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In the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yellow” and “Mongolian” East Asian identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Becoming Yellow incorporates a wide range of sources in its exploration of the European imagination of an East Asian racial identity, including poetry, travel accounts, medical and anthropological texts, and children’s toys. Over the course of our interview, we talked about the difficulties and rewards of trying to situate the idea of a “Yellow Peril” in historical context, and the potential pitfalls along the way.
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The book sounds like a great investigative journey into Western notions of Japanese and Chinese personhoods. Listening to the interview, I have to take issue with a few global remarks made by Michael Keevak.
The use of color to signify bodies is not Western borne. While there are peripheral references such as “Yellow Emperor” in Chinese sources that do not say much to racial distinctions, there has been a long history of mapping people’s bodies by their skin color in South Asia (and other parts of Asia) with examples such as the Sanskrit term “varna,” which translates as “color.’
Whiteness does not derive from the West– one of its Asian references is to economic status (those who did not need to work outside remained light-skinned versus those that had to work outside and became darker). Western racial formations did make an impact — and continue to make an impact — on Asian methods of racialization, but the method of mapping bodies based upon skin color did not originate in the West.