Synopses & Reviews
The "yellow peril" is one of the most long-standing and pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—indeed, this book traces its history to the Enlightenment era. Yet while Fu Manchu evokes a fading historical memory, yellow peril ideology persists, animating, for example, campaign commercials from the 2012 presidential election.
Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic.
Written by two leading scholars and replete with paintings, photographs and images drawn from dime novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, polemical and pseudo-scholarly literature, and other pop culture ephemera, this book is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.
Synopsis
John Kuo-Wei Tchen is a professor at New York University, the author of
New York Before Chinatown, and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America.
Dylan Yeats is a doctoral candidate at New York University.
Synopsis
From invading hordes to enemy agents, a great fear haunts the West The "yellow peril" is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture--dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia.
Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.
About the Author
SG