Yellow Peril Research Articles

Between Empirical Data and Anti-Blackness: A Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents

Between Empirical Data and Anti-BlacknessA Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents Janelle Wong (bio) and Rossina Zamora Liu (bio) After a US president (with connections to white nationalists), raised the specter of Yellow Peril and white shooters engaged in mass killings of Asian Americans in Atlanta and Indianapolis in the spring of 2021, white violence toward Asian Americans was difficult to ignore. Yet one leading story of anti-Asian violence in the wake of the pandemic is of an Asian American senior, often termed an "elder" in reporting, or young woman brutally beaten by a person who "appears to be Black." This story and others like it have circulated throughout the Asian American community via viral videos. The story has been the subject of calls for attention to "Black-Asian conflict" in the recent past.1 In March 2021, for example, Vox reporters noted that "Many of the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured Black assailants, and have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans and Black Americans."2 In April of 2021, a story by an NBC local affiliate in Seattle observed that "There have also been widely circulated videos that show Black men attacking Asian Americans."3 Meanwhile, survey and crime data suggest a different trend. Empirical data, for instance, shows that, compared to their share of the population, Asian American elders (over age 65) are underrepresented among victims of Asian American hate crimes and hate incidents. While women are more likely to report a hate incident to the StopAAPIHate reporting site, multiple sources of data show that men are as likely or more likely to experience a hate incident than women. Further, the vast majority of violence against Asian Americans [End Page 387] consists not of physical assaults but of verbal harassment and "shunning." The data also shows that Black offenders make up a minority of offenders. And, comparatively, Black Americans are up to ten times more likely to report being the victim of a hate crime than Asian Americans, and this pattern persists even in places like California, where Asian Americans comprise nearly double the population of Black Americans.4 This is true despite the fact that people of all racial backgrounds indicate that they are reluctant to report hate crimes. The point here is not to minimize the disturbing incidents, crimes, and even killings that have been widely circulated as part of anti-Asian hate media coverage; rather, placing these incidents in a broader context allows them to be better understood and ultimately addressed by well-informed policy. As two Asian American women and non-Black educators of Color, we seek to better understand the disconnection between the empirical data and the many Black-Asian conflict narratives of anti-Asian violence. We note that, despite a wealth of compelling empirical data, the media arc of anti-Asian violence—historically a symptom of white supremacy—quickly turned from the China-focused rhetoric of a white president and the heinous actions of white mass shooters to a focus on Black individuals physically assaulting Asian American elders. What is disturbing about this second narrative, which we describe as the "Black-on-Asian crime" narrative, is that it eclipses systematic racism captured by data, while gaining a widely accepted place in the discourse of Black aggression as a root cause of anti-Asian violence. The Black-on-Asian crime narrative has not only (re)ignited the Black-Asian conflict trope but seems to have also illuminated an undercurrent of anti-Blackness in narratives of Asian American victimization and perceptions of safety. In this paper, we present data regularly ignored in widely circulating Black-on-Asian crime narratives around anti-Asian violence, followed by a theoretically grounded reflection on the gap between empirical data and viral videos that emphasize Asian American vulnerability against the threat of Black violence. To be clear, we acknowledge that the anti-Asian incidents shown on viral videos are not only real and abhorrent but they have understandably elicited anger and fear in our community. What we hope to illustrate is the way in which these incidents have become prominent in discourses around anti-Asian violence, even though...

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.

Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa: Racial Performance, Ornamentalism, and Yellow Voices in Daughter of the Dragon (1931)

Abstract This article provides a comparative study of Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa—the two most iconic stars of Asian descent of American cinema's silent era—by examining the reception history around their rare collaboration, the early sound film and yellow peril thriller Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, US, 1931). The on-screen collision of these two stars associated with the imaginary East reveals incongruities between a homogeneous Orientalist image and heterogeneous—culturally acquired, professionally trained, mechanically reproduced, and gendered—yellow voices. Situating the star personae of Wong and Hayakawa in the geopolitical environments of the interwar era, the essay foregrounds the plasticity of voice as a form of cultural capital fetishized as an exchangeable commodity through the heavily marketed product of the new sound cinema. In this case study, the accented voice serves also as a contact point between European, American, and Asian film industries. A close analysis of the differently accented yellow voices in Daughter of the Dragon demonstrates the artificial homogeneity of the Orient embodied by the supposedly “authentic” stars of Asian descent and complicates the established configurations of the gendered “Orientals”: the Janus-faced Japanese man and the ornamentalist yellow woman.

