The Yellow Peril as a Travelling Discourse: A Comparative Study of Wang Lixiong's China Tidal Wave

Abstract

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.