Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear

On Friday, March 7, guest speakers will discuss some of New York City's most urgent racial issues and link them back to divisive and corrosive stereotypes, policies, and practices.

UPDATE: This event, originally a 2-day conference entitled “Remapping Fear: The Politics and Poetics of Scapegoating and Denial,” will now be a one-evening program. Please see below for details.

“A uniquely satisfying work, Yellow Peril! is smart, funny, comprehensive, and theoretically astute. It sees as well as thinks anti-Asian xenophobia through riveting images that literally demonstrate class conflict that has been racialized and sexualized. This is theory + praxis at its best.” –Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University.

From Genghis Khan to Fu Manchu, death rays to Islamophobia, Guantanamo to Tea Party xenophobia, the national security state to immigration policies…. Linking and bringing together fragmented visuals, documents, and essays, Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (Verso Press, 2014) is both a call to decolonize US and Western civilizational studies and an indispensable briefing contextualizing contemporary wars, politics, and global conflicts.

On Friday, March 7, a gathering of performers and guest speakers will discuss some of today’s urgent issues, linking them back to divisive and corrosive stereotypes, policies, and practices.

Featuring new commissioned works by Suheir Hammad, Jason Kao Hwang, and Kelly Tsai, and Yellow Peril! contributors Bruce Franklin, Matt Jacobson, Urmila Seshagiri, Karen Shimakawa,  John Kuo Wei Tchen, and Dylan Yeats.

RSVP by Wednesday, March 5 here.

Yellow Peril! is a labor of love co-edited by Jack Tchen (A/P/A Institute at NYU) and Dylan Yeats (NYU History Department). The project emerged from the Yoshio Kishi and Irene Yah-Ling Sun Collection, and more recently the Jack G. Shaheen Collection.

Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU.

Jack Tchen is the founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program at NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in 1979-80, where he continues to serve as senior historian. He is the author of New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, 1895-1905.

His research interests include the present, past, and future of New York City; identity formations; trans-local cross cultural communications; archives and epistemologies; progressive pedagogy; decolonizing Eurocentric ideas, theories, and practices; and making cultural organizations and institutions more representative and democratic. He is co-principal investigator of Imagining America’s Community Knowledge Collaboratory.

Dylan Yeats is a doctoral candidate in History at New York University. His dissertation traces the often unacknowledged (and sometimes unintentional) role of the US Federal Government in promoting and shaping a national culture before World War I. Yeats has worked as a tour guide, curator, archivist, and community documentation project consultant. Yeats believes that historical inquiry (as an analytical approach and as a set of research tools) can help us understand, enrich, and empower ourselves and our various communities.