This essay circles yellow matter to conceive Asian/America in excess of what Sylvia Wynter calls Man. Yellow matter names various materialities caught in the wake of yellow peril and that surface in the reverberations of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperial expansion and war. This essay tends to yellow matter at its most abstract and ethereal—where it coincides with a potential to vary. It theorizes the powers of yellow matter by crosshatching the abject underside of yellow peril with vital materialism across different contexts: anti-Asian racism in the COVID-19 pandemic; Asian/American efforts to prove their humanity in response to that racism; and Franny Choi’s collection of poetry The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. While the negative power of yellow matter threatens an end to Man, the productive capacity of yellow matter intensifies an otherwise. Tending to yellow matter encourages inquiry into Asian/America as a shapeshifting field of potentiality and spurs more experimental, more inventive forms of politics.

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the discursive mechanisms that sustain anti-Asian racism in the United States by critically examining the potent and unstable symbol of Chinese. Through historical, ideological, economic, and geopolitical examination, we demonstrate how the conflation of China with Chinese operates discursively to collapse race, ethnicity, and nation-state. We introduce the concept of the China/Chinese discursive construct to reveal instances of intercultural communication where the term Chinese implicitly references Mainland China and to explain how the insinuated affiliation between Chinese and China goes beyond mere factual inaccuracy. By unpacking the strategic deployment of Chinese in public discourse, we expose how the elision of China in Chinese is a crucial feature of contemporary yellow peril discourse — a slippage that evokes the threat of a foreign state without explicitly naming it. Our analysis illuminates the ideological power of rhetoric in shaping harmful narratives and sustaining structures of domination. We conclude by advocating for a critical and reflective mode of communication that resists the normalization of racialized language, positioning the China/Chinese construct as a tool for communication intervention and rhetorical disruption.

The U.S. government’s treatment of TikTok and other Chinese-adjacent tech strugglesto maintain objectivity and belies the Sinophobia that lingers within the political hegemony.The U.S. is no stranger to Anti-Asian sentiments and policies. This Article will give anoverview of America’s historic mistreatment of Asians, both foreign and natural-born,before analyzing the government’s treatment of short-form video media giant TikTok andtelecommunications company Huawei. This analysis will seek to differentiate legitimatesecurity concerns and measures from inequitable ones in either justification oradministration.

ABSTRACT Building on theorisations examining the colonial positionalities of Asian diasporic communities in settler societies such as Canada, Hawai’i and the U.S., this article investigates the role of Chinese racialisation and discursive positioning vis-à-vis Pākehā and Māori in bolstering, obscuring or otherwise entrenching White supremacy, settler colonisation, and capitalism in Aotearoa. Specifically, I offer a critical analysis of historical texts, building upon and expanding existing narratives within secondary sources through the theoretical framework of colonial racial capitalism. I argue that Chinese racialisation and discursive positioning in Aotearoa has and continues to be shaped by the material interests of ‘New Zealand’ as a settler-colonial project founded upon the subjugation of Māori land and life, and reliant on the alienation of racialised tauiwi from the national identity and body politic. At once a Yellow Peril, model minority and essentialised Other, Chinese immigrants have been differentially racialised and positioned in society in order to produce and reproduce the conditions necessary for the preservation of colonial racial capitalism. Our racialisation as Chinese people can then be understood as inseparable from the settler-colonial project, and so to resist against White supremacy thus also requires that we resist against the violences of capitalism and (settler) colonisation.

