Sax Rohmer Research Articles

Sanctified Sinophobia, Christian Nationalism, and M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger

Abstract: This article examines the bestselling 1898 novel The Yellow Danger , a so-called Chinese invasion fantasy that inspired Sax Rohmer’s infamous Fu Manchu series. Where analysis of The Yellow Danger has tended to underplay its religious dimension, I argue that its depiction of the Yellow Peril constitutes a prototype of what I call “sanctified Sinophobia,” religiously motivated hostility toward China that now fuels contemporary Christian nationalism. Both as a characterological emblem of racial personality and as an eschatological force of nature, the Yellow Terror represents an ineffable Satanic malevolence, defying European Christians’ existing categories of evil. Tracing these two variants of sanctified Sinophobia in Shiel’s novel, I then examine how the text’s logics of ethnoreligious purity continue to structure the prayers, benedictions, and oracles of so-called China Virus discourse.

Sanctified Sinophobia, Christian Nationalism, and M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger

Abstract: This article examines the bestselling 1898 novel The Yellow Danger , a so-called Chinese invasion fantasy that inspired Sax Rohmer’s infamous Fu Manchu series. Where analysis of The Yellow Danger has tended to underplay its religious dimension, I argue that its depiction of the Yellow Peril constitutes a prototype of what I call “sanctified Sinophobia,” religiously motivated hostility toward China that now fuels contemporary Christian nationalism. Both as a characterological emblem of racial personality and as an eschatological force of nature, the Yellow Terror represents an ineffable Satanic malevolence, defying European Christians’ existing categories of evil. Tracing these two variants of sanctified Sinophobia in Shiel’s novel, I then examine how the text’s logics of ethnoreligious purity continue to structure the prayers, benedictions, and oracles of so-called China Virus discourse.

‘The China Virus’: Invasion, Contagion, and the ‘Yellow Peril’

‘The China Virus’: Invasion, Contagion, and the ‘Yellow Peril’

Criminal Sleight of Hand: The Detective Magician as Transitional Figure

The detective magician, an American subgenre, was popularized by several series characters between 1935 and 1945. This decade comprises a meeting point between different strains of detective fiction: the waning years of the Golden Age, a highpoint of hard-boiled pulp detectives, and the rise of the espionage novel. Following Ernest Mandel's general chronology from Delightful Murder, I argue that the detective magician serves as a transitional figure who embodies contradictory impulses: the conflation of mystification and demystification, the supernatural and the rational, and justice and criminality. After a preliminary discussion of magic's self-dividedness, I review the overlap between magic, theology, and science in the context of the nineteenth century, moving from there to the interrelation of these threads with detective fiction. Important theoretical writers include Simon During and Michael Saler. I then explain why stage magic is an appropriate vehicle to represent these contradictions through discussions of exemplary detective stories by G. T. Fleming- Roberts, Walter Gibson, Clayton Rawson, and Sax Rohmer.

The Enlightenment of Fu Manchu: Buddhism and Western Detective Fiction

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 Buddhistically endorsed proposition that the only and ultimate solution to such a grievous existential condition is to fundamentally alter one's perception by acknowledging the living potential of self-transcendence and cultivating enlightenment.

The old ‘white actor playing a Chinese man’ trick: Get Smart and race

Abstract This article examines the portrayal of Chinese characters in Get Smart (1965–70). Get Smart was a 1960s American spy comedy based on the premise of good (Control) against evil (KAOS) set against the back drop of the Cold War. Many of the episodes in this comedy featured a Chinese character as the enemy. This article will examine the way the characterization and performance of the Chinese roles play out in Get Smart. It locates them within the long-standing but now highly dubious tradition of ‘yellowface’ casting in American vaudeville, theatre and cinema, as Caucasian actors almost always played the Chinese roles in Get Smart. More particularly it examines Get Smart and especially the episodes with Chinese characters as examples of adaptation. Doing so suggests that different and at times competing conceptions of Chinese archetypes have been brought onto the screen, from the oriental villainy of Sax Rohmer and Ian Fleming to the criminal detective genius of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan stories. These archetypes (and indeed stereotypes would be a better word in some instances), nonetheless permit the argument that Get Smart brings onto the screen a reasonably complex understanding of its Chinese characters and a critical view of the American characters.