Rethinking the “Yellow Peril”: Charles Pearson’s Views and Related Debates

Abstract At the end of the nineteenth century, texts and discourses around the world abounded with fear and contempt for Chinese immigrants, specifically contract workers. This outpouring is remembered as talk of a “Yellow Peril.” Charles Pearson introduced the theme (though not its best-known phrase) to the English-speaking world in 1893, with the publication of a bleak manifesto he’d written about the West’s future as he saw it. The present article examines Pearson’s views and the intellectual debates regarding them. A century ago, the international supply of Chinese workers contributed little to China’s prosperity. Today, as a center of consumer goods supply, China contributes to the prosperity of the Western capitalist world while continuing its own rapid economic growth. For this reason, today’s apprehension about China is based on the fear of the emergence of a communist regime as a superpower. In this respect, the current fear of China differs from the “Yellow Peril” discourse of the past. Nevertheless, the discourse may have influenced today’s concerns and apprehensions about China.

Asiatisk resignation


 
 
 This article offers a reading of Herman Bang’s Novel De uden Fædreland – (Those Without a Nation–) under the perspective of the so-called “Yellow Peril”, a wide- spread theory at the beginning of the 20th century, which believed that Europe was threatened by a pan-Asian movement. The article claims that Bang’s fear of Asia and of European decline is mixed with a certain sympathy for Buddhism and the idea of resignation.
 
 

From Model Minority to Yellow Peril

The ongoing pandemic, COVID-19, has demonstrated how quickly the depictions of Asian individuals can shift from “model minority” to “yellow peril” during times of crisis. These times were particularly difficult for Chinese post-secondary international students who were directly impacted by these shifting narratives, as many faced discrimination, violence, and prejudice as a result of the rise of anti-Asian hate that occurred across the nation. Thus, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of these contrasting narratives and how “model minority” and “yellow peril” can contribute to the maintenance of White supremacy. This article also discusses possible considerations and interventions to better support Chinese international post-secondary students during their studies in Canada.

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Asian American racialization, racial capitalism, and the threat of the model minority

This paper argues for an Asian American racialization that takes seriously the political economy of racial capitalism. To do so, it first discusses the racial category of Asian American, and then take up the myth of the Model Minority as the defining form of Asian American racialization in education. This paper then connects the Model Minority to the tropes of Yellow Peril and Orientalism, arguing that our shortcomings of understanding Asian American racialization generally, and in education specifically, require us to develop a different theory of Asian American racialization that is not wholly confined within the boundaries of the United States. Following the racial political economy of Day (2016), this paper then discusses a conceptualization of Asian American racialization as that of abstract and efficient alien labor, and points to the ways this explains how Asian Americans have been used within racial dynamics in the U.S. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications this reconceptualization of Asian American racialization for the construction of the Model Minority in education.

COVID-19 is a “Yellow Peril” Redux: Immigration and Health Policy and the Construction of the Chinese as Disease

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have endured a stark rise in discrimination, harassment, and violence. Public discourse regarding COVID-19 has also been filled with anti-Asian and xenophobic rhetoric, including former President Donald Trump’s usage of racially charged epithets like “China Virus” and “Kung Flu.” However, this is not the first time that Asian Americans, and specifically Chinese Americans, have been condemned as a public health threat. In the late 1800s, Chinese immigrants were stereotyped as the “Yellow Peril” and dirty disease carriers amidst growing anti-Chinese sentiment, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Additionally, San Francisco Chinatown was intentionally and unfairly targeted by public health officials in attempts to purge the bubonic plague at the turn of the century. While court cases like Wong Wai v. Williamson (1900) and Jew Ho v. Williamson (1900) determined that such public health campaigns violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by singling out Chinese individuals, their legal outcomes do not represent the overall social consensus, both historically and today. Thus, our current moment of surging anti-Asian rhetoric and racism must be contextualized within America’s long history of branding Asian and Chinese people as unwanted, filthy vectors of contagion to be excluded. This paper argues that the uptick in anti-Asian racial violence during the COVID-19 pandemic is a direct extension of xenophobic scapegoating, racial formation, and sociocultural representation of Chinese immigrants as harbingers of disease that rationalized the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and San Francisco’s racist public health measures in 1900. Ultimately, I argue that America's historical intersection of exclusionary immigration law and discriminatory health policy set the stage for COVID-19 to play out as a “Yellow Peril” redux.

