Race Magic and the Yellow Peril

Abstract

Among the many historical examples in which the Orient has been imaginatively associated with magic, one of the most fascinating involves an actual overlap between race and magic in the popular performances of yellowface magicians at the turn of the twentieth century. I use this example to show and analyze some of the dynamics between magic and the aesthetics of race, especially as these play out through one of the most influential and long-standing contradictions of the “Yellow Peril”: Chinese people are unassimilable, yet Chinese aesthetics are easily appropriated.