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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 States. However, such sentiments about the South Asian immigrant community are not new, as they are reflective of a "yellow peril" discourse. This study analyzes South Asian Americans' responses to a TIME Magazine column complaining about their influx into Edison, New Jersey. It first explores the racial formation that the model minority myth, in dialectical relationship with the yellow peril discourse, has produced among South Asians. Through this analysis, this study critically analyzes how South Asian Americans' discourses both reinforce and challenge their racialized status positions and identities as the model minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model minority stereotype is viewed as the most influential and pervasive stereotype for Asian Americans today. In this article, the author argues that this seemingly positive stereotype, the model minority, is inseparable from the yellow peril, a negative stereotype, when Asian Americans are stereotypically represented in mainstream media texts. The model minority–yellow peril dialectic is explicated with the concepts of racial triangulation and the ambivalence of stereotypes. Racial meanings for Asian Americans cannot be discussed without considering both local and global contexts. The author explores historical, political, and economic contexts of both the United States and Asia in which the two stereotypes were produced and reproduced, and examines how the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril operates in a Hollywood film, Rising Sun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]