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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...

Yellow Peril ideology has long cast Chinese as cruel, deceitful, incompetent disease vectors. Many US elites now tie such notions to China’s response to Covid-19. Their racialized framing of the drive to condemn and sue China however exemplifies a Chinese idiom—“big thunder, little rain” (雷声大, 雨点小)—which means noisy, yet ineffective. There are empirical obstacles to convincing the world of Chinese responsibility for the pandemic, such as that the virus spread much more from Europe and the US than from China, many Western states failed against the virus, and pandemic-related agitation against China has resulted in many anti-Asian actions. The ongoing claims are thus unlikely to be convincing beyond the Anglosphere, but still spread racism and advance a US-led anti-China mobilization.

An insensitive poem published in 1935 sparked a wave of outrage among the Indies Chinese students in the Netherlands. Titled The yellow peril, it had started as an inside joke among Leiden’s Indologists, yet quickly aroused the fury of both moderates and radicals. Their anti-colonial activism flared up for months, attracting numerous allies and eventually taking hold in the Netherlands Indies. After the Indologists had apologized, the number of activists willing to push for more structural change dwindled. As such, this microhistory lays bare some broader dynamics of anti-racism. We argue that ethnic Chinese, who continue to be portrayed as an unobtrusive model minority, have a longer legacy of activism than they are usually given credit for. This is particularly relevant in the present, when Covid-induced Sinophobia, anti-Black racism, and a reassessment of the colonial past are inspiring new movements and forging new anti-racist solidarities.

Deep into the novel, an inarticulate sense of unease in the psyche of Henry Park is explored being extremely disturbed, and an outcast. Trapped being in American-Korean identity, he has got his impression on his wife, Lilia beings ‘emotional alien’, ‘yellow peril: neo-American,’ ‘stranger/follower/traitor/spy’. In addition, she speaks of him being a ‘False speaker of Language’ because Henry looks listening to her attentively; following her executing language word by word like someone resembling a non-native speaker. In fact, the cultural differences between the Korean-American and the Native American bring tension around the ways the English language is used.

This article examines The Foreigner, the 2017 film adaptation of British novelist Stephen Leather’s The Chinaman (1992), starring the Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts film star Jackie Chan. The film reveals a cosmopolitical cinematic revision that foregrounds the contradictions and paradoxes of Yellow Peril, present when the film was made, during the time of Brexit in the United Kingdom. By investigating Chan’s screen persona, which has roots in Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts cinema, I focus on how the film derives and builds upon Chan’s transnational status as a cinema icon to critically engage with the conventional Yellow Peril narrative.

This article approaches Philippine texts in Spanish written by two generations of ilustrados, which evidence the birth and consolidation of a pan-Asian sentiment and the development of a discourse of resistance to Spain and the United States by the identification with China between 1880 and 1930. It shows that what happens in texts of different genres written by Filipino writers in Spanish, encompasses a social and political movement which departs from the traditional images of “writers with nostalgia for the Spanish colonial period” and opposed to modernity. Finally, it discusses how the exoticization of Asia and the yellow peril discourse are both based on the conception of China as a faraway country, and therefore they were subverted in the Philippines.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1905 was a watershed moment for the presence of the Royal Navy in the Pacific. Although it allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its fleets in European waters, this strategy caused resentment due to the underlying fear of the ‘Yellow Peril’, especially in the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance presented some challenges to the received Edwardian racial hierarchy and the idea of British military supremacy. This article demonstrates how the ‘port town’ not only became a place of mediation where high-level international diplomacy mingled with the face-to-face experience of an alliance ‘in practice’, but also a space through which issues such as Otherness and imperial security were contested and explored.