Identity, Community Education and Private Schooling—On Gus Lee’s China Boy

Chinese American literature, as a unique part in American literature, since its appearance has undergone dramatic changes and received more and more attention at home and abroad, especially after the 1960s. The special writing style, the gender problem, the emasculated Chinese men and the struggles of oppressed Chinese are always the issues that catch the notice of critics. Among them, the exploration of identity is the most pervasive. From “yellow peril” to “model minority,” Chinese American identity has experienced a great transformation. To interpret this phenomenon, critics have adopted different perspectives, like historical, cultural, religious, psychological and sociological ones. However, few of them pay attention to the influence of education on Chinese American identity formation. Despite several researches about the role of education, most are focused on some limited samples acquired through the qualitative methods. China Boy as the debut of Gus Lee, since the publication has provoked a stir around the world, this research concentrates on the influence of education on the identity formation of Kai Ting, the protagonist, from a scraggy little boy to a strong one in the dilemma of traditional Chinese culture and dominant culture. Through the research of community education and private schooling, the thesis tends to probe into the impact of education on the construction of Chinese American identity.

Being Asian American Women Scientists and Engineers in the United States: Intersection of Ethnicity and Gender

A high level of educational and occupational achievements in science and engineering (S&E) in the US has changed the image of Asian Americans from the “yellow peril” to a “model minority.” Behind this new identity is the belief that Asian Americans as a group have equaled, if not surpassed, the standards of success set by White America in S&E. It is further assumed that Asian American women are advancing equally in S&E. The reality is that they are over-represented as Asian Americans but under-represented as women in S&E occupations. They experience challenges associated with both, their ethnicity and gender. They face “double bind”—a term used for women of color who simultaneously experience sexism and racism in S&E. This paper presents Asian American women’s unique situations within S&E organizations, with a particular focus on high-technology industry, where most of them are employed. It focuses on their identities and socio-cultural categorizations.

