts Asian Americans as no longer needing minority services, essentially de-minoritizing them) in the contexts of the removal of Asian Americans from affirmative action, anti-Asian campus backlash, the Asian admissions controversy, and the representation of Asian Americans as victims of affirmative action.

Focusing on three influential contemporary Chinese political fantasy novels, this article contextualizes the stories in the complex spectrum of contemporary Chinese political thoughts and interprets them in light of the rivaling tendencies among the Chinese intellectuals since the 1990s, regarding the issues of rising nationalism and political authoritarianism, the possibilities of fascism and federalism, the role of a strong, centralized state, and the relevance of liberal democracy in China. The article calls attention to fiction as an expression of political thought and concerns, and argues that these novels present a pessimistic and chilling view of China’s political future, in contrast with the optimistic tone of novels of the same genre in the early 20th century, and also challenge an earlier cult of the Western model of liberal democracy. An earlier Chinese-language version of the paper appeared in the website “Democratic ChinaC”, http://www.minzhuzhongguo.org 12/8/2010, entitled “Zhengzhi huanxiang xiaoshuo zhong de dangdai Zhongguo sixiang: jiedu Huang Huo, Zhongnanhai zuihou de douzheng, he Shengshi, Zhongguo 2013” [Chinese Political Thought as Reflected in Political Fantasy Novels: Interpreting 'Yellow'' Peril', 'The End of Red Chinese Dynasty', and 'A Flourishing Age: China, 2013'

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. …

The most important development in recent Asian American literary studies was perhaps the recovery of Sui Sin Far's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, this momentous breakthrough did not occur in one earth-shattering move, but through gradual, piecemeal efforts by various scholars. According to Amy Ling, it all started in 1976 when S. E. Solberg delivered a paper on the Eaton sisters at an Asian American conference, which he subsequently published in 1981 under the title, "Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist" (11). William Wu's 1982 book, Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940, takes note of Sui Sin Far's uncollected short story "A Chinese Ishmael" (53-54) and her only published volume, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (130-32). From the mid 1980s on, there has been an impressive growth in Sui Sin Far scholarship, with the appearance in 1995 of the two most important works to date: Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks's critical edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings and Annette White-Parks's Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: A Literary Biography. Despite the steady increase in scholarship on Sui Sin Far, the significance of her work has yet to be fully explored. The long neglect of Sui Sin Far from the 1910s to the late 1970s has been a tremendous loss to the study of Asian American literature because the emerging Asian American canon evolved largely without any knowledge of an important predecessor. The idea of attributing the origin of a literary movement to a single author may seem presumptuous, or precarious at best, yet in so far as such an effort is helpful in clarifying the initial impulses of an Asian American literary consciousness and constituting the ethnic identity of a whole group of writers, Sui Sin Far is unequivocally deserving of such honor. Widely considered the first Asian American fictionist, Sui Sin Far is also the first Asian American writer to portray Chinese American life in a fair and sympathetic manner, which was an act of supreme courage in the face of rampant anti-Chinese hysteria in North America around the turn of the twentieth century. (1) Unfortunately, Sui Sin Far's presentation of Chinese American characters as ordinary human beings, in contrast to Orientalist stereotypes of either "good" or "bad" Asians as defined by Elaine Kim (Asian 4), had little appeal for the dominant literary establishments of the time, and her work was soon forgotten after publication. Nearly a century later, we have become more aware of how illuminating and valuable Sui Sin Far is in our current resistance to Orientalist stereotyping of the Chinese--a reductionist practice so deeply rooted in the consciousness of Asian America that its ghost still lurks in Asian American literary production today. (2) Consequently, Sui's work yields new implications for us on another front: her affirmation of Chinese American integrity and character as a whole, not just as men or women, proves especially meaningful in our effort to move beyond the gender wars that have dominated Chinese American literary discourse for over two decades. In the roughly six decades after the publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance in 1912, Chinese America was unable to articulate as affirmative an expression of an Asian American subjectivity as Sui Sin Far's. Popular hits such as Pardee Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) reveal an alien consciousness that perceives oneself as a permanent Other insecure in the host culture. These works are a continuation of what Elaine Kim calls "ambassadors of goodwill" (Asian 24) that first began with Yan Phou Lee's When I Was a Boy in China (1887) and continued in Lin Yutang's My Country and My People (1935). Intended to "explain" Asia to the West and plead implicitly for racial tolerance, these writers do not condemn or challenge racist stereotypes of the Chinese. Like Father and Glorious Descendant, Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter "express[es] accommodation to rather than challenge of distortions about Chinese Americans" (Kim, Asian 61) and focuses on "whatever was most exotic, interesting, and non-threatening to the white society" (66), constituting what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong calls a "guided Chinatown tour" for Western readers (249). …