The goal of this essay is to explore what kind of hate is produced against Asian bodies in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. By centering Asian/American affect and materiality – marginalized voices, narratives, and feelings of Asian/Americans as affective-performative texts, this essay attends to critique the historical continuum of racial discrimination against Asian/Americans (i.e., yellow peril) and advocate for social justice, equality, and inclusion in the U.S. Overall, I argue that Asian/American bodies are both physiologically and ideologically desensitized, dehumanized, and weaponized as the revival of yellow perils over the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, this essay highlights the possibility of adding affective and performative lenses in Critical Intercultural Communication research, exploring the politics of Asian/American bodies and the hate discourse as a case study for further academic conversations in Asian/American scholarship in Communication.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about not only political, social, and economic disaster globally, but also rising hate and the exacerbation of social inequity. As the pandemic spread beyond China, hate crimes against Asians skyrocketed in the United States and internationally. Amidst growing xenophobia and a global health crisis, 2020 also marked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. Memes that featured “Roof Koreans” started being shared during the protests, along with the already racist memes about COVID-19 that targeted Asians. In this essay, we critically analyze memes from the spring and summer of 2020 to examine how Asian/Americans are not only positioned and reproduced as the Hated Other (“Kung Flu”), but also how they function as Proxies of Hating (“Roof Koreans”) in service to white hegemony. Using critical discourse analysis, while also responding to Palumbo-Liu’s 1994 essay examining images of Korean Americans from the 1992 LA Uprising as proxies of white hegemony, we explore the symbolic connections between these memes and the pervasive narrative of Asian/Americans as both yellow peril and model minority.

This study examines the character of racism as a social relation. As such, racism is continuously produced and modified, not only culturally and ideologically but also in social interaction. Understanding racism and its repercussions demands close investigation of all the processes involved. An instructive example is an incident that unfolded in the early 1910s in Broome, Western Australia. The exemption from immigration restriction of a Japanese doctor raised tempers at a time when the nationwide aspiration for a racially homogeneous society determined political and social attitudes, and ‘whiteness’ was a crucial element of Australianness. The possibility of admitting a Japanese professional to a town that was already suspected of race chaos fuelled debates about the question of ‘coloured labour’ and the ‘yellow peril’, while challenging the unambiguousness of class and race boundaries. The influence and wealth of some Japanese, the indispensable position of their compatriots in the pearling industry, and the skills and reputation of their doctor, supplemented with the distinct racial pride of the whole Japanese community, proved to massively impede and disrupt the unrestricted implementation of white supremacy.

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...

Objectives The purpose of this project is to assess (1) presence of anger toward Asian Americans “taking jobs,” and (2) whether stereotypes, feelings of competitive threat, and principles of equality predict increased presence of anger. Methods We used an experimental list survey of 416 participants, which reduces social desirability effects compared to traditional surveys. Results Findings show feelings of group competition and threat were strong predictors of presence of anger toward Asian Americans taking jobs. This anger was not associated with stereotypes as suggested by past research. Conclusions This finding supports Blumer's Group Position Theory, which argues that racial animosity is rooted in concerns that out‐groups are vying for resources claimed by one's own group.

Joining recent scholarly efforts to free the study of the Yellow Peril from the conventional framework of Asian American and postcolonial studies, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the manifestations of this mutable racial discourse in twentieth-century Anglophone and Sinophone literatures. As a case in point, I focus on the Chinese dissident writer Wang Lixiong and his ‘racist’ appropriation of the Yellow Peril ideology in fin-de-siècle Anglo-American popular writings. By juxtaposing his canonical work China Tidal Wave, known in Chinese as Huang Huo (‘Yellow Peril’), with the Asian invasion fictions by Jack London and M. P. Shiel, I argue that instead of some kind of indisputable metaphysical truth, the Yellow Peril ideology manifested in these texts is merely a performative cultural practice that shifts its functions and allegiances according to the situated socio-political agenda of its practitioner. This performative nature is made explicit through my analyses of the changes of their paratexts as these texts travel across languages, leading to further reflections on theoretical concepts such as Occidentalism, the postcolonial palimpsest, Sinophone literature, and world literature.

