基本説明
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.
Full Description
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
List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: No Longer White: The Nineteenth-Century Invention of Yellowness 1 Chapter 1: Before They Were Yellow: East Asians in Early Travel and Missionary Reports 23 Chapter 2: Taxonomies of Yellow: Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and the Making of a "Mongolian" Race in the Eighteenth Century 43 Chapter 3: Nineteenth-Century Anthropology and the Measurement of "Mongolian" Skin Color 70 Chapter 4: East Asian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The Mongolian Eye, the Mongolian Spot, and"Mongolism"101 Chapter 5: Yellow Peril: The Threat of a "Mongolian" Far East, 1895-1920 124 Notes 145 Works Cited 175 Index 211
