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To what extent did U.S. intelligence believe that Imperial Japanese forces would invade the West Coast, an idea that many believe was responsible for the alleged atmosphere of wartime hysteria that led to mass confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans? Based on unused archival materials, this article shows that these agencies dismissed the idea of an impending Japanese invasion, shown by their negative reaction to Korean nationalist Kilsoo Haan’s “Yellow Peril” prediction of a Japanese invasion of California in 1943. It also demonstrates that assumptions about Yellow Peril ideas require more nuanced analysis, for they were not universally accepted or as widespread as often believed. The article concludes with observations on Kilsoo Haan, U.S. intelligence, and Japanese American internment.

In 1980 a large yellow steel sculpture by the Australian sculptor Ron Robertson-Swann was installed in the City Square in Melbourne, Australia. Commissioned by the Melbourne City Council, the sculpture attracted enormous media scrutiny and its tenure in the Square was a regular agenda item on City Council meetings from the time that a maquette of the proposed work was first displayed. Over the next 20 years the sculpture, later named Vault, was twice dismantled and reassembled at other sites. In this article I approach the sculpture through an object-oriented method, one that attributes agency to the human and nonhuman actors in these events. In so doing I seek to locate what Bruno Latour might have described as the “hidden geographies” of the sculpture. This close examination of the life of the work, and the many and varied interactions with the sculpture on the part of the people of Melbourne, demonstrates how Vault far exceeded Robertson-Swann's intentions for it.

For the past decade, confronting the reality of China’s gradual and peaceful rising, certain American politicians, army men, and scholars have been vigorously preaching the “China Threat Doctrine.” This doctrine seems with some certainty and innovation. However, through the historical mirrors, it is not hard to discern that such doctrine is nothing but a current “variant” under contemporary situations of the once clamorous “Yellow Peril Doctrine” fabricated and preached by Russian Tsar and German Emperor in the nineteenth century. Both the past and the current version of such doctrines share the same DNA in distorting the historical mainstream of Sino-foreign interactions for the past thousands of years, as well as in playing certain political legerdemain. The characteristics of such legerdemain are endeavoring to spiritually and publicly mobilize people for invasive activities and aggressions against China with alarming and sensational descriptions. Based on China’s extreme suffering under colonialist powers’ suppression and plunder since the 1840 “Opium War,” this article discloses that “Yellow Peril Doctrine” and “China Threat Doctrine” are essentially slogans of colonialism and imperialism. Furthermore, based on the historical facts of Sino-foreign economic interactions for the past thousands of years and the jurisprudential principles therein, this article discloses that “Yellow Peril Doctrine” and “China Threat Doctrine” have severely deviated from historical truth. Lastly, this article reminds all decent people both domestic and abroad not to take a casual attitude on the practical outcome of “Yellow Peril Doctrine” and “China Threat Doctrine.” On the contrary, people shall be aware of and prepare for the danger in times of peace and shall not act as cat’s paws for American hegemonists.

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

The benefits of using films/movies in the English language classroom to teach culture and cultural awareness in addition to the four skills of language acquisition have been well documented. This study attempts to examine how Korean Americans are portrayed and depicted in Hollywood films which have traditionally reduced the complexity of Asian nations and cultures into simplified stereotypes. Most Asian characters were stereotyped as the “Yellow Peril,” “Lotus Blossom,” “Dragon Lady,” “Charlie Chan,” or “Dr. Fu Manchu.” Though these negative stereotypes were commonly used in early Hollywood films, they continue to appear in many contemporary films. In recent years, additional stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans have appeared, such as the “Nerdy Shy Guy,” the “Anti-Model Minority,” and “The Greedy Merchant.” The study also examines how Hollywood deals with Korean women who do not fit the classic and contemporary negative Hollywood stereotypes. The study concludes by suggesting methods for identifying the negative stereotypes presented in Hollywood films in the English language classroom in order to raise awareness and when necessary to challenge these stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans in films or other forms of media.

Chinese emigrants or kakyō occupy an important but little acknowledged niche in the history of modern Japan. They mediated Japan's relations with China and the West in the Meiji period, they competed against Japanese economic interests in Korea before and after it became a Japanese colony, and they were a controversial source of labour for the Japanese economy. This article recovers the history of Chinese migrants in Japan and Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century paying special attention to the ambivalent Japanese attitude toward them. This study not only contributes to a fuller understanding of modern Japanese history but also offers historical insights into Japan-China relations in the twenty-first century as Chinese migration to Japan again causes public concern.