I came to the concepts explored in this essay through questions formulated while reading Pocahontas's Daughters by Mary Dearborn.(1) Although Dearborn does not directly discuss writers of Chinese descent, her concept of mediation - in which the role of the ethnic woman writer is to "stress samenesses rather than differences," "explain" a subordinate group to a dominant group, and ultimately "bridge" cultures - raises important issues for my examination of Sui Sin Far.(2) One critical aspect of mediation, as I interpret, is the stance or attitude a writer assumes toward the culture(s) of and for whom she is writing. The cultural pool that Sui Sin Far drew from was composed basically of populations of Chinese or European descent, living in Canada or the United States, encountering one another for the first time on the North American continent. Her narrative stance varies. When Chinese North American characters interact with each other, they follow no particular insider-outsider pattern but, contrary to the "Yellow Peril" stereotypes in the age they were written, depict the scope of humanity in its diversified range.(3) Among interactions between Chinese and White(4) North Americans across racial borders, however, another picture begins to emerge: Chinese North Americans repeatedly occupy the fictional center, taking on the role of insiders, while White North Americans shift to the periphery, becoming the outsiders, or "Other."(5) This is a direct counter-perspective to conventional portrayals of the relationships between White and Chinese North Americans in literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century era when Sui Sin Far was writing. More subtle is the writing strategy by which this effect was created. In 1976, S.E. Solberg observed: Edith Eaton as Sui Sin Far did manage to dip into those deeper currents...[of Chinatown], but no matter what she saw and understood, there was no acceptable form to shape it to.(6) (Melus 32) My study examines the way in which Sui Sin Far's fiction creates that form, combining strategy and idea to contrive a reversal of concepts of "Other-ness" as portrayed in American literature. I show that Sui Sin Far's primary writing task, as perceived through these stories, is not to mediate - stressing the "samenesses" - but to create a visibility, a voice and, ultimately, an hegemony for Chinese North Americans in her art that they were denied in their lives.(7) To interpret the critical questions of race as Sui Sin Far - and any writer of non-European heritage - must have encountered them in the imperialist-racist climate of North America at the turn-of-the-century, we must look at the options such writers were faced with: 1) to climb into the Procrustean bed the dominant, European-based culture defined for them, be assimilated and give up traditional cultures, or 2) to fight back against the discriminatory laws and attitudes these writers lived with daily as individuals and took stands on as artists. Sui Sin Far seems never to have doubted that her choice was to fight. From early childhood, she recalls street battles with other children who malign her and her siblings for being Eurasian, and writes: "I glory in the idea of dying at the stake and a great genie arising from the flames and declaring to those who have scorned us: 'Behold, how great and glorious and noble are the Chinese people!'" ("Leaves" 127). As an adult, Sui Sin Far relates an actual confrontation with her dream and tells how she responded. It happened in "a little town away off on the north shore of a big lake" in the "Middle West," when she was lunching with White American acquaintances, including her employer, who perceived her as being racially the same as themselves. Conversation turns to the "cars full of Chinamen that past [sic] that morning" by train, leading to her companions' observations that "I wouldn't have one in my house," and "A Chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger," and "I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are human like ourselves. …

Pro-Japanese editorials swept across nation at outset. Sympathy for underdog turned to admiration of victors and then to the apprehension that led to “yellow peril” hysteria.

James Payne9s thoughtful and carefully documented essay stresses the importance of evaluating ethnic American, specifically Afroamerican, fiction within its historical context. The historical information he provides in his essay concerning the Afroamerican response to the Spanish-American War and to America9s paranoia of a supposed “Yellow Peril” does indeed shed light on how Griggs and Corrothers each imaginatively re-invested a specific social reality with an Afroamerican revolutionary furor—a rage which ironically had the best interest of the country at heart.

