Portland Public Library

Becoming yellow, a short history of racial thinking, Michael Keevak

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Becoming yellow

bibliography

679940690

Michael Keevak

a short history of racial thinking

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

No longer white: the nineteenth-century invention of yellowness -- Before they were yellow: east Asians in early travel and missionary reports -- Taxonomies of yellow: Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and the making of a "Mongolian" race in the eighteenth century -- Nineteenth-century anthropology and the measurement of "Mongolian" skin color -- East Asian bodies in nineteenth-century medicine: the Mongolian eye, the Mongolian spot, and "Mongolism" -- Yellow peril: the threat of a "Mongolian" Far East, 1895-1920