In collaboration with Brazos Bookstore and the University of Houston Honors College

Please note that this program takes place offsite at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street.

China's meteoric rise and ever-expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past believes connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions worldwide.

Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term "Yellow Peril" in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple.

The term "Yellow Peril" may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection — experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberation of China's economic rise — offer a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today's world.

Program attendance is free. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event venue, Brazos Bookstore.

About the Author

Sören Urbansky is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC. He is a historian of Russia and China in the modern era, specializing in imperial and racial entanglements, emigration, and the history of borders. Before he joined the GHI in 2018, he taught Chinese and Russian history at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Kolonialer Wettstreit: Russland, China, Japan und die Ostchinesische Eisenbahn (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008) and Beyond the Steppe Hill: The Making of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2019). He is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments in a global perspective.

Asia Society Texas Center Business & Policy Programs, Endowed by

Huffington Foundation

Bank of America, Muffet Blake, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and United Airlines are presenting sponsors of Business and Policy programs at Asia Society Texas Center. Lead support for Business & Policy programs comes from Nancy C. Allen, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, BP America, Cathay Bank Foundation, Anne and Albert Chao, Mandy and William Kao, The Southmore, and Wells Fargo. Generous funding also provided by the Friends of Asia Society Texas Center, a dedicated group of individuals and organizations committed to bringing the best in public programming.

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