Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear Paperback – February 11, 2014

I have learned a great deal from this book !

Don't be fooled by the title: This book provides a wealth of material about racist discourse and Eurocentrism well beyond the anti-Asian context. Part anthology and part critical analysis, Yellow Peril! is a tour-de-force that goes back all the way to European colonialism and the Enlightenment. It shows that engaging with colonialism is necessary not only to learn about the origins of racist stereotypes, but also to understand why they are so pervasive and continue to inform ways of knowing and cultural production to this day. Students and scholars interested in the history of racism and its legacies, and especially faculty looking for teaching materials on the topic, will enjoy and appreciate this remarkable book.

I always make it a rule to look at primary sources when I write a book, and this is an excellent compendium with well-thought out selections. It would also be useful for anyone who wants to conduct an informed discussion whether it be in a paper, a classroom presentation or an online forum.

This is a meditation on being Chinese American and being an immigrant. Very perceptive and interesting to read.

A lot of little short (one para to 2-3 pages) snippets from various eras. Disappointing. I had seen the presentation on BookTV and was looking forward to discourses on Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, Doctor No, Big Stoop, etc. Mention only of the former, and not much on him. Book concentrates (barely) on anti-Oriental prejudices but wanders far afield into more general Western biases vs. "the others". Would not buy if I had a do-over.

While nominally about the abusive stereotyping of Asians in Europe and America, Yellow Peril spends nearly half its heft dealing with xenophobia, prejudice and abuse through the ages. Yellow Peril itself was the conceit of Kaiser Wilhelm, who saw it in a dream in the 1880s, and had it made into a political cartoonish painting that was reproduced throughout the West. Sadly, it stuck, and flourished.

Unlike most academic tracts that quote often and in short bursts, this book takes excerpts in their entirety, giving you a taste of style as well as content. It makes the read much more varied, especially when the content is as revolting as man's complete intolerance of anyone who is in any way different.

It is also peppered with gloriously malevolent illustrations from ancient maps prejudicially naming countries and continents, to mass market book covers and political cartoons - including a racist,inflammatory cartoon against the Japanese by Dr. Seuss of all people. It just adds to the evidence that prejudice is ubiquitous and ingrained. I freely admit I had no idea attacks on Asians were so widespread or so intense. This has been a revelation.

Respected academics, historians, philosophers and of course politicians all participate in propagating ignorant hatred. And their words are taken as truth. The yellow peril is only a more recent example. We have gone through eugenics and phrenology and all kinds of crackpot theories, particularly in the 1800s, all of which were received as solid science. They all prove "we" are better, more advanced, more evolved, superior. "They" are wretched, dishonest, dirty, and incapable of either assimilating (restrict immigration) or self-governing (invade and colonize). All nations feel this way about everyone else. It's how they keep together. Some examples from Yellow Peril:

-13th century opinion was that the invading Mongol hordes were Jewish, because there is no mention of Mongols in the bible.
-In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull authorizing perpetual slavery for all Saracens (Muslims), pagans and all other nonbelievers. With this, he justified and promulgated the development of the international slave trade.Which we still have not shaken.
-We love to assign bizarre attributes to others, to mark them as infidels: Jews drinking baby's blood, Muslims as jihadists, American Indians as Redskins, Asians as Yellow. No truth in any of it, but these characterizations stick for ages. It helps when you invade. In Vietnam, Americans considered the people they were "saving" as gooks, and abused them at will.

At bottom, it is the politics of fear. It's so much easier to find a scapegoat than to deal with issues. In America, whole political parties base their existence instilling fear in the populace. We pick easy targets to blame: "Arab `control' of oil prices, Japanese `unfair' competition and Chinese `manipulation' of currency help politicians and pundits protect Americans from understanding the glaring domestic policy failure underpinning their economic woes."

The sad conclusion is that humans hate anyone who is different. It doesn't even have to be racial: Irish Catholics and Protestants, Muslim Sunnis and Shiites... We demonize them, belittle them, minimize them - at best. At worst, we abuse, plunder, rape and murder. And now, we can bomb like no one could ever before. And so we do.

I will give the last word to a quote from another review of mine, for By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey, the story of American blacks abusing African blacks in Liberia. A freed slave, who rose to high office in the mid 1800s, reflected:"How true it is, the greater the injury done to the injured, the greater the hatred of those who have done the injury!"

Yellow Peril has a long list of antecedents.

David Wineberg

Professor Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats have compiled a superb textbook on the paramount topic of the Yellow Peril (aka Oriental-phobia). Count Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Boxer Rebellion, Bible prophecies, and the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) are given some attention.
Nevertheless, the opinions of Greenberry George Rupert, George S. Patton, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Anna Louise Strong, Charles Henry Vail, Sun Myung Moon, Manly P. Hall, Jack Weatherford, Marco Polo, Jacques de Molay, and Anna May Wong should also, perhaps, have been mixed into this otherwise sublime primer.
[I]t is extraordinary to see how ignorant even the best scholars of America and England are of the tremendous importance in world history of the nation-shattering Mongol invasions... But this does not entirely excuse ignorance of such an event as the Mongol-Tatar invasion, which affected half of Europe far more profoundly than the Crusades (Page 173).
[B]ible prophecy teaches that the Red advance in Europe will be powered from out of Asia... President Theodore Roosevelt sounded a warning against the 'yellow peril'... Communism is an Asiatic theory of government... By the 'yellow peril' we mean the organizing of Orientals into a force that seeks to destroy all white men from the face of the earth... The army of 200 million men, described in Revelation, flows forth from the empire of the 'yellow peril' which consists of people who worship devils... All Oriental religions are cut from the same cloth and according to substantially the same pattern... Some forms of pantheism make the material universe an object of worship... Even by hairsplitting, it is impossible to discover any important difference between the materialism of Marxian Communism and the superstitions of the Oriental religions... We are told in Revelation that the rampaging Yellow Peril will launch mass slaughters that will take the lives of one-third of the human race... Communism sanctions fornication, murder, sorcery, and theft (Pages 299-301).