Race and the Modernist Imagination

Race and the Modernist Imagination

Race and the modernist imagination

Race has long been recognized as a formative element of American modernism, but its role in England is less clearly understood. While critics have examined race in the works of British writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Forster, they have done so mostly from a postcolonial perspective. In Race and the Modernist Imagination, Urmila Seshagiri finds that race-as a matter apart from imperialism-served as an engine for the creation of new literary forms by a wide range of writers, including Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf. In Seshagiri's view, race provided these writers with a set of tropes and plots that rejuvenated the British aesthetic tradition: new ideas and fresh forms found their way into British literature through characters and settings that evoked other peoples, other places. In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works-The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and the short stories of Mansfield and West-Seshagiri considers examples that fall outside the usual purview of British modernist literature, such as Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu tales, the avant-garde review BLAST, and Vita Sackville-West's travel writings. Throughout, she places her subjects within their social and cultural contexts: British Chinatowns, avant-garde cabaret clubs, exhibitions of African art, and dance performances by the Ballets Russes. Urmila Seshagiri's interdisciplinary study reveals a common core of race in the modern imaginary and, more broadly, establishes race as a crucial concept for understanding the cultural field of modernity.

‘CHOU GAGS CRITICS IN BANDOENG’ or How the Media Framed Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, 1955

AbstractAt 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.

The Color of Fu‐Manchu: Orientalist Method in the Novels of Sax Rohmer

The Color of Fu‐Manchu: Orientalist Method in the Novels of Sax Rohmer

Introduction: Alien/Asian: Imaging the Racialized Future

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 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 fictions, their cultural representations did not emerge from a vacuum. (2) Sidney L. Gulick's foundational study, 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. 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, 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) 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. …

Double agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture Cynthia Wu (bio) Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. By Tina Chen . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Tina Chen's Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture is a literary-critical tour de force that proposes a hermeneutics of Asian American subjectivity and identity through the trope of impersonation. The title's play on the term, "double agent," references Cold War era-derived anxieties about Asian stealth and shiftiness while reworking racist linkages between Asian-raced peoples and espionage. In her readings of a wide variety of cultural productions, Chen eschews both 1970s cultural-nationalist claims to authenticity and 1990s theories of performativity developed by (white) gender and queer theorists. In doing so, she develops a critical framework for reconsidering Asian American racial formation in ways that transcend static models of culture and cultural transmission, on the one hand, and materially-unmoored celebrations of identity performance, on the other. In Part I of the book, titled "Impersonation and Stereotype," Chen notes that impersonation (especially of racist caricatures) as economic and social survival strategy has been a site of ambivalence for Asian America given that Asian American people have historically been coerced into adopting and displaying behaviors that are discomfiting precisely because they uphold and maintain damaging ideas about racial minorities. But rather than condemn impersonation as a practice that emerges solely out of racial subjugation, Chen chooses to reclaim it both as a mode of literary-critical analysis and as a site of agency, arguing that Asian American subject formation itself arises from an ongoing process of performing assumed roles that complicate notions of an authentic or true identity. Creating a distinction between "impersonation" and a related term, "imposture," Chen avers that, whereas imposture strives to effect a seamless and convincing counterfeit for the purposes of deception, impersonation involves "the assumption [End Page 209] of a public identity that does not necessarily belong to 'someone else' but that has been assigned to and subsequently adopted by the performer in question in order to articulate an identity comprehensible to the public" (14). In the acts of impersonation that Chen reads, we find Asian American subjects who—in turn—acknowledge the multiple allegiances and affiliations that lie always at the heart of identity-as-process. This model of imposture and its relationship to stereotype manifests itself in Chen's readings of the Fu Manchu novels and films of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Sax Rohmer's fictional villain is an emblematic figure of white anxieties about Asian masculinity, sexuality, and "mimicry of Western imperial agency" (57). As a character that emerges out of its creator's immersion in the yellowface minstrel circuit of the early twentieth century, Fu Manchu at once embodies the stereotypes of both the feminized and the hyper-heterosexual Asian-raced man. However, Chen cautions her readers to avoid making sweeping condemnations of the body of cultural productions that feature Fu Manchu, stating that these portrayals are far from being uniformly stable in their alignment with hegemonically conceived ideas about race. The following chapter takes up these same concerns about stereotype as a crucial site of meditation in later twentieth-century Asian American-authored plays. Readings of Elizabeth Wong's "China Doll," David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die, and Diana Son's "R.A.W. ('Cause I'm a Woman)" form the basis of Chen's argument that the myriad and varied range of racist caricature is not uniformly a source of victimization for Asian Americans but can also be a basis for politically informed coalition building among Asian American subjects. That these potentially liberating transformations in the performance of stereotype take place within the literal space of the theater is significant for it literalizes the act of assuming, embodying, and—ultimately—revolutionizing previously scorned and injurious archetypes. Part II of Chen's book, titled "Double Agents, Double Agency," takes the reader away from the scene of literal performance (i.e., the cinema or the stage) and transposes her critical framework onto the genre of the novel. Departing, also...

Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-40

Few parts of London attracted as much attention as did Limehouse between the Great War and the 1930s. Limehouse, and its ghostly double ‘Chinatown’, figured as a dangerous and exotic place in novels, films, magazines, even in popular songs. Images of this small riverside district squeezed among the London Docks were shaped by two authors in particular: Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke. ‘Chinatown’ was a key theme in Rohmer’s early fiction. Three of these appalling novels are centred on the character Fu Manchu, an evil Chinese genius plotting world domination – often from some kind of secret headquarters around Limehouse. 1 Several other Rohmer novels published between 1915 and 1920 dealt with drug smuggling and the dangerous oriental presence in the London docks. 2 A 1916 collection of his short stories was titled Tales of Chinatown. Others jumped on the Fu Manchu bandwagon. Edgar Wallace’s novel The Yellow Snake published in 1926 had its Fu Manchu character Fing Su and an underground Chinese network in London. In Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, published in the following year, Hercule Poirot confronted another diabolical Chinese genius seeking world domination and at one point his assistant, Hastings, was imprisoned in a Limehouse opium den. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties the threat of Fu Manchu and his numerous oriental clones was recycled in comic books, magazine stories, radio shows and several film adaptations and imitations. 3 A very different kind of Limehouse Chinatown was manufactured by Thomas Burke, in a number of short stories, collections of verse and newspaper articles during the same years. 4 Here there were no evil oriental geniuses, international conspiracies or clumsy pastiches of Sherlock Holmes. Burke’s Chinatown stories – fiction and journalism – owed much to Jack London. Their tough boozy narrators revealed the sordid and dangerous spaces of the East End to a nervous suburban readership. They were stories about the interaction between working-class English men and women and their Chinese neighbours. They happened in little corner cafes, in the backrooms of terraced houses, in corner shops and public-houses, and they involved petty crime, sex and much violence. Burke’s writings on Chinatown did not have quite the international currency of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, but they were best-sellers. And they too found a ready market in the United States and were

Thomas Burke, the "Laureate of Limehouse": A New Biographical Outline

Thomas Burke, the "Laureate of Limehouse": A New Biographical Outline The whole English-reading world knew every dark and dangerous alley of Limehouse as well as they knew the way to the corner grocery. —Karl Brown, Adventures With D. W. Griffith Anne Witchard Birkbeck College University of London A METAL SCULPTURE of a dragon commemorates what was once Chinese Limehouse, now largely erased from the physical site of Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway in London's Docklands. The idea of Chinese Limehouse, however, is charged with significance even today and the most evocative reminder of this vanished district is the Limehouse fiction of Thomas Burke (1886-1945). Burke's first collection of Chinatown stories, Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown, was published in 1916 to instant notoriety. It was banned for immorality by the circulating libraries and Burke was condemned as a "blatant agitator" by the Times Literary Supplement for his evocative portrayal of a hybrid East End: "In place of the steady, equalised light which he should have thrown on that pestiferous spot off the West India Dock Road, he has been content. . . with flashes of limelight and fireworks ."1 At the same time Burke received letters of support and encouragement from literary luminaries, amongst them H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Eden Philpotts and Arnold Bennett.2 Some thirty years later, in his preface to a posthumous publication of Burke's Best Stories, the poet John Gawsworth found it difficult to imagine at a time when James Joyce's Ulysses is issued, and reissued in London ... that the accouchement of Limehouse Nights—surely some occasion in modern literary history?—was attended by acute anxiety both for the author and the publisher , that "Arnold Bennett told Burke that the possibility of securing a conviction was being seriously discussed at headquarters, and that he himself 164 WITCHARD : BURKE feared the worst." But so it was. For feelings still ran high at that time against frankness in fiction.3 So what was it, muses Gawsworth disingenuously, that had "occasioned the pother?" The sadistic motif underlying so many of his themes? No I do not think so: but would suggest, rather, that it was the novel, and to most unsavoury, implication that Yellow Man cohabited with White Girl in that East End of an Empire 's capital surrounding Limehouse Causeway.4 In 1916, the fact of relations between Chinese men and white women was fast becoming an issue of critical national concern. The form of yellow perilism that circulated in Britain during the early twentieth century was a demonology of race and vice, bound up with anxiety about degenerative metropolitan blight and imperial and racial decline. Limehouse Nights displays what seems in the light of its day, and in contrast with Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu thrillers, an unusual racial tolerance . Its absence of moral censure regarding miscegenation, or what Wells referred to as "rather horrible... 'sexual circulation,'" would play a significant part in the hysteria which peaked in the late 1920s with press appeals to the Home Office to stop "the hypnotism of white girls by yellow men" in London's East End. It contributed towards the book's renown in the United States5: "you were utterly behind the times if you were not intimately acquainted with Burke's stories of Limehouse."6 Accounts of Burke's life, few and brief as they are, have been largely inaccurate, taking at face value works that purport to be autobiographical yet contain far more invention than truth. Burke embarked on his writing career in the opening years of the century. He was of the lower middle-class, self-educated, a jobbing journalist who aspired to gain a foothold in literary life. He wanted "to tell a story as ably as Ambrose Bierce and to see and write as clearly as Stephen Crane."7 He managed successfully to anchor himself on London's literary fringes with the claim to a specialist knowledge. His first major publication, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography (1915) was a collection of observations on working-class London by night and included the seminal "A Chinese Night, Limehouse." Market-oriented professions proliferated alongside the late-nineteenth-century expansion of monopoly capitalism and...

