No Longer White

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Far East ◽  
East Asians ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Mongolian Spot ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Important Shift

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.

Nineteenth-Century Anthropology and the Measurement of “Mongolian” Skin Color

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Far East ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
East Asians ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The People ◽  
Western Imagination

This chapter examines how the “yellow race” became an important focus in nineteenth-century anthropology. More specifically, it considers how the whole notion of skin tone had become inextricably linked to scientifically validated prejudices and normative claims about higher and lower forms of human culture. The chapter first discusses why the term “Mongolian” was selected to represent the people of the Far East and compares it to “Tartar” before exploring how the new field of anthropology became preoccupied with the idea of anatomical quantification, and especially the measurement of skin color using an instrument known as the color top. It shows that the desire to find yellowness in East Asians was so ingrained in the Western imagination that some anthropologists tried to prove that their skin really was yellow.

Taxonomies of Yellow

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Far East ◽  
East Asians ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The People ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
French Physician

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new sorts of human taxonomies as well as new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, during the course of the eighteenth century, as well as their racial implications. It first considers the theory advanced in 1684 by the French physician and traveler François Bernier, who proposed a “new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of man which inhabit it.” One of these races, he suggested, was yellow. Then in 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema naturae, in which he categorized homo sapiens into four different skin colors. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, also a physician and the founder of comparative anatomy, declared that the people of the Far East were a yellow race, as distinct from the white “Caucasian” one.

Yellow Peril

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Far East ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The West ◽  
East Asians ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
China And Japan

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.

Before They Were Yellow

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Far East ◽  
White People ◽  
East Asians ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Asian People

This chapter examines how East Asians were seen by medieval travel narrators and missionaries before they became yellow at the end of the eighteenth century. The story begins in 1511, when the Portuguese established a permanent outpost for East Asian trade at Malacca. Persistent rumors of “white” people in the Far East had turned into a reality, as both Chinese and Japanese (as well as Arabs and other East Asians) became a common sight. The “whiteness” of these people was constantly highlighted as a term that described their presumed level of civilization. The chapter considers a number of surviving accounts by merchants and (later) missionaries that are full of references to the whiteness of both Chinese and Japanese natives, including those attributed to Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa. It also explores how Western descriptions of East Asian people shifted from calling them white to calling them yellow.

scholarly journals The ‘standard of civilization’ in international law: Intellectual perspectives from pre-war Japan

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (01) ◽  
pp. 13-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Shahabuddin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Far East ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Western World ◽  
European Standard ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Historical Pattern ◽  
National Spirit ◽  
Opening Up

AbstractThis article establishes the normative connection between Japan’s responses to regional hegemonic order prior to the nineteenth century and its subsequent engagement with the European standard of civilization. I argue that the Japanese understanding of the ‘standard of civilization’ in the nineteenth century was informed by the historical pattern of its responses to hegemony and the discourse on cultural superiority in the Far East that shifted from Sinocentrism to the unbroken Imperial lineage to the national-spirit. Although Japanese scholars accepted and engaged with the European standard of civilization after the forced opening up of Japan to the Western world in the mid-nineteenth century, they did so for instrumental purposes and soon translated ‘civilization’ into a language of imperialism to reassert supremacy in the region. Through intellectual historiography, this narrative contextualizes Japan’s engagement with the European standard of civilization, and offers an analytical framework not only to go beyond Eurocentrism but also to identify various other loci of hegemony, which are connected through the same language of power.

Early Diplomatic Relations Between Mexico and the Far East

1950 ◽  
Vol 6 (04) ◽  
pp. 401-414
Author(s):  
Clinton Harvey Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
The Far East

Between the glamorous galleons of the sixteenth century and the flashing fighter planes of the 1940’s—which were the Mexican commercial and military introductions to the Far East—came the less brilliant but more permanent diplomatic orientation toward the Far East on the part of Mexico during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals A cross-cultural perspective on musealization: the museum’s reception by China and Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang Wan-Chen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Preservation ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
The West ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The World ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals

Historically museums emerged in the West and were subsequently taken up by people in other regions of the world, including the Far East, where the museum was adopted with alacrity by Japanese and Chinese intellectuals. This article explores how China and Japan imagined museums when they first encountered them in the West. It sketches how intellectuals in these two nations began to conduct ‘musealization’, and suggests that the museum in China and Japan was a product of appropriation of Western formats that was, however, deeply influenced by traditional attitudes to cultural preservation and display.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document