ABSTRACT Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid is not the first American comics character to be printed in colour and serialised – despite decades of comics scholarship claiming it so. In brief asides or footnotes, they acknowledge that Charles Saalburg’s Orientalized Ting-Lings are the origins of America’s colour comic strips, but unfortunately give this strip cursory examination. This essay will expound on why the Ting-Lings remain understudied in published materials. Relevant to my argument is Michelle Ann Abate’s argument in a 2021–2022 ImageText journal article arguing that the Yellow Kid is better viewed historically not as Irish American, as he has been regarded for over a century, but as Irish Asian. From Abate’s inquiry into who put the ‘yellow’ in the Yellow Kid, I explore Saalburg’s Ting-Lings as the first colour comic strip through yellow lenses. That is, I use Asian immigrant history to re-visit Saalburg’s characters through America’s Asia, a term introduced by Colleen Lye to explain representations of Asians in American literature from 1893 to 1945. I explore how the deliberate interjection of the Ting-Lings impacts comics scholarship. I query the quick demise of the Ting-Lings in popular culture and scholarly invisibility. What do the comics brief references in general comics histories, and often complete absence from scholarly works, suggest about Saalburg’s Orientalist caricatures in their American contexts and about the proclivities of Chicago’s Progressive-era newspaper readers? In proposing answers to these questions, I lift the Ting-Lings out of obscurity to join the Yellow Kid at the comics forefront.

Leslie J. Harris’s The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity is a brilliant and timely analysis of the white slavery controversy that dominated the turn of the twentieth-century United States, in which many citizens expressed fear that white women and girls were being deceived, trapped, and sold into prostitution. For Harris, “the controversy was not simply about protecting women and children; it was also about harnessing white womanhood to constitute national identity and belonging.” A scholar of rhetoric, Harris impressively argues this point through coining “the ‘mobile imagination,’” which “includes conceptions of who can move, how mobility occurs, and what meanings of mobility circulated.” The white slavery narrative’s valorization of white women’s reproduction, purity, and domesticity defined “moral” women as those who were passively in stasis—moved, but not mobile, “private, controlled, and protected.” Heavily racialized, white slavery rhetoric further illustrated mobile individuals in “wilderness settings,” such as “immigrants, Black Americans, and residents of colonized countries,” as barbaric, immoral threats to white women and “to the spatiotemporal status of the nation.” To elucidate this argument, Harris’s work then moves readers through space and time. It begins in the 1880s Northwoods of Wisconsin, where a sensational national controversy emerged: confounded by the presence of white women in the area, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and Wisconsin lawmakers erupted into debate as to whether they were “irredeemable whores or innocent victims” of prostitution. Chapter Two concentrates on the supposedly dangerous and depraved urban city—a rhetorical image which Harris asserts was rooted in nostalgia and fear “as the immigrant Other moved into the space.” White women in urban settings were warned to “avoid virtually all human connection,” solidifying the home as “the only safe place.” Chapter Five expands upon the white slavery narrative’s interaction with the immigrant Other through the lens of Yellow Peril, which vilified Chinatown as a threat to womanhood and nation and simultaneously magnified women’s suffrage efforts. Turning toward the national level, Chapters Three and Four reveal how efforts to combat white slavery manifested in public and discursive spaces. Wealthy reformers like John D. Rockefeller Jr., for instance, turned to “supposedly objective facts” to redeem both women and men engaged in the vice of prostitution, finding “a lack of proper domesticity” as a consistent cause. Yet these reformers consistently cast Black women as irredeemable counterparts and potential perpetrators of white slavery. Harris additionally analyzes the Mann Act, contending that it functioned to create a national community defined by its moral whiteness. The legislation, which secured funding for the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), also worked to constrain Black mobility and institutionalize a legal alternative to lynchings as a means of enforcing racialized and gendered fears surrounding Black men. The final chapter examines how white slavery narratives in Europe recast the controversy as a transnational problem. Similar to the Mann Act, the international 1910 white slave treaty reinforced nations’ identity through the protection of white women and concurrently constituted empire through the exploitation and regulation of colonized women. Harris’s invention of the mobile imagination brings fresh insights to scholarship on religious nationalism. The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity uncovers how narratives of chosenness were infused into the white slavery controversy and amplified by mobility. The chosen—redeemable white women—could be moved against their will and victimized by white slavery; at the same time, they had access to the potential for mobility (a marker of citizenship) but instead morally and responsibly chose stasis within the confines of the home. On the contrary, the unchosen—irredeemable women, white and otherwise—moved with unregulated and threatening agency; they were mobile, but their mobility did not constitute citizenship and instead required freedoms denied to protect the national project. The white slavery narrative’s elevation of the chosen as worthy of salvation reveals moral white womanhood as sacred. American religious historians may then ask about the role that certain Protestant eschatologies held within the controversy. Harris’s brief transnational turn also invites scholars to consider how American religious nationalism is informed by empire and opens space for a comparative analysis of the white slavery controversy. The breadth of Harris’s work, steering readers through the local, national, and transnational domains, positions it as an indispensable read for American Religious historians of varying approaches. The work is well-suited for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, especially benefiting those with an interest in religion, nationalism, and race in the Progressive Era.

