TY - BOOK AU - Keevak,Michael TI - Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking SN - 9780691140315 AV - HT1523 .K44 2017 U1 - 305.8009182109033 23 PY - 2011///] CY - Princeton, NJ : PB - Princeton University Press, KW - East Asians KW - Race identity KW - National characteristics, East Asian KW - Race awareness KW - Western countries KW - History KW - 18th century KW - 19th century KW - Racism KW - SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / General KW - bisacsh KW - Carl Linnaeus KW - China KW - Chinese KW - Down syndrome KW - East Asian bodies KW - Far East KW - Franois Bernier KW - Japan KW - Japanese KW - Johann Friedrich Blumenbach KW - Mongolian bodies KW - Mongolian eye KW - Mongolian race KW - Mongolian spot KW - Mongolian KW - Mongolianness KW - Mongolism KW - Sino-Japanese War KW - Tartar KW - Tom Pires KW - Wilhelm II KW - anatomical quantification KW - anthropology KW - color top KW - homo sapiens KW - human taxonomies KW - medicine KW - merchants KW - missionaries KW - race KW - racial thinking KW - racism KW - skin color KW - travel narrators KW - whiteness KW - yellow peril KW - yellow race KW - yellow KW - yellowness N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Illustrations --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction: No Longer White --; Chapter 1. Before They Were Yellow --; Chapter 2. Taxonomies of Yellow --; Chapter 3. Nineteenth-Century Anthropology and the Measurement of "Mongolian" Skin Color --; Chapter 4. East Asian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Medicine --; Chapter 5. Yellow Peril --; Notes --; Works Cited --; Index; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400838608?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400838608 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9781400838608.jpg ER -