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong Chinelo Ezenwa, Respondent Angie Wong’s article “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” addresses the subtle ways in which two recent acclaimed Hollywood films reinforce cinematic violence against Asian women, who are either hypersexualized, rendered mute, or shown as carriers of deadly diseases that disrupt the Arcadian world of the whiter Westerner. The article shows that in Venom (2018), the two pre-action Asian women are depicted as disease-ridden bodies, whose main role, it seems, is to deliver the disease from Malaysia to San Francisco. Their transference of disease to the white world also conveniently takes place at an airport, at the border where non-white peoples are often designated as non-beings. Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014) is similarly subjugated by Nathan, her white creator; she represents the white male exploitation of the body, labour, and sexuality of the Asian woman by a hypermasculine white society. Wong points out that in both films, there is neither character development for those women nor any escape for them as soon as they serve the perverse purposes of their “creators.” Perhaps this is because, on the aggregate, they are simulations of real people (“SimulAsians”). But, based on Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, Wong argues that using the fragmented prism of a technological form of Orientalism (techno-Orientalism) and creating such “SimulAsians” allows these movies to violate and exploit the Asian female characters. Kyoko, the Asian housekeeper-mistress figure in Ex Machina, is the ultimate “Simulacrum” and “SimulAsian,” as Wong demonstrates. This is because, for most of the film, one is uncertain if Kyoko is a cyborg created to look Asian, or if she is [End Page 232] an Asian deliberately presented to look like a cyborg. Whatever reality exists for her is premised on Nathan’s (her manufacturer’s) stereotypical perception of the Asian woman as cold, silent, and sexually available (Wong 9). But it is not even Kyoko’s poor development that bothers one most about Ex Machina. Instead, it is how the film manages to minimize Kyoko when shown against Ava, the Caucasian cyborg. The latter in fact becomes triumphant by exploiting both Kyoko and the unnamed Asian woman’s body. Ava’s only means of escape, it seems, is by literally cherry picking the skin off the bones of the unnamed female Asian figure in order to achieve “humanity.” Therefore, after their final “battle,” only Ava is triumphant while Kyoko remains a victim of the liberation march. Yet, as Wong equally observes, though the film seems to criticize the “dehumanization” of the Asian cyborgs, it is only able to achieve this critique by presenting them as sacrificial lambs, without any will and ability to achieve liberation. This double subjugation is not uncommon for “women of colour.” In my discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, for instance, I show how the Zimbabwean women are double yoked under colonial and traditional patriarchies. The difference is that where the Zimbabwean girls and women are deliberately portrayed in Nervous Conditions with critical voices, Ex Machina and Venom do not allow the Asian women any such power. They are stereotyped as figures of annihilation, while the extreme physical violence against them is masked under the notion that they are not human. The horror of that form of cinematic occlusion of violence is perhaps clearer when one considers the implications of the two Asian diseased bodies in Venom, as Wong does. They are pitted against the white heroic journalist, Eddie Brock, and his lawyer girlfriend, Anne Weying. Despite their flaws, the latter two characters are somehow found the acceptable bodies of the “future” who are able to not only achieve symbiosis with the alien but still maintain their societal moral codes, act out their heroisms, and rescue their world from the threats of the extraterrestrial disease embodied in the Asian women and the equally Asian-looking genius inventor, Riz Ahmed. In both films, the viewer is encouraged to ignore the scenes of violence against the Asian women because the action is conveniently set in the magical world of the movies. Wong rightly points...

Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril

Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril Angie Wong Techno-Orientalism and the SimulAsian The films Ex Machina (2014) and Venom (2018) are two critical and commercial successes in Hollywood cinema that use the representational device of techno-Orientalism as a guise for magic realism. Techno-Orientalism, also known as ‘high-tech’ Orientalism, “assigns technological and thus inhuman characteristics to the peoples and locations of the so-called Orient” (Pham 7). The subgenre, according to Minh-Ha T. Pham, “temporally locates Oriental difference in the future rather than the past” (15), as the signs and symbols of Orientalism are transmitted to the future, reproducing a novelty that is common among a universal fascination with the culture industries of Hollywood. Consequently, techno-Orientalist narratives offer a dose of magic through, for instance, AI (artificial intelligence), the comic book universe, and the extra-terrestrial-onscreen reproductions that engender a tranquility towards histories and ongoing realities of European-American frontier violence in Asia, as well as the significance of Black and Asian labour (women and their bodies) to technological production in the West. My discussion of these films involves discussions of how, in the favour of commercial, as opposed to critical, success, both films transit between Orientalism and techno-Orientalism and recapitulate a deeper postmodern problem of white male hegemony in Hollywood cultural production that is reinforced by a precession of onscreen vocabularies of stereotypical Asian female difference, which most prominently manifest in visual vocabularies of silence, sexuality, and sickness. By diverting familiar stereotypes of Orientalism into the future or within parameters of science fiction, these films seemingly incorporate a dose of magic into cinematic experience; this is a point of contention, however, that will be addressed below. For now, we should remember Edward Said’s statement that “continued investment made [End Page 208] Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (4). Grounded in this tradition, the representational power of techno-Orientalism is related to what Jean Baudrillard initially identified as the “precession of simulacrum” or the idea that the “simulation […] is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Simulacra and Simulation 3). These critical theories come together in this article to address qualities of representation, simulation, or what I call “simulAsian” in Ex Machina and Venom as devices under the guise of magical realist works that have garnered critical and commercial success. The models of Orientalism that assign Asian characters, particularly women, as magically operational engenders the simulAsian as familiar even in its novelty. They embody Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality wherein simulacra-representations, imitations, forgeries of the real-“are themselves an anticipation of the real” (Simulacra and Simulation 81). Given extant models of Orientalism, this precession of simulacra or saturation of images are “characterized by a precession of the model” in which “facts no longer have a specific trajectory; they are born at the intersection of models” (Simulacra and Simulation 13) and contour the finitude of the onscreen simulAsian. In homage to Baudrillard’s 1994 English translation of Simulacra and Simulation, I correspond discussion between the simulAsians of both films to address how their techno-Orientalist elements provide a dose of magic that disenchants audiences from the ongoing realities of European-American frontier violence in East and South Asia. Ex Machina, in particular, hosts relevant critiques of the processes of modernization and the function of Black and Asian labour in the tech industry, which were elided by the very problem of reproducing stereotypical Asian female difference. Instead, Venom recapitulates these complex problems of geopolitics and global structuring by recasting familiar twentieth-century Yellow Peril stereotypes, such as that of Asians as carriers of disease, into its comic book universe. The simulAsians are simulations; they are a “play of illusions and phantasms” wherein no principle of reality is intact and the “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (Simulacra and Simulation 3). Both films enhance the precession of simulacrum or the saturation of the simulAsian, “which no longer has anything to do with the logic of facts...