Pulp fiction magazines bloomed into life in the first decades of the twentieth century, when hundreds of vividly illustrated titles flourished by bringing more imaginative literary genres, including science fiction, horror, and fantasy, into the cultural mainstream. The makers of these inexpensive magazines used cheap paper and new printing technologies to fashion lurid, dramatic covers that simultaneously propelled sales and opened the door to theretofore unknown imaginative possibilities in the stories they advertised. The pulps’ vivid cover illustrations made envisioning exotic lands, bodies, or phenomena that much easier, and consequently made the fantastic stories that the magazines peddled seem that much more real. However, these images also relied on varieties of visual shorthand that often exploited period racial and gender stereotypes in order to excite their predominately white, male readers with exotic events and settings while also reassuring them of their place within current social hierarchies. Indeed, pulp protagonists are typically faultless and heroic “Anglo-Saxon” men who combat evil and exotic villains as they rescue the girl and save the day. Using period commentaries from pulp readers, writers, illustrators, and editors alongside illustrations produced to accompany racist “Yellow Peril” pulp stories from the 1920s and 1930s, this article argues that as they fashioned appealing cover designs intended to attract readers and stimulate their imaginations, the creative forces behind the pulps balanced inventiveness with prejudice-filled convention, and in so doing fueled the fires of racism and sexism within millions of readers.

ABSTRACT The #StopAsianHate movement arose as a critical community-led response to the (re)surge(nce) of transnational anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. While there is growing North American scholarship on this antiracist movement through the lens of online activism, little is known about its in-person mobilization, and even less is known beyond the North American context. This paper thus focuses on #StopAsianHate's Australian iteration through methodologically foregrounding activist research principles with a particular focus on participatory meetings. It explores historical and ongoing manifestations of anti-Asian racism in Australia, rooted in the White Australia Policy and “Yellow Peril” anxieties, and highlights the Asian Australian Alliance’s efforts in raising awareness, advocating for systemic change, and fostering (transnational) solidarities across diverse communities. The paper also captures #StopAsianHate’s complexities, including mobilization considerations and ingroup internalized racism. It concludes with the importance of recognizing activist’s unique experiences, along with sustained advocacy and intersectional solidarity, when enacting antiracism.

Abstract In 1902, Britain and Japan signed the first of three alliances requiring each state to recognize and guarantee the other’s geopolitical interests in continental Asia. Even before the first Anglo-Japanese alliance was announced, there were obvious currents of both anti-British and anti-Japanese sentiment in Wilhelmine Germany. Whereas the latter was channelled into the so-called ‘yellow peril’ rhetoric popularized by Wilhelm II, the former shaped the ambitions of German Weltpolitik. German reactions to the Anglo-Japanese alliance evolved over the course of its roughly two-decade existence—from ambivalence, to anxiety over its perceived threat to German interests and, finally, to Schadenfreude as it began to unravel—and yet one element remained consistent. Whereas Japan was represented alternatively as the innocent dupe of British scheming and as a savvy political operator, German liberals aimed their critiques of the alliance almost exclusively at Britain. This animosity towards Britain existed alongside, and in a dialogic relationship with, a growing consensus that Japan represented an ambiguously coded counter-model to both Britain and Germany for its ability to navigate the murky waters of international politics without compromising its moral integrity or strategic self-interests. Examining German responses to the Anglo-Japanese alliance thus reveals a new perspective on the Anglo-German rivalry during the Age of Empire and explores the entangled politics of race and space informing German popular and political discourse.

