Becoming yellow : a short history of racial thinking / Michael Keevak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keevak, Michael, 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

East Asians--Race identity.

East Asians.

National characteristics, East Asian.

Race awareness--Western countries--History--18th century.

Race awareness.

Race awareness--Western countries--History--19th century.

Racism--Western countires--History--18th century.

Racism.

Racism--Western countires--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (240 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase "yellow peril" at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow. Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: No Longer White

Chapter 1. Before They Were Yellow

Chapter 2. Taxonomies of Yellow

Chapter 3. Nineteenth-Century Anthropology and the Measurement of "Mongolian" Skin Color

Chapter 4. East Asian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Medicine

Chapter 5. Yellow Peril

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613012128

9781283012126

128301212X

9781400838608

1400838606

OCLC:

705539230