With the Chinese presence on the African continent being perceived and portrayed as a new global phenomenon there has been a concomitant, albeit sporadic and nuanced, emergence of an aversion to things Chinese, gradually permeating popular consciousness. In a postcolonial world these anti-Sinitic or Sino-phobic sentiments are crudely reminiscent of the late nineteenth century colonial cries of the “yellow peril”, which culminated in acts of exclusion and extreme prohibition that singled out and targeted the Chinese in the various colonies across the Atlantic and Pacific including South Africa. This article, however, proposes to trace the genesis of some of anti-Sinicism to a pre-industrial period by considering developments in colonial Southern Africa. It will show how in the early Dutch settler and British colonial periods at the Cape, when the number of Chinese present in the region was miniscule, negative feelings towards the Chinese as the “other” were already apparent and evident in the reactions to them prior to the arrival of the large numbers which came to America, Australasia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

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

A 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 maps the rise and dissemination of Yellow Peril fears in the United States between about 1980 and 1993 and seeks to explain them. Anti-communism had been an animating force in Ronald Reagan's career, but shortly after he left office an opinion poll revealed that Japan had replaced the Soviet Union as the greatest perceived threat to the US. While economic anxieties contributed to the resurgence of Yellow Peril sentiments, this article emphasizes the vital parts played by other phenomena, notably Reagan's economic policies, partisan politics, a media war, and the ending of the Cold War. The Yellow Peril scare was widely criticized, and by the early 1990s the controversy had invaded popular culture. Ronald Reagan is frequently applauded for restoring American self-confidence after the “malaise” of the Carter years, but the apprehensions discussed here suggest that he enjoyed only limited success in this respect.

This article examines the intersections of race, nationalism, and water conservation policy. Such relationships, it argues, are particularly pronounced in the history of the Colorado River Delta, a border region and an arid region, especially in the discourse surrounding the international allocation of the river. It focuses on the intellectual underpinnings of federal reclamation leaders and their subscription to the tenets of the idea of "yellow peril," with special reference to Chinese and Japanese immigrant farmers along the U.S.-Mexican border. While the reclamation movement has received considerable scrutiny, the geopolitical views informing it have been largely overlooked. The unexamined writings of George Maxwell, in particular, present a new perspective on the major architect of the National Reclamation Act, one of the region's most far-reaching and consequential pieces of legislation.

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 extensive literature concerning America's exclusion of Asians has emphasized primarily the domestic contexts for restricting trans-Pacific migrations. Fears of a “Yellow Peril” invasion and conquest were used to justify the earliest American attempts to limit the entry of races and nationalities deemed too different and incompatible to integrate and participate on equal terms in a republic dominated by European arrivals and their descendants. Asian American Studies scholars in particular have mined the rich vein of documents delineating the formative legacy of anti-Asian laws, ideologies, and institutions shaping the still deeply troubled patrolling of American borders today. Less attention has turned to the influence of foreign policy considerations and their role in carving out categories of migrants exempted from exclusionary laws. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882 made exceptions for merchants, merchant family members, students and teachers, diplomats, and tourists.

The Asian is no stranger to science, or for that matter, science fiction. Jack London's 1906 short story "The Unparalleled Invasion," set in 1976, chronicles the emergence of China as a world power coming out from the shadow of Japanese imperialism; due to its incredibly fecund citizens now numbering in the hundreds of millions, China threatens all modern civilizations. (1) To combat this reproductive menace, biological warfare is employed, thereby conveniently annihilating the Chinese population. Sax Rohmer's infamous creation of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1913 twined the figure of the Asian other intimately with the dark sciences as he came to be known as the "devil doctor." Although set in London's Chinatown, Rohmer's Fu Manchu-centered series of novels nevertheless drew upon the immigration anxieties flourishing in the United States, where it became a bestselling series; the image was so popular, in fact, that Rohmer resurrected this infamous character time and again. While both Rohmer and London operate within early twentieth-century "yellow peril" fictions, their cultural representations did not emerge from a vacuum. (2) Sidney L. Gulick's foundational study, The American Japanese Problem; a Study of the Racial Relations of the East and the West, published in the same year as "The Unparalleled Invasion," explains that "Japan's amazing victory over Russia has raised doubts among white nations. The despised Asiatic, armed and drilled with Western weapons, is a power that must be reckoned with. In the not distant future Asia, armed, drilled, and united, will surpass in power, they aver, any single white people, and it is accordingly a peril to the rest of the world" (225). Here, Gulick refers to the 1905 conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, which marked a sea change in international relations precisely because it was the first time an Asian nation had defeated a European power in modern warfare. However, Gulick's rhetorical descriptions illustrate how this moment required a reorientation and reconsideration of Asia more broadly as a location from which to mold futuristic representations and alternative temporalities. For instance, continued tensions over Chinese immigrant laborers resulted in a series of exclusion acts throughout the late nineteenth century that further cemented the status of the Asian as an alien subject, unfit for assimilation and integration into the United States. According to Urmila Seshagiri, the social context for Fu Manchu should also be situated transnationally in light of the fact that the Manchu dynasty had just concluded and Sun Yat-sen had begun a modernization campaign: "Fu-Manchu and his hordes ... emblematize not only dynastic China's ideological opposition to the modern Christian West but also the emergent geopolitical ambitions of a post-1911 China determined to fashion itself as a nation unhindered by the imperial designs of Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, or Japan" (170). From this perspective, both London's short story and Rohmer's book series draw from multiple anxieties over Asia as pollutive geography, military menace, and economic competitor; these cultural productions interrogate what the attendant Alien/Asian might mean for "any single white people." Both London and Rohmer imagine alternative temporalities where the Alien/ Asian is inextricably tied to science, the future, and technology. Although yellow-peril fictions and other such cultural forms first proliferated over a century ago, this special issue elucidates how the connection between the Asian American and the alien other still remains a force to draw upon to allegorize racial tension and exclusion. I further explore the discursive interventions made by both Laura Hyun Yi Kang and David Palumbo-Liu in employing the "slash" within the term Asian American, as I call attention to the ways in which Asia and America stand in an uneasy and unstable relationship with the other. (3) The title of this special issue, "Alien/Asian," also emphasizes how the binaristic formulation of Asian American might possess subcategories and intricacies routed through genre conventions that touch upon and intersect with fantasy, speculative fiction, science fiction, and other similar genres. …