Abstract: This article examines three World War II novels set in the Pacific: Jewish American author , Jewish American author , and African American author . Based on their firsthand experiences on the battlefront, these authors depict how racism toward non-Anglo-Americans is detrimental in the war against fascism worldwide. The authors also consider the anti-Japanese sentiment during the war and the preexisting “yellow peril” racism on the home front, disrupting the US master narrative of World War II as “good” and “necessary.”

Converging evidence points toward the COVID-19 pandemic having amplified lingering anti-Asian prejudice and discrimination, including the virus’s geographical origin being highlighted on social media. This amplification is consistent with theoretical frameworks and empirical findings that connect moral disapproval to biological aversion. Furthermore, experimental literature suggests that prejudicial stereotypes (e.g., of Black criminality) can prompt behavioral discrimination (e.g., disproportionate aggression in shoot/don’t-shoot simulation tasks). Hence, we tested across four experiments ( N = 2,844) whether prejudicial stereotypes of Asian infectivity, prominent during the COVID-19 era, might analogously trigger disproportionate avoidance. White participants (Experiments 1 and 2, United Kingdom and United States, crowdsourced) cross-culturally exhibited a pattern of Asian evasion on a custom-made approach-avoidance simulation task: they more readily avoided infected targets when Asian and more readily approached uninfected targets when White. However, Asian evasion waned after exposure to both associative pairings unsupportive of the stereotype and explicit media critique of the stereotype (Experiments 3 and 4: United States, crowdsourced). Our findings highlight how, even if the threat of COVID-19 induced anti-Asian aversions consistent with historical hatreds (i.e., “yellow peril”), some of those aversions may be readily remediated.

미국 내 동아시아계 미국인들은 사회적 안정에 위협으로 여겨지는 황화론(Yellow Peril)과 성공과 순응을 이상화하지만 체계적인 차별을 은폐하는 모범적 소수자 신화(Model Minority)라는 이중 도전에 직면하고 있다. 이러한 고정 관념은 직장 및 사회 전반에서 포함과 배제를 동시에 촉진하며, 특히 인종화된 자본주의 체제 속에서 더욱 심화된다. 본 논문은 기독교 신학에서 제시하는 노동과 관계에 대한 관점을 통해 이러한 문제를 극복할 방안을 모색한다. 어거스틴(Augustine), 디트리히 본회퍼(Dietrich Bonhoeffer), 캐서린 태너(Kathryn Tanner) 그리고 이정용(Jung Young Lee)의 신학은 지배, 경쟁, 착취의 구조에 도전하며 노동을 관계적이고 공동체적인 관점에서 새롭게 조명한다. 특히 이정용의 삼위일체 신학과 동아시아의 음양 철학에 뿌리를 둔 “양자/포괄적”(both/and) 관점은 주변화된 집단이 이분법적 범주를 초월하고 포용과 상호성을 증진할 가능성을 강조한다. 본 논문은 이러한 신학적 관점을 통해 이중적 고정관념을 극복할 뿐만 아니라 동아시아계 미국인을 위한 더 공정하고 통합적인 노동과 공동체의 비전을 제시할 수 있음을 주장한다. 은혜에 기초한 공동체적이고 관계적인 실천으로서 노동을 재구성함으로써 배제 구조를 해체하고 사회적 소속감을 재구상하는 경로를 탐구한다.

Racialized exclusion of Asian entrepreneurship and its communities, as part of the entrenched systemic racism in American society, has long been promulgated by the mainstream media and policymakers. Notably, nail salons, as an Asian-dominated multi-billion-dollar industry, reflect the confluence of media portrayals and policy structure of racialization. With the racial triangulation framework, we examined the news discourse of nail salons in New York (2015-2016) and California (2020-2022), and therefore, identified a four-step racialization of Asians that underlines media-regulation nexus, that is, Othering, Discriminating, Regulating, and Consolidating. Specifically, the general stereotypical portrayals of Asian Americans, for example, Model Minority and Yellow Peril, generate discriminatory images of certain Asian groups (e.g., business owners and immigrant workers) through covert language and frames, further motivating top-down regulatory measures that aggravate the economic and political burdens on the whole Asian community and thus solidifying the current racial dynamics. Altogether, this study heightens our sensitivity to the varied forms of (re)production of anti-Asian racism and underlines the legacy of White supremacy and colonialism in symbolic constructions and the legal regime.