While recent literature on Asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents Asian life as mechanically non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and other developments under the Anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of Asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the West. In this article I argue that a unique discourse of bio-orientalism contributes to the depiction of Asians as a "Yellow Life" that is an existential threat to Western forms of life. Western life posits that this Yellow Life must be resisted and ultimately eliminate for the flourishing of all non-Asian life. Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in yellow peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Rather than embracing an Asian Americanist response that would also seek to disavow Yellow Life, in a reading of Bryan Thao Worra's poetry I speculate upon embracing Yellow Life as another mode in which Asian American studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary Western-centric and humanist responses to anti-Asian racism.

Yellow Peril and other anti-East Asian themes are a recurring but rarely acknowledged feature of the oeuvre of Robert A. Heinlein. Still revered by an overwhelmingly white, male and ideologically libertarian readership, the “Dean” of American Science Fiction made extensive use of threatening, hateful or contemptible images of East Asians in novels that appeared from the 1930s through the 1960s. The contradiction between Heinlein’s self-portrayal as broad minded and unbiased on issues of race and religion and the descriptions of East Asians as menacing and untrustworthy Others that suffuse his fiction has not been systematically investigated until now. Exposing Heinlein matters because he continues to enjoy a large readership and inspires other science fiction authors. The stereotyping expressed in novels like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the dehumanization expressed in novels like Starship Troopers continue to shape the social and political attitudes of non-East Asian Americans both in domestic race and ethnic relations and in international affairs.

Using the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic as a case study, this paper engages with debates on the assimilation of Asian Americans into the US mainstream. While a burgeoning scholarship holds that Asians are “entering into the dominant group” or becoming “White,” the prevalent practices of othering Asians and surging anti‐Asian discrimination since the pandemic outbreak present a challenge to the assimilation thesis. This paper explains how anger against China quickly expands to Asian American population more broadly. Our explanation focuses on different forms of othering practices, deep‐seated stereotypes of Asians, and the role of politicians and media in activating or exacerbating anti‐Asian hatred. Through this scrutiny, this paper augments the theses that Asian Americans are still treated as “forever foreigners” and race is still a prominent factor in the assimilation of Asians in the United States. This paper also sheds light on the limitations of current measures of assimilation. More broadly, the paper questions the notion of color‐blindness or post‐racial America.

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.

This chapter examines how Germany and China’s changed relationship after World War I and Germany’s forced decolonization affected representations of China in German opera through analysis of two operas. The first, Eugen d’Albert and M. Karlev’s Mister Wu (1930–1932), reconfigured the tropes of the Yellow Peril, reflecting the social upheavals experienced by Germany after the war and Germany’s new relationship with its former colonies. The second, Ernst Toch and Ferdinand Lion’s Der Facher (The Fan, 1927–1930), transported a Chinese fairy tale to present-day Shanghai. Modern China becomes an allegorical site whose similarities to Germany are a means of exploring Germany’s new postwar identity. However, this portrayal also subtly positioned Germany in a dominant role, anticipating post-World War II neocolonialism.

The pandemic has rearticulated racial discourses in unprecedented ways and at an accelerating pace. The resurgent protests of Black Lives Matter demand fundamental changes in the criminal (in)justice system and racial relations in the US beyond the Black–white dichotomy. In this paper, I argue that our current shared struggles require a new form of internationalism against the rapid right-wing turn of global hegemonies that does not draw lines between the simple binaries of “East vs. West,” “white vs. Black,” or “authoritarianism vs. democracy,” but in the interconnected fights against the militarized police state, neoliberal capitalist order, Han supremacy, and the continued impacts of Euro-American coloniality.