The World War II combat film Bataan depicts the Japanese "yellow peril" enemy not only as hostile to both white and black Americans, but as even more racist to blacks than white Americans, displacing the history of white racism towards blacks onto the Asian enemy.

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.

Racial hierarchy in Canada between 1900 and 1950 shaped the way immigrant “others” were portrayed in White-Anglophone Canadian discourse. Crimes involving ethnic minorities were explained in racial and cultural terms that fed stereotypes and incited fears that served to marginalize and oppress minority groups, particularly people of colour. Chinese men in particular were targets of a racial and sexual othering that resulted in the distrust and oppression of this group. Moral and sexual threats posed by Chinese immigrants were part of an overarching fear of Chinese influence on white Canada known as the “Yellow Peril.” The myth of the Yellow Peril interwove all of the predominant discourse in the early twentieth century, encouraging and exacerbating accusations of vice, gambling, interracial seduction, drug use, and other ‘moral offences’ against the Chinese. Racist perception of Chinese immigrant men in Canada helped to sustain prevailing imperialist ideologies, marking out Asian societies as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive.’ Chinese immigrant men were perceived to have inferior moral standards and, like other men of colour, were believed to be ncapable of controlling their sexual desires. Moral anxieties of this kind contributed to public support for racist legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, and other laws and regulations which served to limit the entry of Chinese persons into Canada and to socially and economically marginalize those already here.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, when Asians began immigrating to the U.S. West in significant numbers, they have played an integral role in developing and shaping the region through such activities as mining, building the transcontinental railroad, farming, creating businesses and communities, and participating in transnational capital flows that connect Asia and the western states. While they have played a constitutive role in the region, Asian Americans have historically been marginalized and excluded from full political and cultural citizenship in the U.S. West and the nation through legal, political, and social means that target their racial and cultural difference. This marginalization and exclusion are exhibited in the relative invisibility of Asian Americans in prominent narratives of the U.S. West and their stereotyping in much U.S. western literature. As Hsuan Hsu asserts, “Although historically the largest concentration of Asian Americans has been in the western states, they have been written out of dominant narratives of the region. When they are represented, it is often through stereotypes such as the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ Charlie Chan, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ the model minority, or the laundrymen, prostitutes, and cooks that infuse western settings with ‘local color.’” Asian American writers address this contradictory situation – of being constitutive yet liminal – in literary works that invoke dominant narratives of the U.S. West about such topics as mobility, freedom, land, gender, and domesticity and that demonstrate the limitations of these western myths for Asian American subjects. Asian American literature also puts western literature in a global, hemispheric context by highlighting the relationship between the U.S. West and the Pacific Rim and the transpacific ties of urban and suburban spaces. This essay examines how selected Asian American literary works create and shape as well as affirm and critique discourses of the U.S. West. Constriction and Mobility Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 frontier thesis locates the distinctive American character in westward movement across the continent. As Sau-ling Wong observes, the frontier thesis links together several key American myths: “[It] regards the availability of free land – presupposing unconstrained mobility to take advantage of it – coupled with equality of opportunity, to be crucial determinants of American character and the source of American democracy.” For Asians in the United States, however, presumed basic American rights such as citizenship, the ability to own land, and freedom of mobility were limited from early on in their history in the nation.