The discourse of racism dominated by a binary logic of white supremacy and black oppression has historically enfeebled resistance to anti-Asian racism. COVID-19 opened up new discourses about the escalating vulnerability of the Chinese community amidst racist ideologies of the ‘yellow peril’ and the ‘Chinese virus’. South Asians are in a unique situation in this conversation about Asians in the USA; they are not even considered Asians. Against this backdrop, this essay turns to another history of anti-Asian racism, marked by ideologies of the ‘brown peril’ of Islamophobia at a specific moment during post-9/11, post-Cold War American hegemony. It engages with the brown Asian in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a historicised analytic for illuminating differential racisms in the USA. Situating this moment against a longer history of resistance to Asian migration in the USA, this article argues for declining hospitality as a frame to perceive transmigration, and theorises racialised transmigration from South Asia to the metropoles as a demand for reparation that the north owes for past and continuing imperial devastation of South Asia. Against the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its antecedent British and US imperial history in South Asia, the article examines the possibility of reading Hamid’s novel as transnational counterpublics for exploring wider questions about ethnoracial responsibility and relationality in a world strangled by American corporatism and militarism. Rita Felski’s conceptualisation of feminist counterpublics and context as well as Lauren Berlant’s frames of ‘cruel optimism’ and ‘commons’ offer valuable insights for thinking with the postcolonial detritus left by imperial formations that Hamid’s novel portrays. Deploying a revisionary reading of Derrida’s limits of hospitality allows for a radical global south pedagogy of reparative justice. This is also a pedagogy of relationality rather than one of capital ‐ a responsibility that comes with ‘exiting America’ to defy the lures of the American Dream and to refuse to be an agent of empire, as Hamid’s protagonist does. The article finally turns to Stuart Hall’s concepts of ‘conjuncture’ and ‘contingency’ and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil to think about the afterlife of the text in our contemporary moment as it concludes with the tariff war with India and what that means for a ‘postcolonial commons’, American exceptionalism and a theory of reparations.

This article is dedicated to an analysis of the historiosophic concept of “Asian Renaissance,” as elaborated by the writer and polemist Mykola Khvylovyi, who was an ideologist of Ukrainian national communism. It will focus on his ideas expressed during the Literary Discussion of the 1925–1928 period in Soviet Ukraine. The objective of this article is to examine Khvylovyi’s ideas within the broader context of the most significant ideological constructs that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These include Nikolai Danilevsky’s “Bible of Pan‑Slavism,” “Europe and Russia,” Oswald Spengler’s concept of “The Decline of the West,” the circle of ideas known as “Yellow Peril,” Russian “Scythianism,” and the Marxist‑Leninist approach to history and politics. All of these concepts found their further development within Russian Symbolism and Futurists. It has been largely overlooked by scholars that Khvylovyi’s call for “psychological Europe” and his concept of “Asian Renaissance” can be situated within the broader ideological context of the evolution of Pan‑Mongolism. The article also contextualizes Khvylovyi’s concept of “Europe” and its further political and ideological applications in the contemporary Ukrainian media. Finally, Khvylovyi’s writings are discussed in the context of Ukrainian nation building of the 1920s within a broader frame of Soviet modernization.

Abstract: This study covers the history of the Soviet Chinese and Koreans of the RFE from 1860 to 1939. It will demonstrate that the Russian Empire and the USSR continually viewed its East Asians as an excellent colonizing element, industrious, clever but as dubious citizenship material. One might ask, “How is this possible when the Soviet East Asians distinguished themselves to the Soviet state as NKVD agents, kolkhoz leaders, Soviet cadres, farmers who vociferously supported state collectivization of land, teachers, and informants?” This was because the USSR prioritized Russians (including Belorussians and Ukrainians) as their core people ( primus inter pares ) despite the avowals to build “real socialism” and a class-based society. In the 1930s, as the tension of war and political intrigue mounted, Stalin began a campaign through various Soviet media (radio, newspaper, and official pronouncements) that warned of Japanese spies infiltrating the RFE in all of the most common occupations held by RFE Chinese and Koreans. This is a short history of the tsarist and Soviet creation of the “yellow peril” leading to the deportation of the Soviet Chinese.