Cet article analyse le partage intergénérational de recettes de soupes familiales chez les Sino-Américains à partir d’enregistement audio et video de séances de cuisine. Trois thèmes principaux ressortent: 1) la construction de l’hygiène au cours de la préparation des repas, 2) l’interrogation de l’authenticité et de la “chinoisité” dans les pratiques d’alimentation, et, 3) la revendication du capital culturel comme élement identitaire d’un groupe marginal aux Etats-Unis à travers les connaissances intergénérationnelles de l’alimentation. Considérés ensemble, ces thèmes montrent comment les Sino-Américains sont aux prises avec une longue histoire de discrimination et, en même temps, repoussent les tendances à l’assimilation grâce à la préservation positive de leur affinité culturelle et dessinent des espaces pour les nouvelles générations. This paper examines Chinese Americans’ intergenerational sharing of important family soup recipes in audio/video-recorded cooking sessions. Three main themes emerged: 1) Construction of hygiene around Chinese meal preparation; 2) questioning the authenticity and Chineseness of particular food practices; and 3) claiming cultural capital as part of a marginalized identity group in the U.S. through intergenerational food knowledge. Taken together, these themes demonstrate how Chinese Americans wrestle with a long history of discrimination while simultaneously pushing back against assimiliationist tendencies through preserving positive cultural affinity and carving out spaces for newer generations.

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...

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.

This article examines U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s Cold War dissent as a window into racial geopolitics in a post–World War II era of decolonization and U.S. global power. Focused on Wallace and the United States, the article uses a wide range of published and archival sources to argue that Wallace and U.S. anticolonial liberal elites saw anti-racist egalitarian pressures in the post-1945 international system as not only a threat, as existing scholarship suggests, but also an opportunity for U.S. global expansion—particularly in the Pacific Rim. By the 1960s, Wallace and postwar anti-racist activists diminished in influence amid global Cold War pressures reviving racial restrictions and Cold War militarization after the Korean War. Nonetheless, Wallace’s anti-racist diplomacy, stemming from long-running U.S. and global liberal debates and political struggles over race and empire, suggests the wider role of anti-racist geopolitics and the paradoxical persistence of race as a global cultural concept in the postwar era.

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...

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.

This paper discussed the discrimination that occurs in the life of Asian immigrants. Yellow Peril phenomenon occurs in 1882 in Europe and America which resulted in racial discrimination toward immigrants from China and Japan. In this study, the author uses data sources from a series drama entitled Tenno No Ryouriban (2015). This series drama showed the life of two immigrants from Japan named Tokuzo Akiyama and Shintaro Matsui who migrated to France. In their daily life, Tokuzo and Shintaro would frequently receive discrimination from white people. This study uses literal sociology. To obtain descriptions regarding discrimination, the author would analyze data in the form of scenes and dialogue excerpts are taken from the series drama Tenno No Ryouriban. Furthermore, there was also support theory Mise-En-Scene to help to explain the reason why a scene was shown in a particular manner by the film director. Result of this study showed that there were several scenes and dialogues excerpt which describe discrimination in various forms, such as Explicit Discrimination and Implicit Discrimination, and Institutional Discrimination and Cultural Discrimination. The author found the cause of discrimination described in the series drama Tenno No Ryouriban, which related to race differences such as differences in skin color, the nation of origin, and body height.

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.

This chapter delves into late Qing utopian thought from the perspective of ethnicity, race and nation. It begins with a historical account of the origin and development of modern racism, especially the concept of the ‘yellow race’. For China, a country where yellow has been a symbol of greatness, nobility and royalty for thousands of years, Western racial discourse such as ‘yellow peril’, surprisingly, became a catalyst for racism and nationalism. A considerable number of Chinese intellectuals regarded the xenophobic fear of the yellow race in the West as recognition of their own potential, from which they derived a utopian prospect for China and the Chinese. It is noteworthy that there are interesting divergences between these utopias, reflecting very dissimilar aims and hopes relevant to the world order.

This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.