Introduction The transnational production of Japan as a post-imperial nation The Japanese people are often accused of their inability or unwillingness to properly remember and atone for the atrocities they committed as a colonial empire, especially during the Second World War. In the author's view this ethical assessment is fundamentally correct; yet what is being emphasized in this chapter is that the problem of forgetfulness or at least insufficient remorse in post-imperial Japan was not produced by the Japanese people alone, but was rather the result of a mutually convenient transnational collaboration of Japanese nationalists/conservatives with the US led advanced capitalist nations who were victorious in the Second World War. Moreover, this failure to adequately address the matter of Japan's imperialist past has an intimate relationship to the transnational refusal to remember that Japan's imperialism was both enabled by, and enabling the imperialism of the American and European empires. As an entryway into discussing Japan as a transnationally produced post-imperial nation – and by the latter the author means a nation which carries the weight of the imperial past despite the dismantling of its former empire – the author would like to begin by listing some of the major flash points in the national and transnational field of memories that continue to trigger debates about Japan as a forgetful and irresponsible former imperial power. Of course, the author cannot list them all, let alone analyse them in any depth, but here are some of the most hotly contested matters in Japan, East Asia, and North America. The Nanjing Massacre The ‘comfort women’ or sexual slavery issue The territorial disputes (especially Dokto/Takeshima/Liancourt Rocks and Daioyu/Taioyutai/Senkaku) The status of former colonial subjects now residing in Japan, mostly Koreans The status of former colonial subjects who were mobilized as labourers, soldiers, sailors, or military personnel Japanese biological and chemical warfare testing on live human beings. […]

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.

In a series of lectures on Nietzsche delivered in 1940, Heidegger enumerates the varieties of ‘consciously posited bindings’ that in the modern age secure for ‘mankind’ the possibility of its ‘abso...

This article narrates the development of a set of ideas and provocative imagery about population growth and movement that has shaped the way people think about world politics. It represented humanity in terms of populations that could and should be controlled to prevent degeneration and preserve civilization. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this discursive tradition supported a series of political projects that aimed to either exclude those deemed able to subsist on less and reproduce more or regulate reproduction worldwide. Conceiving of the world in terms of populations – rather than nation-states – led people to think of new ways in which it might be divided, unsettling diplomatic alignments and alliances. But it also contributed to critiques of state sovereignty, since population problems were said to affect everyone and require a united response. This intellectual history helps illuminate some of the local and parochial reasons why people began to ‘think globally’.

The history of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is usually treated by historians as an exercise in power politics that came about because of the broadly similar national interests of the two signatories who were both opposed to Russian expansion in North-East Asia. Such an approach overlooks the fact that this was an alignment between two countries that differed in regard to race, religion, and culture. To overcome this divide and thus seal the alliance, both sides made overt use of royal diplomacy to create mutual respect and a sense of equality between the two nations. This led to a series of high-profile royal visits and the reciprocal conferment of the highest orders of honour. However, in the background racial factors, such as the 'Yellow Peril' phenomenon and the rise of pan-Asianism, continued to exist. In the Great War, these problems came to the surface and fuelled mutual suspicion. As a result, at the end of that conflict, some felt that the alliance had no future, and this sense of malaise contributed to its termination at the Washington Conference.

A strong characteristic of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s was its fascination with all things “oriental,” or generally exotic. It was expressed in a multitude of areas, including furniture, fashion, movies and architecture. It was also evident in quiltmaking, an extremely popular pastime of the era, in the preponderance of patchwork patterns that had an exotic theme or name. Sometimes the designs of these patterns directly reflected their exotic names; most often they did not. The reasons for the popularity of exotic pattern names are varied. Certainly, pattern designers were capitalizing on the fashion for anything oriental. But, as this paper will propose, ladies' magazine publishers and quilt column writers also were reacting to Americans' ambivalence about Asians—their fear of the “yellow peril” mixed with their admiration for Eastern design. By naming and renaming patterns and, more importantly, by mixing oriental, “colonial,” and modern imagery and verbiage, they diluted the...

