'Journalistic representations of Asian Americans and literary responses, 1910-1920'

Evolutionist racism:
▪ Collier ran two pieces, one heralding the 'arrival of Japan' as 'nothing less than the miraculous creation of another Western power' and the other entitled 'The Awakening of China.' The language of both articles draws a time-line of evolution, where having 'arrived' or being on time (Japan) means Westernizzation, and where being late signals backwardness and stagnation.
▪ Socialist exclusion of Asiatic labor from its ranks -- because Asiatics 'were so far behing the peoples of Europe in the plan of evolution that they were not readily assimilable.' The party's appeal to 'evolutionary development,' though seemingly focused on progress and change, denied its subjects any potential for growth. Asiatic peoples could not develop class consciousness precisely because of the limits of their assigned stage of development. Clearly, the argument acts as a strategy of containment, which masks its purpose in pseudoscientific language.
▪ This evolutionary discourse that slotted Asian nations into developmental stages also amassed all Asians into a near-primate stage, with only the Anglo-American as the fully developed human. Other races remainde either 'anthropoid apes' or 'children' who needed to be 'spanked regularly.'

Perceived as a mass of undifferentiated peoples, homogeinty:
▪ The editorials of this era often conflated a single Asian nation with 'the East in general,' reflecting a propensity to see Asian nations as a political bloc and pointing to the way in which journalistic prose applied the 'character' of any of one Asian nation to all Asian nations.
▪ 'The yellow peril' during this decade served as a general reference to all Asiatic peoples and their perceived threat to Americna labor and real-estate markets.
▪ This tendency to lump all Asians under one racial category enabled various journalists to take single instances of culturally 'foreign' behavior and apply them to another national group so as to compile an amalgamated image of 'the Asian race' (which functioned less as a physiological category than as a discursive trope for the other).

McFarlane's article 'Japan in California':
▪ 'Unclear' becomes synonymous with noncomformity to American tastes in home decoratoin and husbandry (McFarlane's article 'Japan in California'). --> non-conformism, different cultural understandings.
▪ He called the aspirations of the Japanese 'sordid' because they 'are not our ambitions . . . Not our satisfactions, with morals that to us are no morals . . . ' In McFarlane's rhetoric, 'sordid' simply translates into 'not like us.' one sees the discourse of 'uncleanliness' appropriating scientific terminology in order to make 'cultural difference' a dirty word.
▪ This focus on the supposed unhygienic nature of the Japanese appeals to the racist fear of infection. Portayals of Asians as carriers of disease.

Othering, unknowability:
▪ The journals furthered the stereotype of Asians as 'stoic' and 'inscrtable.' Because of the American emphasis on emotional display, 'inscrutability' became almost a criminal trate - evidence of inhumanity.
▪ A picture of an infected person --> the caption transformed the observer's inability to read someone's facial expression into a projected fault of the observed.
▪ This 'inscrutable' laber also bespeaks an uneasiness with the implicit limits to which Asians can be 'known' (placed in familiar categories) and then assimilated (adjusted socially and politically so as to develop not only familiarity but similarity).
▪ Although the ostensible object of orientalist studies is to create a verifiable body of knowledge about the East, its underlying objective is to secure boundaries for the West, precisely by delimiting what the West is not. Having set up ontological boundaries between East and West (defining the East essenetially as 'not us'), the magazines' orientalist discourse rationalized diverse - even contradictory - poltical, economic, and social policies toward Asians. On the one hand, the 'not us' definition allowed Amreicans to ignore their brotherly duties toward Asian immigrants in their midst; on the other hand, it dissociated the Filipino cry for independence from a similar American one in 1776, thereby permitting US retention of the Philippines as a colonial possession. In the end, the 'not us' association led to a driving out of Asian Americans at home and an Americanizing of Asians abroad.

Asians, Asianness as a commodity:
▪ Magazines felt no sense of incongruity in circulating ads that promoted desire for a commodified Asiatic body yet printing articles and editorials that voiced loathing for Asian peoples.
▪ While negative images of the Orient encouraged an American readership to be wary of Asian peoples, the commodification of the Orient into a saleable product abated this sense of vulnerability promoted in editorial copy. By purchasing the product (or employing an 'Oriental' houseboy), an American consumer could figuratively 'own' a part of the East, thereby defusing its threat. Packaging the Asian as a commodity enacts a 'domestication of the exotic,' as Said phrases it, wherein the previously unknown becomes familiarized by its identification with a previous experience (e.g. Talcum powder, varnish).
▪ Negative portraits of the Orient, rather than discouraging purchase, might fuel the popularity of Asiatic goods. Thus, fear of Asians promoted by journalistic copy resulted not only in vociferous protest against social integration with Asians but also in readerly pleasure at seeing and consuming Asiatic commodities.

Literary responses:
▪ Overlapping these praactices in the popular press were literary representations of Asians that rpelicated, critically as well as uncritically, the various types of Asian portraiture circulating in these magazines. They provide a window onto the literary trade that often reinforced images of Asians as recalcitrant children needing punishment, but in rare instances countered the notion of Asians as inscrutable aliens.

