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"Keevak, Michael"
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Becoming yellow
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.
eBook
A World of Impostures
Keevak talks about the history of forgery. Forgeries are ubiquitous. Yet it has also been noted, and in fact noted by many eighteenth-century commentators themselves, that the Age of Reason produced an unusually large number of famous fakers: Thomas Chatterton, James Macpherson, George Psalmanazar, William Henry Ireland-to name just four, and just four in England. The realm of literary forgery (including piracy) is even more densely populated, and not simply with famous examples like Chatterton, Macpherson, or William Laudet.
Journal Article
Yellow Peril
In previous chapters I have repeatedly insisted on the difficulty of determining any sort of moment at which East Asians had suddenly “become” yellow. During their initial encounters with the West they were almost uniformly described as white, and while they slowly darkened in European eyes there was never really a consensus about exactly what color they were. A defining moment occurred at the end of the eighteenth century when they were lumped together into a new racial category called the “Mongolian,” commonly identified as the “yellow race.” But even then a number of color terms continued to be used.
Book Chapter
Nineteenth-Century Anthropology and the Measurement of “Mongolian” Skin Color
We concluded the last chapter by arguing that Blumenbach’s 1795 resolution to call East Asians “yellow or olive” was the product of a long descriptive and taxonomic tradition, and that deciding upongilvusto characterize the people of the region was a kind of reorienting (pardon the pun) of a constellation of color terms that had formerly been applied to very vague notions about the people of Asia as a whole. Blumenbach had attempted to correct earlier sources not only by settling upon yellow as opposed to some other color, but also by zeroing in onEastAsia as its
Book Chapter
East Asian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Medicine
In the last chapter we took up the idea of a yellow race in the field of nineteenth-century anthropology. This chapter will serve as a companion piece of sorts because it examines the fate of Blumenbach’s Mongolian race in nineteenth-century Western medical discourse, even though medicine, unlike anthropology, did not typically make any claims about yellow skin apart from its manifestations in such diseases as jaundice or yellow fever. Western medicine did, however, attempt to strengthen the racialization of the region by employing the adjective “Mongolian” in a number of conditions that were supposedly linked to—or endemic of—the
Book Chapter
Before They Were Yellow
When premodern European authors attempted to describe the residents of other lands there was often little agreement about precisely what color they were, partly because before the end of the eighteenth century there was no systematic desire to classify people according to what we now call race. Western thinking had long differentiated between the peoples of the known world in a variety of ways, including often vague notions about skin tone. But markers such as religion, language, clothing, and social customs were seen as far more important and meaningful than the relative lightness or darkness of the inhabitants, which, in
Book Chapter
Taxonomies of Yellow
In the last chapter we have begun to see how Western descriptions of East Asian people fitfully moved from calling them white to calling them yellow, although it was ultimately unclear why yellow should have been chosen from among so many other possibilities, including tawny,moreno,olivastro,basané,gefärbt,fuscus, andbruin. I have suggested that we are not going to find a satisfactory answer to that question by looking at travel texts or other forms of “eyewitness” description, simply because the adoption of any color term was symptomatic of a larger development within racialized thinking itself. To call East
Book Chapter