This article explores the ramifications of the intersections of gender, race, and class ideologies for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws in the years immediately following their passage. Drawing from government documents and archival data, I argue that the notions of gender, race, and class that permeated the legislative debate contained significant incoherences and self-contradictions, and that many of the dilemmas surrounding the enforcement of the exclusion laws against Chinese women resulted from these collisions. Faced with conflicting mandates derived from, for example, racism and patriarchy, enforcement officers had to choose between equally powerful discourses. Their ad hoc and often pragmatic approach to such dilemmas contrasted sharply with a policy process that otherwise appeared to be driven by unquestioned-and unquestionable-moral mandates. In concluding, I note the implications for our understanding of the contingencies and instabilities of ideology and the legal practices of which it is part. Does this term laborer apply to females, servants, or married women? (San Francisco Customs Collector requesting instructions for implementing the Chinese Exclusion Law, 1882; underlined in handwritten original) What certificate would the Chinese government issue to the wife? A certificate that she is a female? (attorneys for Chinese merchants and steamship companies appealing the requirement that wives of Chinese merchants carry their own certificates) President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (22 Stat. 58) suspending the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States, thereby barring immigrants on the basis of their nationality for the first time in American history. The effort to pass such a law had begun with a massive congressional investigation into the impact of Chinese immigration, had consumed months of congressional debate, and had survived a presidential veto. In the end, supporters of Chinese exclusion were satisfied that what they called the "yellow peril" had been stanched (The New York Times, 9 May 1882, p. 4). Labor historians disagree about the primary reasons for the enactment of the Chinese exclusion, with some emphasizing the role of anti-Chinese racism in the labor movement at a time of economic upheaval and industrial strife (Sandmeyer 1939; Hill 1996; Saxton 1971; Mink 1986; Lyman 2000; Lee 2003), and others insisting that Congress itself had fueled the racism and then strategically come to American labor's "rescue" (Gyory 1998). Putting aside the question of ultimate causes or primary movers, there is no doubt that racism was a denning feature of the debate. Indeed, anti-Chinese racism was an important rhetorical tool that members of Congress returned to again and again in making the case for exclusion. Less conspicuous in the congressional debates and less remarked upon in the scholarly literature, class ideologies permeated and spiked the racist rhetoric. For example, Chinese merchants and others "not in the laboring classes" were exempt from the exclusion. While the exemption for merchants was in part carved out so as not to interfere with the lucrative trade with China (Calavita 2001), it was justified on the grounds that "[t]he Chinese mercantile class is entirely different from the working class" (U.S. Congress 1891:282). Still less visible in these debates were the gender ideologies that nonetheless shaped the legislation and that ultimately caused considerable confusion and turmoil among enforcement officials. This invisibility was related to gendered assumptions about Chinese women-that they were neither laborers nor merchants and thus irrelevant to the matter at hand. While it is true that far fewer Chinese women than men traveled to the United States in this period, those who did arrive came from a wide range of backgrounds and had myriad and diverse motives for their travel. As we will see, the legislative lacuna opened up by Congress's omission meant that enforcement officials had to determine for themselves, for example, whether a woman could ever be considered a "laborer. …

