Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema. The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, then considers later films such as Shanghai Express, Madame Butterfly, and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now. Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.

This study examines the way Americans of Chinese descent were portrayed in American literature between 1850 and 1940. Their depictions are compared to historical events that were occurring at the time the works of literature were published. This edition has additions and corrections compared to the original hardback edition published in 1982. ~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~ My purpose in writing this work has been to explore the depiction of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in American fiction, from the mid-nineteenth century entry of the first Chinese immigrants in significant numbers, to the eve of World War II. I consider both the immigrant Chinese and the American-born generations that followed them to be Chinese Americans, but will sometimes identify the groups separately in recognition of the fact that the historical experience and treatment of the immigrants in fiction has been different from that of their descendants. The fiction treated in this study includes short stories and novels both by white Americans and Asian Americans. I am defining the term Yellow Peril as the threat to the United States that some white American authors believed was posed by the people of East Asia. As a literary theme, the fear of this threat focuses on specific issues, including possible military invasion from Asia, perceived competition to the white labor force from Asian workers, the alleged moral degeneracy of Asian people, and the potential genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons with Asians, who were considered a biologically inferior race by some intellectuals of the nineteenth century. The Chinese immigrants were the first target of this attention, since they were the first Asian immigrants to reach the United States in large numbers. This study will focus on American fiction about Chinese Americans in an attempt to analyze the growth and development of attitudes about them. My thesis is that the Yellow Peril is the overwhelmingly dominant theme in American fiction about Chinese Americans in the years with which this study is concerned. It is expressed through the variety of images of the Chinese Americans that appear, especially in their relation to, and their role as part of, the United States. The historical causes and literary subject matter change, but the theme neither disappears nor abates. Each work of fiction has been studied individually for the images it contains. Prior to the turn of the century, the Yellow Peril is perceived only as stemming from the Chinese. In the twentieth century, especially in the pulps, the Japanese joined the Chinese as a perceived menace to Europe and North America. The overall process of evaluation relies primarily on detailed analyses of the characters under consideration. This has been done with an awareness that the American public as a whole sometimes did not distinguish carefully among Asian ethnic groups, so that events involving one Asian ethnic group often affected the image of another. Some works are obscure and these have been quoted at greater length than more available ones. Relatively few critical sources have been cited; this is due to a dearth of relevant studies. The less important works of fiction have naturally received little critical attention and, often, when such attention was concerned with pertinent stories, the authors had little or nothing to say about the depiction of Chinese Americans. This observation is intended only as an explanation, and not as a value judgement of earlier scholarship with different goals.

An entirely new perspective on current scaremongering about China’s global ambitions, and on the Western media’s ignorance of Chinese culture A hundred years ago, a character who was to enter the bloodstream of 20th-century popular culture made his first appearance in the world of literature. In his day he became as well known as Count Dracula or Sherlock Holmes: he was the evil genius called Dr. Fu Manchu, described at the beginning of the first story in which he appeared as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.” Why did the idea that the Chinese were a threat to Western civilization develop at precisely the time when China was in chaos, divided against itself, the victim of successive famines and utterly incapable of being a “peril” to anyone even if it had wanted to be? Even the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu novels, Sax Rohmer, acknowledged that China, “as a nation possess that elusive thing, poise.” And what do the Chinese themselves make of all this? Is it any wonder that they remember what we have carelessly forgotten–the opium wars; the “unfair treaties” that ceded Hong Kong and the New Territories; and the stereotyping of Chinese people in allegedly factual studies? Here cultural historian Christopher Frayling takes us to the heart of popular culture in the music hall, pulp literature, and the mass-market press, and shows how film amplifies our assumptions.

A history of Chinese immigrants encounter with Canadian Protestant missionaries, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967, analyzes the evangelizing activities of missionaries and the role of religion in helping Chinese immigrants affirm their ethnic identity in a climate of cultural conflict. Jiwu Wang argues that, by working toward a vision of Canada that espoused Anglo-Saxon Protestant values, missionaries inevitably reinforced popular cultural stereotypes about the Chinese and widened the gap between Chinese and Canadian communities. Those immigrants who did embrace the Christian faith felt isolated from their community and their old way of life, but they were still not accepted by mainstream society. Although the missionaries’ goal was to assimilate the Chinese into Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, it was Chinese religion and cultural values that helped the immigrants maintain their identity and served to protect them from the intrusion of the Protestant missions. Wang documents the methods used by the missionaries and the responses from the Chinese community, noting the shift in approach that took place in the 1920s, when the clergy began to preach respect for Chinese ways and sought to welcome them into Protestant-Canadian life. Although in the early days of the missions, Chinese Canadians rejected the evangelizing to take what education they could from the missionaries, as time went on and prejudice lessened, they embraced the Christian faith as a way to gain acceptance as Canadians.

"Future war novelette intended as an awful warning story. Antiquated military hardware, bureaucratic bungling, labor problems, and foreign-born U.S. resident saboteurs spell defeat for America in a war with China and Japan in 1912. Manson (1850-1931) was San Francisco's City Engineer in charge of the water supply. His brief excursion into the world of fiction tells of a crisis precipitated by Asian-American racial animosity, resulting in a declaration of war by China and Japan. Within a few months, Asian forces invade and seize Pearl Harbor and other American bases in the Pacific and blockade the West Coast. The United States is compelled to sue for peace on humiliating and costly terms."--Dan Siegel. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s.

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.

The Yellow Peril provides considerable background information about Chinese immigration to Australia, but is mainly concerned with presenting a parade of Australian attitudes (usually fiercely racsist) towards Chinese and Japanese from the middle of the 19th century through to mid 20th century.