The Global Voices Author Night Series presents Dylan Yeats and John Kuo Wei Tchen on their new book, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Asian-American Fear. The “yellow peril” is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture — dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia.

Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, Yellow Peril! is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

The evening will feature a distinguished panel of academics tackling the book thematics from a range of perspectives, as well as yellow peril imagery and media. Panelists include Matthew Briones, Associate Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago, James L. Hevia, Director of the International Studies Program and Professor of International History and the New Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, Lisa Yun Lee, Director of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Art and Art History and Associate Professor of Art History, and Alaka Wali, curator of North American Anthropology in the Science and Education Division at the Field Museum.

Book sales and signing will follow the lecture.

Free and open to the public. 

Presented by the Global Voices Lecture Series and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.