Time and Date: 11:00am-12:00pm CT, Friday, April 14, 2023
Registration link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YiXmxmLeQxe3yVRbVDKm5Q
The “Yellow Peril Redux: From Coolies to Concentration Camps, Trade Wars and Coronavirus” Project, funded by the Call to Action to Address Racism and Social Justice Program of UIUC, invites you to our inaugural talk of an online speaker series.
The title of Professor Keevak's speech is When Did East Asian Become Yellow?
In their earliest encounters with East Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white, yet by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? This talk will explore the notion of yellowness and show that the label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. Once East Asians were lumped together as members of the "Mongolian race" they began to be considered yellow.
Speaker: Michael Keevak is a professor of foreign languages at National Taiwan University, where he has taught for the past thirty years. He has published six books, including Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, and is now at work on a seventh, a history of the terrible term "Chinaman."
Chair: Dr. Craig Koslofsky, professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, works in early modern European and global history.
Please visit https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/9115/623467347 for more information about our project. If you have any question or would like to be included in our group mailing list, please contact Professor SHAO Dan (danshao@illinois.edu) and GA LIU Yangyang (yl92@illinois.edu).
The recording of this speech is available at: https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_12dgyx1z/171192221
Many thanks for our speaker and chair for their consents on sharing this video for educational purposes only.
Upcoming events:
April 28th, 2:30-3:30pm CT, "The Yellow Peril and the Law", Speaker: Judge Sabrina Shizue McKenna (Associate Justice of the Hawai`i Supreme Court)
May 12th, 2:00-3:00pm CT, On Documentary "First to Go: Story of the Kataoka Family", Speaker: Myles Matsuno (Director)
