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Modern scholarship has drawn hasty and numerous parallels between the Yellow Peril discourses of the 19th- and 20th-century plagues and the recent racialization of infectious disease in the 21st-century. While highlighting these similarities is politically useful against Sinophobic epidemic narratives, Michel Foucault argues that truly understanding the past's continuity in the present requires a more rigorous genealogical approach. Employing this premise in a comparative analysis, this work demonstrates a critical discontinuity in the epidemic imaginary that framed the Chinese as pathogenic. Consequently, those seeking to prevent future disease racialization must understand modern Sinophobia as fundamentally distinct from that of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]