Twenty-first-century understandings of how disability figures in Asian American literature and the representation of Asian American individuals have greatly evolved. Earlier, highly pejorative characterizations associated with the 19th-century “Oriental” or “yellow peril” as a carrier of disease whose body needed to be quarantined and excluded. Later, the model minority myth typecast Asian Americans as having extreme intellectual abilities to the point of freakishness. Disability studies asserts that having an “imperfect” disabled body is nothing to hide and questions beliefs in norms of behavior and experience. Focusing on disability in Asian American literature opens a new path to reflect on Asian American identity and experience in ways that break away from the racial types and narrative trajectories of immigrant success that have often been seen as defining what it is to be Asian American. Integrating a disability studies perspective into Asian American studies provides a compelling and necessary means of critiquing stereotypes such as the model minority myth, as well as to reread many classic texts of Asian American literature with attentiveness to difference, impairment, and loss.

Television is a significant socialization tool for children to learn about their social worlds. The children's brand, Thomas & Friends, targets preschool audiences with manifest messages about friendship and utility as well as troubling, latent messages about race, ethnicity, and difference. Through critical visual and verbal discursive analyses of the film, Hero of the Rails, we expose Thomas & Friends' investment in racial hierarchies despite its broader message of friendship. We identify four ways that Hiro is “othered” in the film: (1) his glamorized description as “strange,” (2) his consistently heavily accented voice, (3) his Japanese origin story, and (4) his pigmentation and powerlessness. Using theories of “othering,” we argue that the representation of cultural difference to the preschooler audience is fearful and propagates racist discourses of yellow peril and Orientalism.

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...

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...

While important scholarship exists on the television representations of Asian American identities, research in the UK has been focused on African Caribbean and South Asian identities. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to televisual representations of British Chinese identities, despite the British Chinese constituting one of the larger and fastest growing ethnic minority groups within contemporary Britain.\ud \ud Informed by an understanding of the complexity of the term ‘British Chinese’, this article explores the representation of British Chinese identities in British television drama. Despite the long-standing absence and invisibility of such identities in British television, as perceived within the popular imagination in Britain and British Chinese discourses, the article finds that a larger number of British Chinese actors have found notable employment in British television than is commonly acknowledged or remembered within the popular imagination.\ud \ud The article draws on a database that deploys a range of research, including archive research at the BFI Reuben Library, to map the presence of British Chinese actors in British television drama since 1945. Through this historiographic focus, the article identifies some of the most significant trends in representations of British Chinese identities in British television drama. It then illustrates and provides more specific texture to these broader patterns through the close textual analysis of a case study, the BBC1 flagship series Sherlock (2010-present). It concludes by reflecting on the contemporary period, which has seen an influx of British Chinese actors in British television drama as well as high-profile diversity campaigning within Britain.

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.

