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Amy J. Ransom, in “Yellow Perils: M. P. Shiel, Race, and the Far East Menace,” examines Shiel’s three “Yellow Peril” novels—The Yellow Danger (1898), The Yellow Wave (1905), and The Dragon (1913), republished as The Yellow Peril (1929)—in relation to their representations of racial Others. Largely adhering to the future war or secret history sub-genres, Shiel’s three novels—like much of his work—draw on contemporary headlines, such as the opening of Japan to the West in the Meiji period (1868-1945), the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902; 1905; 1911), and the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05). By situating Shiel’s work within the larger framework of Yellow peril literature and analyzing how its representations of Asians comply with (and depart from) contemporary discourses on race and degeneracy, Ransom reveals Shiel’s conflicted attitudes about his own multi-racial background.

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This chapter examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime after early 1942.

To what extent did U.S. intelligence believe that Imperial Japanese forces would invade the West Coast, an idea that many believe was responsible for the alleged atmosphere of wartime hysteria that led to mass confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans? Based on unused archival materials, this article shows that these agencies dismissed the idea of an impending Japanese invasion, shown by their negative reaction to Korean nationalist Kilsoo Haan’s “Yellow Peril” prediction of a Japanese invasion of California in 1943. It also demonstrates that assumptions about Yellow Peril ideas require more nuanced analysis, for they were not universally accepted or as widespread as often believed. The chapter concludes with observations on Kilsoo Haan, U.S. intelligence, and Japanese American internment.

In his introduction, Isiah Lavender III reminisces on his love for Japanese anime on American television and his first screening of Blade Runner before explaining how the concept of comparative racialization comes to bear on the seventeen essays gathered together in this collection. He discusses politics, racism, and science fiction as he considers how the collection brings together theories old and new to further explore and to expand the renewed visibility of the Orient in science fiction. Likewise, he indicates why the multidisciplinary approach for this collection offers a wide-ranging critical assessment of Asian representations in science fiction. Finally, Lavender suggests that the comparative, relational, and global intersections of Dis-Orienting Planets help readers positively, or at least in a different way, rethink contact among the races in each of the chapters.

Accepting that racial science, written almost exclusively by white men, has created social conflict for people of color as well as other ethnic groups in the United States, James argues, in “Yellow, Black, Metal and Tentacled: the Race Question in American Science Fiction,” how racist attitudes and widespread prejudices have shaped science fiction in the twentieth century by examining various SF motifs in the work of M.P. Shiel, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert A. Heinlein, among others.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) marked a watershed in global history. Victory over Russia secured Japan’s position as the first Asian ‘great power’. But it also raised an acute debate over the meaning and implications of its sudden rise. Some praised the Japanese victory as the triumph of ‘civilization’ over Russian barbarism; others pointed ominously to the effect that the destruction of a ‘white power’ would have on the collective European colonial project in Asia. Policymakers, both in London and its self-governing colonies, were forced to reckon with the implications of Japan’s bid for equality. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Britain, Canada, and Australia all took symbolic steps to demonstrate their willingness to recognize Japan as a co-equal member of the international system.

This chapter studies the dehumanizing discourses of American-style racism that compared black and yellow people to gorillas, apes, and orangutans. This act and signification is seen as a means to justify the array of legal, political, social, and religious ideologies that upheld the lethal system of racial discrimination and segregation. Some examples of such discrimination can be seen, from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia to the mocking Civil War and Reconstruction-era cartoons of Thomas Nast’s Harper’s Bazaar. Against the Asians, there was the Yellow Peril propaganda of World War II and anti-Chinese rhetoric. The chapter then talks about the connection between the guerilla subjectivity that African Americans and Asian Americans adopted and the term “gorilla,” suggesting that there remains an echo which only adds another layer of meaning to the concepts expounded upon in this chapter.

This chapter looks at controversial online and print journalistic texts that launched heated debates about the cultural politics of racial representation in postsecondary institutions in Canada and the United States. It studies the nature of the publics produced by Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Kohler's “Too Asian?” article (2010) and Alexandra Wallace's “Asians in the Library” YouTube video (2011). By reading the influx of Asian students akin to an invasion of postsecondary institutions, Findlay, Kohler, and Wallace rework the language of Yellow Peril and other kinds of Orientalist imagery within Canadian and American contexts. The circulation of these shared Orientalist representations throughout Canada and the United States illustrates the transnational nature of dominant social imaginations bound together by common anxieties about the Asian despite the significant differences in the national histories of higher education in Canada and the United States.

Malisa Kurtz, in “A Dis-(Orient)ation: Race, Technoscience, and The Windup Girl,” provides a preview of what to expect from an anticipated Yellow Planets collection, where she examines Bacigalupi’s portrayal of a future Bangkok seething with racial tensions and prejudices despite technoscientific advancements by implicating that such progress masks imperial and racist ideologies.