ABSTRACT Since 1890, the growth of Eastern nations’ power was perceived as an imminent threat by broad sectors of American society, articulated under the concept of the ‘yellow peril’. This paper examines the positions of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) on this notion between 1904 and 1908, a period marked by increasing diplomatic tensions between Japan and the United States. Through an analysis of the SPA press and the minutes of its conventions, the study identifies how the party comprehensively addressed the three main meanings of this concept: economic competition from Asian immigrants, the industrialization of the East, and the rise of Japan as an imperialist power. These aspects were of great importance for shaping the SPA’s positions on imperialism, colonial policy, and inter-imperialist war. On the one hand, the anti-immigration sentiment within the SPA undermined any potential for bonds of friendship and internationalism with Japan and also affected its critique of colonial policy, which focused on the competition from native workers. On the other hand, Japan’s modernization and rise as an imperialist power rendered imperialism no longer a viable strategy for American capitalists, ultimately contributing to the collapse of capitalism due to its failure to find new markets.

How and when did war come to be understood as a “science”—one that could be quantitatively calculated and measured in such a way that one could derive universal laws? This paper turns to the archives of the Operations Research Office (ORO) during the Korean War to argue that race war orders and produces a scientific “truth” of war. This techno-scientific “truth” drives war to increasingly brutal forms of imperial and racial violence while simultaneously naturalizing and sanitizing this violence as the nature of war. Techno-scientific war produced a racialized enemy: the numerically superior Asian Communist attacked in human waves, willing to sacrifice soldiers because of an Asian disregard for life. But the enemy’s tactics, however seemingly irrational, could be rendered predictable through quantitative analysis. Race ordered techno-scientific war. Combat was rendered sensible through perfecting and managing the superior techno-scientific capabilities of the white race to overcome the problem of the Asian horde and ensure victory. By treating Korea as a “laboratory” for future combat, the ORO ordered and produced these racialized visions through technical manuals on infantry weapons, chemical weapons, and atomic weapons.

Abstract There are two prominent but seemingly contradictory symbols of how Asians are racialized domestically within the United States: “yellow peril” and “model minority.” How do these two racial tropes relate to each other? What effects do they have on the formation of support for race-targeted public policy? In this paper, we propose and empirically test that racialized resentment toward Asian Americans and the congratulatory framing of them as a model minority are both salient in the minds of the American public, reflecting the complexity of prejudices toward Asians in American society. Utilizing two original survey-based measures of anti-Asian resentment and the model minority stereotype, we empirically demonstrate the interconnection between the two racial tropes and highlight the key demographic and dispositional correlates of these multi-faceted contemporary racial attitudes toward Asian Americans. We then show that the two racial tropes, both independently and by interacting with each other, significantly shape racial public policy preferences in the United States.

A sickly sweet scent lingers in Arnold Genthe’s Old Chinatown photographs (1896–1906). Genthe, a German immigrant who was known for his portraits of presidents of the United States and prominent businessmen, began his artistic career by taking pictures on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. While Genthe’s archive is celebrated for its soft-focus pictorialist style, less attention has been paid to the racialized discourse on Chinese atmospheres that produced this aesthetic effect. Contextualizing these images within the US anxiety about the “yellow peril” in the early twentieth century, which rendered the Chinese as noxious to the national atmosphere, this essay demonstrates that Genthe’s style emerged from these racialized fears of toxic air. Moving between the photographer’s images, his published memoir, and contemporaneous public health records, I chart an irresolvable sickly sweet scent in this visual archive through a method that I term “atmo-speculation.” Focusing on a lesser-known portrait by Genthe of an anonymous nude woman, I trace fetid air as a critical aesthetic through which we can sense insurgent forms of Chinese femininity in the US. Augmenting recent scholarship on minoritarian form, which approaches race through affect and sensation, I argue that feminist sensorial engagements with Genthe’s Old Chinatown photographs disturb national ideals of contained citizenship.