The yellow peril discourse in anglophone and sinophone literatures and cultures, 1895 to the present: mutations, reactions, and reinventions

Thesis

Focusing on appropriations of the racist Yellow Peril discourse in a range of Anglophone and Sinophone contexts from 1895 to the present, this thesis advocates a transnational and situated approach to the study of narratives of racialization. It seeks to challenge the discursive ossification of “Yellow Peril” in the existing English-language scholarship dominated by Asian American Studies. The shifting presences and absences of the “Yellow Peril” in a diverse range of cultural materials, including novels, memoirs, poems, song lyrics, and music videos, are examined with comparative perspectives. The three main sections of this thesis (Section I to III) investigate three different geo-cultural contexts. Section I looks at how the “Yellow Peril” trope found both its prototypical and archetypal fictional characters in fin de siècle England and how it turned into culturalist undercurrents in Ezra Pound’s development of literary modernism in the early 20th century. Section II examines Chinese South African life writing about being “yellow” under apartheid, and analyzes the poetic images of China and Chineseness constructed by the “colored” South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus to counter the dominant “Yellow Peril”/“Red Peril” discourses in the country during the global Cold War. Section III examines the emergence and re-popularization of racializing discourses related to the color yellow in post-Mao China, or the Sinophone world inclusively conceived. Through detailed analyses of dissident writer Wang Lixiong’s novel Yellow Peril (1988), the anti-locust discourse in Hong Kong, and the racial nationalism exhibited in selected patriotic songs produced by Hong Kong and Taiwanese celebrities, it proposes the concept of “Sinophone trouble” to understand the diverse and often paradoxical ways in which different Sinophone actors have appropriated or reacted to the Yellow Peril discourse. With these interconnected case studies, this thesis emphasizes the comparative nature of racialization and multiplies the ways in which the “Yellow Peril” can be imagined and engaged with.

Authors: Shi, D

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: Chinese and English
• Keywords: Chinese South African; sinophone; Asian racialization; yellow peril; positive orientalism; racism; comparative literature
• Subjects: Postcolonial criticism; Race; Comparative literature--Chinese and Western