The Riddle of China, Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu-Manchu:
▪ A blurring of fact and fiction. While certain narratives are revealed during the course of the detective story as unreliable discourses, others, though cerrtainly as highly constructed, become privileged as 'facts.' the investigators must sort through a mass of sensory data to separate fact (cerifiable events) from fiction (false leads). On one level, then, the episode is about the process of detection itself, teaching the audience how to read - decipher - the mysterious East.
▪ The stories only pretend to seek answers to the 'riddle of China.' Under such pretense they intensify the puzzling and 'inscrutable' characterizaiton of the Chinese and their exemplar, Fu-Manchu.
▪ The success of Smith and Petrie's investigation reinforces the notion of 'clean British efficiency' reasoning through the sneaky ways of the Chinese. Theirs is an ideological, Western 'science' that eradicated symptoms of Eastern 'supersition.'
▪ Rohmer's books helped eto justify the many violences in USA directed toward Asians (economic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, physical assault, social segregation, and exclusion from immigration) by framing that violence as a necessary means to preserve the integrity of Western character.

Western Professors and Japanese Pupils in Onoto Watanna's Tama:
▪ Whereas Rohmer's pieces advocate domestic exclusion of Asians, Watanna's romance Tama (1910) portrays the Japanese as children who learn well the stern lesson of the West. Onoto Watanna actually a child of British parents, born in China (?), he reinvented herself as a Japanese noblewoman.
▪ Though exploiting exotic stereotypes of the East, Tama nevertheless broaches issues of colonization, Japanese-American relations, and interracial intimacy. The village of Fukui during the earliest stages of Meiji restoration (c. 1868) provides a microcosm for the intrusion of Western force, power, and value systems on a isolationist Japan. Supporting Western 'enlightenment,' Watanna portrays the American professor as opening this small province to Western science and reason. The professor uses Tama, the mysterious, blind fox-woman, to teach his imperialist lesson.
▪ Tojin-san implies that the Japanese people's arrested development is manifest in their 'childish' legends. His attack on indigenous folkore and cultural belife comprises the first step of his lesson plan.
▪ The narrator not only naturalizes the West's imperialist incursions as 'the order of things,' but also makes clear that the ex-samurai warrior's discontent born of unemployment lies at their own feet for being 'too proud.' only those who humbly concede to the wisdom of the Western father will succeed in this new 'order of things.'
▪ Throughout the narrative, Watanna manipulates the interest generated by her romance plot to undermine potential critiques of imperialism. Having portrayed the American 'cure' for Japanese ignorance, the narrator displays the Japanese people's gratitude.

Paz Marquez Benitez and Pastoral Resistance:
▪ In contrast to Watanna's fiction of Japanese gratitude for Western tutelage, Paz Marquezz Benitez, herself a colonial subject, pens a more subdued and allegorical response to Americanization. Benitez was tangibly affected by the composite image of Asians as less-developed, diseased, and unknowable, because this image justified American's initial retention of the Philippines and policy of 'benevolent assimilation.' Her stories of disillusionment in the contex of Filipino thwarted independence and the people's loss of political idealism when forced to settle for American tutelage.
▪ 'Dead Starts' - the protagonist Alfredo Salazar who has to choose between two women, Julia and Esperanza, Julia being the less Westernized Filipina, comes from Laguna (which symolizes the dream of independence). Because Philippine locales (cities, plantations, formerly remote hills) were rapidly being transformed in accordance with the new American policy of infrastructural development, the fictional space of Julia's timeless town emerges as the oinly site uncorrupted by foreign influence. --> narrative reliance upon the pastoral, wherein the writer looks 'back to a happier place, to a lost "organic" moment.'
▪ Benitez's use of the pastoral and her themes of lost youth and lost authenticity remain literary metaphors for cultural alienation, a product of American colonial practices. She glosses over colonial specificity by tracing her characters' sense of cultural loss to an innate aspect of the human condition.

'Its Wavering Image': Sui Sin Far's Reflecitons on Journalistic Reflections:
▪ Of the four authors examines, she wrote most directly about the problems of journalistic intrusion, biculturalism, production of knowledge, and commerce in exotica.
▪ 'Its Wavering Image' (1912) - critiques the circulation of 'knowledge' about Asian immigrants in the press. A 'Eurasian' woman falls in love wiwth a white journalist. Sui uses this narrative to tackle the issue of how to write about Asians without exposing them to a critical white gaze.
▪ Carson's professional mission (finding a story about Chinatown) soon turns personal. He teaches his unknowing informants, Pan, a lesson about assimilation to white ideals and the problems of interracial romance in the present society.
▪ He insists that she has to choose whether she is Chinese or white, later that she is white. In addition to proclaiming Pan's racial difference from the Asian community, he attempts to distinguish her 'real self' from he rpresumably daily self that communes with the Chinese. Appealing to notions of higher, educated life, he implicitly associates this intellectual life with Western culture and learning.
▪ Carson accomplishes his discursive exploitation first by educating Pan, or assimilating her to his beliefs and his loyalty, second by plunderin gher for information, and third by exporting and trading on her as a (re)source. These phases mimic the process of colonization and highlight how cultural assimilation through 'education' acts as a first step to knowledge production and trade. Furthermore, the colonization metaphor underscores the way in which orientalist discourse, whether in journals or novels, acts in conjunction with the 'sword' to further the exploitation of less powerful peoples.