Engendering Racism: History and History Teachers in English Schools

��� acist stereotypes of black peoples are ubiquitous in Britain and are not class-bound. (Nor are they, of course, restricted to blacks; negative stereotypes of, for example, Irish and Roma [gypsies] are also abundant.) Such stereotyping is common in books for children and adults, in all genres of writing. Well-known examples of such writers are Sax Rohmer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, who bridged the worlds of literature, religion, and politics as he became Governor-General of Canada and Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Among children’s authors, the best known names are Enid Blyton, G. A. Henty, and Capt. W. E. Johns (see Rankin; Dabydeen; Clegg; and Castle). These writers, with the exception of Joseph Conrad, were all schooled in the United Kingdom. While the media, visual arts, and popular culture must all take their share of the burden of inculcating English superiority and negative notions of the “other,” I would argue that once free education was made available to all in the late nineteenth century, schools must bear the major responsibility. Within schools the content of history textbooks and the attitude of teachers must be the locus of the engendering and perpetuation of racial prejudice. Furthermore, teachers may also—deliberately or unconsciously—practice racial discrimination. Is there any evidence to substantiate these allegations? Let us begin our investigation by looking at textbooks from the closing years of the nineteenth century:

The Arab Mind Revisited: The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, by David Pryce-Jones

If you are bent on wallowing in racist fantasy, you would be better off reading Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels than David Pryce-Jones's new treatise on the innate corruption of the Arabs, and of Muslims generally. The message is about the same, but Rohmer wrote more amusingly and openly labeled his work fiction. The world according to Pryce-Jones is divided into a Western type of society, best represented by his native Britain, in which participatory democracy, equal opportunity, fairness, and inventive individuality uniquely flourish, and an type of society best understood by the following code phrases: shame-honor, which means admitting feelings of defeat and humiliation and trying to do something to correct them and restore one's sense of honor; money-favoring, which means bribery; challenging, which means challenging the power of a ruler; tribal-religious identity, which means giving priority to considerations of family and religion; and careerism, which means embarking on a political career for personal gain and satisfaction rather than altruism. These characteristics are presented as innate among Arabs and Muslims. What might have looked to a Westerner like unrelenting deprivation, cruelty, and violence is actually a very much more profound assertion of the significance of being an Arab (p. 137). It is essential to Pryce-Jones's argument that his readers join him in assuming these faults to be absent in the West. In the West, he writes, is said and done more or less corresponds to the intentions of the speaker and the doer (p. 41). No liars and perjurors on our team, apparently, the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and Eden's deception of the British public about the Suez conspiracy notwithstanding. Furthermore, European society [is] the first in history to put human division and natural change to work to its own advantage by a process of objectifying and universalizing all knowledge (p. 59). How a continent so blessed managed to get itself into World War II and the Cold War is never addressed. An example of Western virtues Pryce-Jones was delighted to find was articulated by a nineteenth century Tunisian visitor: [European] taxes are not unfair. The inhabitants know exactly what is required, and the revenue collected is spent for the benefit of all without distinction (p. 83). This presumably explains the cheerful, uncomplaining attitude of Western taxpayers. Against this utopian backdrop of the West Pryce-Jones paints a dire scene of corruption and bestiality, though he extends his scenario to the Turks and Iranians from time to time, including on the book's endpapers where Turkey is in'Richard Bulliet is the director of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University.