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

Australia, with the exception of its indigenous peoples, is a land of recent migrants. Our national anthem proclaims that, 'For those who've come across the seas, we've boundless plains to share.' However, this has never been an unconditional offer. Immigration laws in Australia have often disclosed a 'deeply xenophobic hostility' toward foreigners. Fear of the yellow peril, the supposed hordes of Chinese, 'bent on overrunning White Australia and destroying its way of life forever', prompted racially discriminatory immigration restrictions as early as 1855. One of the first statutes passed after Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901(Cth), which introduced the dictation test by which the White Australia policy was implemented.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. hunger for narcotics and cocaine was so notorious that one leading public-health official declared, "We are the drug-habit nation." (1) Today, Americans lustfully--if schizophrenically--consume huge quantities of both the illegal "dope" of stoners and street junkies and the equally profitable products of high-tech bioresearch labs and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We are now, as we were a century ago, a people torn between, as the TV says, "just say no" and "the miracle of medicine." But what do we mean by "drugs"? The public imagination struggles mightily to preserve stark distinctions between the various kinds of "drugs": heroin, cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, anabolic steroids, nicotine, caffeine, aspirin, Ritalin, Viagra, Prozac, and OxyContin, to name but a dozen. The history of drug prohibition, however, shows us that the difference between a "poison" and a "medicine," between drugs as scourge or salvation, is not so easily determined. Are those who become dependent upon drugs victims of a physical disease, or are they criminals and moral deviants? When do personal, medical, or recreational decisions become a social menace? And is it the chemistry or the social status of the consumer that shapes these attitudes? After more than a century of the "war on drugs," the historical transformation of drug use in the United States between the 1890s and 1930s from the free and largely unknowing use of any drug to the strict regulation and criminalization of narcotics, cocaine, and cannabis remains largely misunderstood by the public. At the root of the drug-prohibition movement in the United States is race, the driving force behind the first laws criminalizing drug use, which first appeared as early as the 1870s. In an era in which African Americans, Asian and Mexican immigrants, as well as most European immigrants--Jews, Slavs, and Catholic Irish and Italians--were considered racial others, white racial fears amplified the sense of public menace posed by drugs and drug users. The belief of Gilded Age whites that racial difference marked a biologically determined predisposition to, say, deviousness, slovenliness, or lustfulness served to supercharge the hazards posed by Catholic inebriation, black intoxication, or Chinese addictions. (2) The pleasure of drug taking not only endangered Protestant morality, but the association of specific drug pleasures with individual racial groups raised the dire threat of miscegenation and urban disorder. The nation's first drug laws had appeared in San Francisco in the 1870s, unsuccessfully prohibiting whites from patronizing opium dens in Chinatown lest some white woman should fall into the hands of the yellow peril. Indeed, the first bans on smoking opium only applied to whites, as race mixing and not the health of Chinese immigrants was at issue. Organized nativism, including the Ku Klux Klan, played a crucial role in pressing for federal alcohol prohibition in the 1910s, marking the 18th Amendment as a failed attempt by the waning WASP establishment to curtail the sinful pleasures of urban Catholics and the immigrant working classes. One of America's favorite recreational drugs, marijuana, was banned in the 1930s as a way of criminalizing the tens of thousands of Mexican migrant farm workers who entered the Southwest in search of work. These laws have remained persistently ineffective in curbing America's desire for intoxication and have instead served to demonize and outlaw entire populations. (3) In the Jim Crow South, the dynamics of race, gender, and the growth of a mass consumer culture combined with the reformist impulses of the Progressive era to wage war on the "Negro cocaine fiend." (4) The changes in Coca-Cola in this time period illustrate this point. Marketed exclusively to middle class and professional whites, Coca-Cola contained a small quantity of coca extracts until 1903. When Coca-Cola was introduced, cocaine was championed by doctors and psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, as a medical marvel. …

Since Edward Said's influential formulation, scholars in a variety of disciplines have unpacked orientalism in its various incarnations. Within American studies, theories of orientalism have been used to understand more fully both the relationship of the United States to Asia during the “Pacific century” and the history of racial formation and racism with regard to Asian Americans. One of the prevailing tendencies has been to posit the Oriental as that which is marginalized and excluded, as either the exotic Other or the yellow peril. Both Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East and Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism do much to refocus this discussion, using contexts that demonstrate how Asia and Asian Americans were not just treated as, to use Alexander Saxton's phrase, “the indispensable enemy,” but rather held, both politically and culturally, within a much more paradoxical “embrace.”

The Russian conquest of Siberia was not only a remarkable event in world history like the conquest of the New World by the Western European nations, but also a decisive step in Russia's empire-building. Through territorial enlargement the empire became multiethnic. This process resembled the expansion of the white settlers in North America. Like North America, Siberia represented an “open frontier.” Harsh nature and the encounter between the white settlers and the “savages” formed the identity of the frontier. From the perspective of modern cultural anthropology the frontier also shaped reflections on the self and the other. There existed, however, a decisive difference to the American frontier: Siberia became a meeting ground for Russian and Asian cultures. Whereas the American frontier—except in the encounter with Mexico—remained isolated, Russians early came in contact with Asian nations. From the early emergence of a modern state in Russia during the era of Enlightenment, Russia came into manifold contacts with “civilized” Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) and with “uncivilized” Asians, i.e. the tribes of Siberia. At the junction between Europe and Asia, Russia as a Eurasian empire was the sole country in Europe which was so near to Asia. It was therefore logical that Russia felt a kind of mission toward Asia and required the role of a mediator between Europe and Asia.

“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.

Qu’elle fascine ou qu’elle rebute, qu’elle soit synonyme d’opportunités ou porteuse de défis, la Chine est aujourd’hui devenue un acteur incontournable des relations internationales. Deuxième économie mondiale en passe de dépasser les États-Unis, la montée en puissance de cet État-continent qui représente à lui seul un cinquième de la population de la planète met dès lors la notion de pouvoir mondial en question. La Chine est-elle une puissance mondiale à même de concurrencer, voire détrôner, la domination américaine ?Qu’en est-il en particulier de sa pénétration récente en Amérique latine, une région du monde que les États-Unis considèrent historiquement comme leur arrière-cour et l’Union européenne (UE) comme une importante zone d’influence ?, Centre(s) de recherche :Center for International Relations Studies (CEFIR, ULg) ;Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI, Sciences Po Paris), info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In late 1890’s, a xenophobic Yihetuan (“Boxer”) movement emerged in German sphere of influence in Shandong. In 1900, the movement spread into the neighbouring province of Zhili and was largely tolerated by anti-foreign officials. Foreign diplomats failed to understand this threat. As a consequence of hasty and miscalculated moves of both sides, the Chinese court found itself in the middle of an open conflict with the great powers. Since mid-June, foreign detachments were fighting with governmental troops in Zhili; on June 20, German Minister to China was killed and the siege of the Beijing legations began. German forces in the Far East were too limited to participate much on the fighting. Germany sent a large expeditionary force to the Far East, but these troops arrived too late to take part on the conquest of Beijing on 14 August 1900. Allied forces under supreme command of German Field Marshall Alfred vonWaldersee occupied Zhili and conducted many punitive operations at the country. During the crisis, Germany gained bad reputation for the conduct of her troops.

