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This chapter examines how the discourse of yellow not only became ubiquitous in the West, but also migrated into East Asian cultures during the period 1895–1920, giving rise to “the yellow peril”—the notion that East Asians were yellow and perilous. It begins with a historical background on how the Far East came to be seen as a “yellow peril,” a term coined in 1895 and generally credited to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, specifically in response to Japan's defeat of China at the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War (also known as “The Yellow War”). The chapter then considers how the Western concept of a “yellow race” was understood in China and Japan before concluding with a discussion of the ways in which yellowness persisted as a potentially dangerous and threatening racial category in the early twentieth century.

This book investigates when and how East Asians became yellow in the Western imagination. It follows a trajectory that emphasizes an important shift in thinking about race during the course of the eighteenth century, when new sorts of human taxonomies began to appear and new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, were put forward. It also examines how the “yellow race” and “Mongolian” bodies became important subjects in nineteenth-century anthropology and medicine, respectively. “Mongolian” bodies, for example, were linked to certain conditions thought to be endemic in—or in some way associated with—the race as a whole, including the “Mongolian eye,” the “Mongolian spot,” and “Mongolism” (now known as Down syndrome). Finally, the book considers how the Far East came to be seen as a “yellow peril,” a term coined in 1895 and often attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the notion of an Asiatic threat was well established in U.S. culture, in part through “Yellow Peril” propaganda, a product of the Pacific Coast anti-Chinese movement. Chapter 3 reads sensationalized Chinese invasion narratives alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave them narrative shape to tease out the racial fictions and counterfactual imaginings of this popular subgenre. From legal discourse to the forgotten novels of Pierton Dooner, Robert Woltor, and Arthur Dudley Vinton, the invasion trope dominated U.S.-China relations. The Janus-faced depictions of Chinese labor migrants as abject coolie-slaves and villainous agents of foreign aggression embodied the contradictions of American industrial modernity. In imagining the tragic consequences of unfettered Chinese immigration, the subgenre absorbed and refracted white anxieties over the end of western expansion—American Manifest Destiny—and the changing composition of the national polity after black citizenship and enfranchisement.

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.

This chapter describes how the term “world” becomes a category of racial meaning. Tracking the new coining of phrases such as “colored world,” “yellow world,” and “brown world” during and after the Russo-Japanese War, it shows the ways in which this discourse constructs new ways of seeing that are linked less to scientific racism or social Darwinism and more to modes of futurology that animate race as a historical tendency in the world. It analyzes popular and influential histories of the future such as B.L. Putnam Weale’s Conflict of Colour (1909), Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), and Brooks Adams’s Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History in relation to newspaper discourse on the yellow peril in order to see how race is used as forecast.

This chapter pursues the connections between the modes of storytellling built in future war stories and the new global logics of race described in the previous chapter. It takes the body of literature typically thought to be the most responsible for sensationalizing racist representations of Asiatic persons - future war yellow peril stories - and suggests instead that their narrative strategies act irrespective of the representation of Asiatic persons. Race and genre interact to achieve certain cognitive effects. It traces these cognitive effects across Homer Lea’s popular military history Valor of Ignorance, Marsden Manson’s political pamphlet, Yellow Peril in Action, and popular future war stories by M.P. Shiel and H.G. Wells. It shows how the genre of future war and these ways of noticing race interact in producing the yellow peril as real.

Max Brooks made publishing history with his World War Z, bringing bestseller status to a zombie-themed novel for the first time. Well-researched, entertaining, and massive in scope, the novel spoke to the American fascination with apocalypse and the anxious suspicion of readers still reeling from the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—the feeling that anything can happen, and probably will. But the appeal of World War Z for American readers may also have something to do with the echo throughout the novel of a nationalistic and even racist paranoia that has been a part of the American cultural psyche for over a century: the fear of Asian invasion, or “yellow peril anxiety.” This chapter reads Brooks’ novel for instances of yellow peril anxiety, which can be most easily recognized in the portrayal of China’s rulers as the source of the worldwide zombie plague.

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.

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.

This chapter focuses on the iconography of the ‘yellow claw’ and its place in the Anglo-American political culture. More specifically, it examines how the yellow claw icon was created and disseminated by a transnational circuit of popular print culture and visual media, and its link to anti-Chinese measures implemented in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It first looks at the origins of the yellow-claw-like drawings before discussing its visual elaboration into visceral peril, along with the political impacts of yellow peril fears. Finally, the chapter analyses the yellow claw icon’s lasting legacy in the unconscious of Anglo-American and European political culture.

This chapter highlights how many women historians, like the author, delve into the histories that have been marginalized by the dominant canon, finding palpable relevance to present-day social justice issues. The chapter then turns to the little-known history of the internment of Japanese Latin Americans in the United States during World War II, a case of extraordinary rendition. Focusing on the internment of the Japanese Peruvians, this chapter argues that global “yellow peril” and eugenic ideologies played an essential role in U.S. and Peruvian policies during WWII. Further, it challenges readers to consider how purported policies of national security have been motivated by thinly veiled racism.

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.

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.

This chapter examines American films that illustrate the shapes taken by China in the cinematic “dreams” and, especially, the “nightmares” of the Cold War era. Both reflecting and fueling the paranoid climate that erupted in the late 1940s, films such as The Manchurian Candidate, 55 Days at Peking, and The Sand Pebbles show how ancient images of Chinese barbarism merged with and drew strength from fears surrounding the Red Scare of the 1950s. This chapter considers how screen representations of China and the Chinese, shadowed by the yellow peril’s specter, underwent a radical transformation, with particular emphasis on how the dialectic between the self and the other seen in earlier films blossomed into an almost mythic, absolute struggle of civilizations. Marks of difference, such as those of sexuality and Christianity, tended to disappear. Impregnated with America’s “anxieties” and “betrayed illusions,” the films of the Cold War era reveal a dramatic swing of the pendulum governing images of China.

Drawing on travelogues, legal documents, public health reports, descriptions of Chinatowns, Yellow Peril fiction, and racial iconography, this chapter traces a long-standing mode of racial discourse that has framed Asiatic bodies and practices as embodiments of modernity’s noxious atmospheres. It then considers how the early twentieth-century author Edith Maude Eaton / Sui Sin Far and the contemporary conceptual artist Anicka Yi deploy scent to critique and redress this pattern of olfactory racialization.

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.

This chapter argues that one of Jack London's most consistent concerns throughout his career was the place of the machine in modern life, and his engagements with the discourses of racial formation and socialism (and his complicated attempts to both reproduce and transcend them) are consistent with this technologically deterministic concern. London's vision of Asia/Pacific, in other words, was as much a product of his hopes and fears about modern technology as it was of any rigid, biological theories of racial difference. Indeed, when viewed through the prism of his concerns about the role of technology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century capitalism, London's seemingly contradictory characterizations of various Asian/Pacific people become much more coherent (if still firmly rooted in a racialized, Eurocentric worldview).

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.

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.