Yellow Peril!- Book Talk & Signing

New York University professor John Kuo Wei Tchen will discuss his new book, Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, during a book talk and signing on Saturday, November 8, 3 p.m., at the Chinese American Museum

The "yellow peril" is one of the most long-standing and pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—indeed, this book traces its history to the Enlightenment era. Yet while Fu Manchu evokes a fading historical memory, yellow peril ideology persists, animating, for example, campaign commercials from the 2012 presidential election. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic.

Written by two leading scholars and replete with paintings, photographs and images drawn from dime novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, polemical and pseudo-scholarly literature, and other pop culture ephemera, this book is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation. Through visuals, archival documents, and essays, Professor Tchen probes the history of anti-Asian xenophobia and paranoia in the United States and examines how it is linked to Angle settlement and the formation of Europe.

Reserve your space by emailing rsvp@camla.org.