Asia Pacific Viewpoint. For much of the time in New Zealand and Australia, our journal’s name has little resonance with the bulk of the population in these countries. There are moments though, when events at home and abroad come together to pull the respective gaze of New Zealanders and Australians away from more parochial fascinations, such as the RugbyWorld Cup taking place in New Zealand as we write, and from the Western media geographies that direct attention to North America and Europe, with occasional glimpses of military activities in the Middle East. These moments can be revealing, in large part because of the glimpse they give us of the national ‘viewpoint’ towards the Asia Pacific and how countries in the region are scripted. Three recent events and trends give us cause to pause and reflect on where the current relationship between New Zealand, Australia and the Asia Pacific region is at, not just in terms of the diplomatic or economic form of the relationship, but also in terms of the imaginaries associated with the region. The raison d’etre of Asia Pacific Viewpoint since its establishment in the 1960s has been to improve ‘understanding of the changes that are transforming the Asian and Pacific scene’ (Buchannan, 1960) and encourage alternative viewpoints and perspectives. Our brief analysis of three contemporary examples suggests that we have a long way to go. Asia Pacific viewpoints are central to recent Australian debates regarding refugee policies. In 2001, conservative Prime Minister John Howard controversially refused to let the Norwegian tanker, the MV Tampa, dock at an Australian port after it had saved 433 mainly Afghani asylum seekers from a sinking vessel between Indonesia and Australia. With an election looming, and conservative voices manipulating widespread anti-refugee feelings that bordered on hysteria, Howard deployed military forces to prevent the vessel from landing before hastily devising the ‘Pacific Solution’. Rather than ‘process’ (a disgracefully dehumanising term) the asylum seekers on Australian soil, he looked first to Indonesia, who refused, then to more economically dependent states in Melanesia. The former Australian colonial territory of Papua New Guinea, which allowed Manus Island to be used as a ‘human processing zone’, and the tiny island state of Nauru (whose once bountiful supplies of phosphate had long since been diminished by Australian mining companies and used to enhance the New Zealand and Australian agricultural economies) became sites to ‘outsource’ and ‘offshore’ humanitarian responsibilities (see Rajaram, 2003). Midway through the stand-off, the Twin Towers were brought down, contributing to public anxieties and approval of Howard’s handling of the crisis, even as Australia’s international reputation floundered. For Howard and his supporters, the episode rejuvenated long-established anxieties many Australians hold towards Asian refugees and migrants, rekindling the ‘Yellow Peril’ fears that underlay the country’s notorious White Australia policy. In contrast, the Pacific was scripted as neo-colonial spaces where Australia could forgo its humanitarian obligations and Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 52, No. 3, December 2011 ISSN 1360-7456, pp233–235

Au xixe siècle les sociétés « lointaines » furent perçues comme communautaires et traditionnelles. De manière concomitante, sur fond d’expansion coloniale, se développèrent des doctrines nationalistes et/ou racialistes. Des conceptions plus anciennes furent également réactivées, qui faisaient de « l’Orient » le monde de la tradition et du despotisme. C’est à cette époque que se cristallise le stéréotype du supposé « manque d’individualité » des Japonais.À l’occasion des guerres remportées contre la Chine et la Russie, en 1894-1895 et en 1904-1905, les théories du péril jaune fleurissent. Par la suite, les théories culturalistes soulignent la dimension communautaire de la société japonaise, bientôt rejointes par les discours sur la crise du sujet occidental. Les Japonais ont eux aussi contribué à renforcer ce cliché. 日本人に個人性に欠けているという考えは、19世紀後半のヨーロッパに始まる。個人vs社会という見方が広まり、植民地主義が発展した時代である。このような状況のもとで、非西洋社会は原始的共同体に過ぎないと見なされた。さらに、当時優勢であった人種論によってそれぞれの民族を特徴づける傾向も強かった。日清・日露戦争が終わると、黄禍論が流行する。第二次世界大戦後に興った文化相対主義においても、「主体の死」に憧れる西洋知識人の妄想においても、このステレオタイプはさまざまな形で繰り返された。日本のなかのオート・ジャポニスムともいえる流れにおいても、この誤った固定観念は繰り返し主張されているのだ。 During the nineteenth century, “faraway” societies were perceived as community-based and traditional. At the same time, nationalist and/or racialist doctrines were developed against a background of colonial expansion. Older conceptions of the “Orient” as a world of tradition and despotism were also revived. It was during this period that the stereotype of a supposed “lack of individuality” amongst the Japanese was formed.Japan’s victories over China and Russia in 1894-1895 and 1904-1905 saw theories on the Yellow Peril flourish. Culturalist theories subsequently underlined the community dimension of Japanese society and were soon joined by discourses on the crisis of the Western subject. The Japanese have also played a part in reinforcing this cliché.

