(Invited) Yellow Peril, Model Minority, and Anti-Asian Racism during COVID-19

Situated within comics and graphic life writing scholarship, this article examines the rhetoric of serially illustrating Chinese labour in David H.T. Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain. It reads the alignment of dead, murdered, injured, and struggling Chinese labourers alongside Indigenous characters and Chinese North American trailblazers as part of the book’s commemorative impulse to memorialize these historical figures and relationships in the (trans)national imaginary. It also claims that the narrative’s rhetorical shifts, from satire to irony, melancholy to condemnation, all form an ethical appeal to the reader to remember and honour the lives and contributions of the Gold Mountain migrants when their presence in the visual and historical archive has been dehumanized by Yellow Peril discourses. However, the article concludes that Wong’s anti-racist memorial project also problematically reinvests in the model minority myth, indigenizes the figure of the Chinese labourer, and upholds a settler colonial relationship to the land.

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From Yellow Peril through Model Minority to Renewed Yellow Peril

Journal of Communication Inquiry ◽

10.1177/0196859998022004004 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 22 (4) ◽

pp. 385-409 ◽

Cited By ~ 30

Author(s):

Doobo Shim

Keyword(s):

Model Minority ◽

Yellow Peril

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‘The Screaming Injustice of Colonial Relationships’

Bijdragen tot de taal- land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia ◽

10.1163/22134379-bja10020 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 177 (1) ◽

pp. 27-61

Author(s):

Tom Hoogervorst ◽

Melita Tarisa

Keyword(s):

Structural Change ◽

The Netherlands ◽

Chinese Students ◽

Model Minority ◽

Ethnic Chinese ◽

Yellow Peril ◽

Netherlands Indies

Abstract An insensitive poem published in 1935 sparked a wave of outrage among the Indies Chinese students in the Netherlands. Titled The yellow peril, it had started as an inside joke among Leiden’s Indologists, yet quickly aroused the fury of both moderates and radicals. Their anti-colonial activism flared up for months, attracting numerous allies and eventually taking hold in the Netherlands Indies. After the Indologists had apologized, the number of activists willing to push for more structural change dwindled. As such, this microhistory lays bare some broader dynamics of anti-racism. We argue that ethnic Chinese, who continue to be portrayed as an unobtrusive model minority, have a longer legacy of activism than they are usually given credit for. This is particularly relevant in the present, when Covid-induced Sinophobia, anti-Black racism, and a reassessment of the colonial past are inspiring new movements and forging new anti-racist solidarities.

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Disability Studies and Asian American Literature

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.912 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Kristina Chew

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Disability Studies ◽

Asian American ◽

Model Minority ◽

Asian American Literature ◽

Model Minority Myth ◽

Yellow Peril ◽

Intellectual Abilities ◽

Asian American Identity ◽

The 19Th Century

Twenty-first-century understandings of how disability figures in Asian American literature and the representation of Asian American individuals have greatly evolved. Earlier, highly pejorative characterizations associated with the 19th-century “Oriental” or “yellow peril” as a carrier of disease whose body needed to be quarantined and excluded. Later, the model minority myth typecast Asian Americans as having extreme intellectual abilities to the point of freakishness. Disability studies asserts that having an “imperfect” disabled body is nothing to hide and questions beliefs in norms of behavior and experience. Focusing on disability in Asian American literature opens a new path to reflect on Asian American identity and experience in ways that break away from the racial types and narrative trajectories of immigrant success that have often been seen as defining what it is to be Asian American. Integrating a disability studies perspective into Asian American studies provides a compelling and necessary means of critiquing stereotypes such as the model minority myth, as well as to reread many classic texts of Asian American literature with attentiveness to difference, impairment, and loss.

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