The “Yellow Peril” and the Asia-Pacific War

Abstract

This chapter explores the history of racialized threats and fears of Asia in the Western imagination. It shows that the discourse of the “yellow peril” can be understood as a process of world-making of “Asian” alterity through ideas of threat and insecurity; it is a discourse of anxiety wherein the global racial imaginary is seen as being in crisis and what potentially replaces it is a world of disorder and violence. The second section of the chapter then examines how both the Japanese and the Americans engaged in the racialization of each other: first, in terms of how the Japanese empire itself internalized its own version of racial order in response to the global racial imaginary; second, for the United States, as a way of intensifying the violence against a racial other, which can be traced back to the settler colonial plans of the nineteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing how the global racial imaginary functioned within the United States during the early Cold War period by representing the Soviet Union as the Asiatic other.