TpHE MALEVOLENT INFLUENCE and power of the press has often been exaggerated-as, for example, in the observation by Seldes that Hearst proved "that news is largely a matter of what one man wants the people to know and feel and think."1 It is generally acknowledged, however, that economic necessity compels publishers to print to please readers. Thus, a Hearst columnist observed that "nobody wants to know what you think. People want to know what they think."2 Further, it is said that journalists tend to emphasize crises, to fish in troubled waters, to stir up, rather than moderate, popular opinion. "Under the pressure of publishers and advertisers," wrote Innis, "the journalist has been compelled to seek the striking rather than the fitting phrase, to emphasize crises rather than developmental trends."-3 Thus, members of the press have been characterized as reactors to, not creators of, new issues and crises "like the modal members of their audience; and their communications fit audience predispositions, not through a process of tailoring, but through correspondence in outlook."4 The foregoing points provide a generalized framework for reviewing the historiography of the role of the press in the removal and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II. The standard interpretation depicts the press as a political pressure group and attempts to link it causally with Executive Order 9066 which formed the basis for the concentration camps. The historian Roger Daniels offers the clearest example of that interpretation. The press, wrote Daniels, particularly the Hearst papers, adopted and disseminated in the early twentieth century the image of the "yellow peril." A notable example was the 1907 two-part Sunday Supplement fantasy authored by Richmond Pearson Hobson entitled, "JAPAN MAY SEIZE THE PACIFIC COAST." Hobson predicted that Japan would soon conquer China and thus "command the military resources of the whole yellow race," and estimated that an army of 1,207,700 men could capture the Pacific Coast. "The Yellow Peril is here," Hobson concluded.5 That spectre of the "yellow peril" was revived in more strident form following Pearl Harbor. "Day after day," wrote Daniels, "throughout December, January, February

Anti-Asian sentiment, and specifically "Japan-bashing" has a long, established history in the film industry. Though the early twentieth-century silent films such as "Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers" (1904) and "Chinese Laundry" (1904) directed racial hatred toward Chinese immigrants in America, these films also worked to demean other groups of Asians, notably the Japanese, who were then immigrating in numbers that far exceeded those of the Chinese, the Chinese population in America having been essentially exterminated" by the U.S. government's first Exclusion Act in 1882. For example, the 1908 production of "The Yellow Peril" - in which a Chinese servant disrupts a household, is thrown from a window, beaten by a policeman, and set on fire - provided, in the words of Eugene Franklin Wong: "an oblique indication of increasingly serious immigration and racial problems between the United States and the rising Empire of Japan, with the Chinese thematically filling the role of scapegoat."(1) Partly because of the "invasion" of America by "hordes" of Japanese immigrants, and partly because of japan's military expansionism (namely its annexation of Korea in 1904 and its defeat of Russia in 1905), the Japanese began to replace "Chinamen" as America's new "Yellow Peril," a threat to everything Americans hold dear. Later, reacting racially to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the American film industry - in tandem with the U.S. government - further focused its anti-Asian sentiment on the Japanese through the production of war films. During a time when all Japanese-American actors and actresses were being herded up for internment, the movie studios "pumped up" production of manifestly anti-Asiatic racist material, revising earlier Asian villains to fit the new context of war. The "props" - (non-Japanese) Asian extras - graduated from playing the masses of huddled, silently suffering (and dying) Chinese peasants to playing hordes of insect-like, fanatic (and dying) Kamikaze pilots. The starring "Asian" roles went to white actors and actresses in yellow face who played Fu Man Chu and Dragon ladies in Japanese "drag" as Samurai-style warmongers and geishas. The evil Chinese villains of pre-war films were easily transformed into the evil Japanese villains of WWII films, since "all Asians look alike," especially considering how many of the same actors portrayed both Japanese and Chinese characters. The new war films, then, essentially perpetuated the old fear of Yellow Peril, now manifested in the Japanese enemy who - perhaps disguised as farmer or fisherman competing (unfairly) for white America's resources - sought to undermine national security and morality from the inside. The war genre succeeded in providing Hollywood with a dominant paradigm, still invoked today, to portray Japanese and American relations; many recent films - such as "Gung Ho" (1986) "Black Rain" (1989), "Captured Hearts" (1990) - that explicitly deal with Japanese and American interaction - are framed in the context of war and battle.(2) For example, while World War II is the obvious backdrop of "Captured Hearts," the "war" in "Black Rain" is drug related, with the Japanese Yakuza overthrowing the Italian Mafia as the "new ethnic" mob in America [just as the (good) Japanese character "Mas" replaces the Latino Charlie as Nick Conklin's - the motorcycle-"cowboy" - (white) cop's new ethnic sidekick]. In "Gung Ho" the "war" between the Americans and Japanese is economic, related specifically to car manufacture. Here, even though the American auto workers are employed by the Japanese, whom they have asked to buy the factory, the American workers talk in terms of "us and them," of competition between two opposing teams. In addition, both "Gung Ho" and "Black Rain" refer to the "original" war, WWII, as the source of prevailing tensions between the Americans and Japanese. In "Gung Ho," when the tension between the Japanese management and the American workers climaxes in a fight between Hunt and Kazihiro ("Kaz"), Hunt is fired and retaliates by saying, "If you're so great, how'd you lose the big one? …