Screening Anti-Asian Racism

Abstract The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities as viral origins—in the United States. Offering strategies for inclusion and for identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism, this article analyzes the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yellow fever in recent films and television series. The spectatorial aspect of racism has both fetishized Asian bodies and erased Asianness from content creators' visual landscapes. These case studies reveal that racialized thinking is institutionalized as power relations in the cultural and political life, take the form of political marginalization of minority groups, and cause emotional distress and physical harm within and beyond the fictional universe.

Introduction

Introduction

The Racial Interface: The Computational Origins of Minority Modeling

This article compares two so-called “success stories”: Asian/Americans and computers. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as computers transformed from threatening, wartime machines to user-friendly personal devices, so too did Asian/Americans shift from “yellow peril” to “model minority” citizens. Engaging histories of Asian/America, media art, and information technologies, this article explores the interpenetration of racial and computational forms, logics, and operations within the structures of US liberal capitalism. It examines the discourse surrounding computer scientist Jeffrey Chuan Chu, Japanese American model minorities, and Douglas Engelbart’s Graphic User Interface (GUI) alongside a central case study of Nam June Paik’s drawing Untitled (TV Face) (1980) and digital artwork Confused Rain (1967). By tracking the emergence of two visual abstractions—the model minority and the computer interface—I theorize “minority modeling” as a racial interface, a representational myth that promotes the dual operations of individualist empowerment and structural obfuscation. While liberal histories of race and computation prop up narratives of social progress and assimilation, Paik’s art offers an aesthetics of indeterminacy that emphasizes the irresolvable contradictions linking Asian/American racialization and computational technologies.

Yellow Peril and cash cows: the social positioning of Asian international students in the USA.

Asians and Asian Americans in the USA have long been a part of a contentious racial history, yet the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted discriminatory stereotypes and beliefs. As revealed through this discourse analysis, Asian international students were simultaneously positioned as scapegoats, bearers of disease, cash cows, and political pawns, all within the context of the pandemic. Asian international students navigated their shifting social positionings within a national context that was heavily influenced by racist nativism. Findings indicated that during a health pandemic, Asian international students were positioned as both the Yellow Peril and cash cows within U.S. higher education.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-022-00814-y.

Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter by Jonathan Hsy

Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter by Jonathan Hsy

From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back to Yellow Peril

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some perceptions of Asian Americans in the United States shifted as anti-Asian hate crimes escalated. However, little is known about how these shifting views manifest in K–12 schools. This qualitative case study uses Asian critical race theory to examine how two Southeast Asian American students faced exclusion and erasure before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and how their Southeast Asian American teacher advocated for them at a public elementary school in the Pacific Northwest. Implications include how researchers can pursue inquiries about Asian American students’ holistic development and how in-service and pre-service teachers can address anti-Asian xenophobia.