In the space of thirty years the circumstances of Australian nationhood changed irrevocably. The country's strategic dependence on Britain drew it into two wars that both originated in European rivalry and together exhausted European supremacy. The first sapped the political stability of the combatants and cut the flows of trade and investment that sustained their prosperity. The second destroyed their empires, leaving an impoverished rump of a continent divided and bound by the two superpowers to its east and west. Britain, a victor in both wars, was perhaps the most diminished by their cumulative effects and Australia, as the largest British outpost in the Pacific, also incurred heavy losses. The fading of imperial certainties created doubt and division. The nation-building project faltered under the weight of debt and increased dependence. Only as the second war spread to the Pacific, and Australia found itself isolated and in danger of invasion, came a belated recognition of the need to reconstruct the nation for changed circumstances. Those who survived the first of these wars knew it as the Great War; they had never experienced such a catastrophe and could not imagine that another would follow so soon. Europe had enjoyed a century of peace since the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars – although European powers waged repeated wars of colonial conquest, at home there were only occasional and limited conflicts that were quickly settled by a decisive encounter of professional troops. The Great War involved mass conscript armies and absorbed the entire resources of the combatants in a prolonged contest of attrition that lasted from 1914 to 1918. It was sparked in the Balkans, a powder-keg of imperial and national rivalry, when a Serb terrorist assassinated a member of the Austrian royal family as he toured an outlying province. Since Germany supported Austria-Hungary in its ultimatum to Serbia, and Britain and France joined with Russia to resist them, the war extended from the Atlantic seaboard to Europe's eastern borderlands. Soon it drew in Turkey and Italy. The United States came late, but the global reach of the combatants made this a world as well as a continental war. After Germany overran Belgium and repulsed a Russian advance, the initial movement of the combatants bogged down in static trench warfare. On land and sea the application of industrial technology to military conflict gave defenders supremacy over attackers.

Introduction: The No Man's Land of Displacement Angela K. Smith and Sandra Barkhof Part 1: Military Displacement 1. Displacement and the Combat Soldier: Poetic Interpretations Angela K. Smith 2. The French Resister in the Maghreb: French North Africa and the Formation of the Forces Aeriennes Francaises Libres, 1940-41 G.H. Bennett 3. The Other Side of the Poison Cloud: Canadian Soldiers as English Patients After the First Gas Attacks Martin Goodman 4. Diluting Displacement: Letters from Captivity Oliver Wilkinson 5. A "Positive" Displacement?: Italian PoW in World War Two Britain Marco Giudici 6. Exploitation of Displaced European Refugees and Axis Prisoners of War in Britain, 1939-49 J.M. Goodchild 7. A Period in Limbo: Placing People and Punctuation in E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room. Hazel Hutchison Part 2: Civilian Displacement 8. Renegotiating the Yellow Peril: Cultural and Physical Displacement in the German Colony in China During the First World War Sandra Barkhof 9. "His Dearest Property": Women, Nation and Displacement in Storm Jameson's Cloudless May. Katherine Cooper 10. "Everything's in a Terrible Mess": Displacement in the Wartime Fictions of Elsa Triolet and Irene Nemirovsky Krista Cowman 11. "When Most Relief Workers Had Never Heard of Freud": UNRRA in the French Zone of Occupation in Germany, 1945-1947 Laure Humbert 12. Fading Childhood Memories of World War II Displacement: Appropriation, Non-Appropriation and Misappropriation Iris Guske and Niklas Guske 13. Prisoners of the Past?: German Refugee Associations Today Karl Cordell

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.

(2001). Frankenstein, racial science, and the yellow peril. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-28.

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. …