In September, 2014, Charisma Magazine--which describes itself as "a trusted source of news, teaching and inspiration to help spread the gospel of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit" and which has been a central identifying institution within Christian conservatism in the United States since 1975--posted on its CharismaNews section an opinion piece titled "Why I Am Absolutely Islamaphobic" [sic], by Gary Cass. (1) He urged that all Muslim-Americans either should be deported--using the acronym D.A.M.N. or Deport All Muslims Now--or should be forced to undergo sterilization. Charisma's author exhorted Christians to a modern-day Crusade, to "trust in God, then obtain gun(s)." After considerable backlash from subscribers and readers, Charisma removed the post on September 7, 2014, but never printed a retraction or apology. This example of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam discourse is recent; it represents a segment of conservative discourse today. Clearly, the first speechact about Muslims and Islam by a leading U.S. religious conservative was of an entirely different character. Within a week of the attacks on September xi, 2001, President George W. Bush--a professed born-again Christian, who flanked himself with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington--officially framed a distinction between terrorism and Islam. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," the president said; "Islam is peace." (2) But, that early and official act of moral leadership would meet stiff resistance by a segment of the religious conservative establishment. Bush-family friend, the prominent evangelical leader Franklin Graham, for example, immediately pushed back: "I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion," he said. (3) Other evangelical leaders expressed similar opposition to the official White House identity of Islam. Jerry Falwell, for example, in a prominent interview on 60 Minutes, said "I think Mohammed was a terrorist," adding, "He was a violent man, a man of war." (4) By the mid-point of the post-9/11 decade, this securitization of Islam among U.S. conservatives was in full expansion in social media and the blogosphere and in the organization of grassroots organizations. Conservative Catholic deacon Robert Spencer, for example, was positioned as director of the newly created blog, Jihad Watch--a project of the well-known conservative culture warrior, David Horowitz. Jihad Watch's sole function was to oppose the more progressive "politically correct" narrative regarding Islam with a distinctly politically incorrect or counternarrative. Conservative grassroots organizations also emerged expressly to counter the more progressive "Islam is peace" narrative. One such organization, ACT! for America, would eventually become larger than even the American Israel Political Affairs Committee. The organization's founder, Brigitte Gabriel, was a naturalized U.S. Evangelical with Lebanese Maronite roots, who had been affiliated with Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Speaking at the unofficial Intelligence Summit in Washington, DC, on February 19,2006, Gabriel said, "America and the West are doomed to failure in this war unless they stand up and identify the real enemy, Islam," (5) and elsewhere characterized "Every practicing Muslim," as "a radical Muslim." (6) In the area of religious fiction, popular conservative Christian novelists advanced a blend of the counternarrative and apocalypticism. Joel Richardson found a sustained niche audience that helped him attain bestselling status with books such as Antichrist: Islam's Awaited Messiah (Wine Press Publishing, 2006), The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Nature of the Beast (WND Books, 2009), and--once more--the Mideast Beast: The Case for an Islamic Antichrist (WND Books, 2012). In about 2009, this popular discourse about the danger of Islam took a much more irrational turn. In what we might call the "Green Scare"--following this historical-colored convention of the Red Scare and Yellow Peril over perceived threats from the East--a more conspiratorial and paranoid threat narrative emerged. …

SINCE ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1980s AND 1890s, Asian Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by the rights-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a "collective self," or Asian Canadian identity, through which to challenge the representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist state policies as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Canadian Internment, and the Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, the field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating the nation-state as the primary interlocutor of the Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of "strategic essentialism" (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as the field increasingly becomes drawn into the academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that the focus on domestic identity politics, and the promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs the risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot "shake up the systemic historical conditions and ... ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures" (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on the Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Asian Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how the construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to "think about the formation of the Canadian state through imperialism and colonialism" and to see Asian Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a "diasporic perspective" can highlight the links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a diasporic perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where the Opium Wars "had disrupted the local economy [and] provid[ed] much of the push for emigration" (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via the coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after the Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm can productively complicate the history of Asian Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in the Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho's arguments gesture to the benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes the perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Asian Canadian identity. Lai argues that the tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to the pressures of "state incorporation" currently informing Asian Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to "recirculate the logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms" (23). This logic becomes all the more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, the 2010 Maclean's article entitled "Too Asian" suggests that "the trope of the 'yellow peril'" has been reinvigorated in the national imaginary (Lai 17). …

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.

The emergence of Japan as a major world power in the early twentieth century generated anxiety over America’s place in the world. Fears of race suicide combined with a fear of the feminizing effects of over-civilization further exacerbated these tensions. Japanese jiu-jitsu came to symbolize these debates. As a physical example of the yellow peril, Japanese martial arts posed a threat to western martial arts of boxing and wrestling. The efficiency and effectiveness of Japanese jiu-jitsu, as introduced to Americans in the early twentieth century, challenged preconceived notions of the superiority of western martial arts and therefore American constructions of race and masculinity. As Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. nation wrestled with the Japanese and jiu-jitsu, they responded in various ways to this new menace. The jiu-jitsu threat was ultimately subjugated by simultaneously exoticizing, feminizing, and appropriating aspects of it in order to reassert the dominance of western martial arts, the white race and American masculinity.

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 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...