Asian American History
Fall 2015
Professor Munshi
Agenda, September 25
• Orientalism + Representation of Asians in America
• Case Study: The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
• Race as a social construction
• Racial triangulation
Contemporary Representations: exercise
• In your notebook, make two columns.
• In one, list images, representations, sounds, smells, ideas, and other
associations you have with Asian Americans
• In the second column, try to identify the source of information: tv,
movies, your own experience, a story someone told you, books,
commercials, your family, etc.
Orientalism, Review
• Concept developed by Edward Said
• The “Orient” as a product of the European imagination
• Pulling together different peoples from Asia and Africa into one lump
sum of stereotypes of exoticism, foreignness, passive, sexualized
• Creation of the Orient as objects (have their own knowledge)
“Yellow Peril”
• Term coined in the late 1800s
• Referred to the idea that Asians were dangerous
• They were going to invade the United States, spread disease, spread their
backwards cultural norms
• Dr. Fu Manchu, character developed by Sax Rohmer (1913)
• His goal is to organize the colonized against the British
• The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
• When MGM studios adopted novel for a film for American
audiences, they took away the colonial history part; makes
America and the American audience
From Yellow Peril: an Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (2014); edited
by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats
The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
• How is Fu Manchu represented in this film? His daughter? The other
characters?
• What are their physical traits?
• What are their emotional or intellectual traits?
How do we view race from a sociological
perspective?
Race is a social experience that goes beyond personal characteristics–
not limited to individuals
How do we view race from a sociological
perspective? continued
Race is embedded in social institutions: the law, education, health,
immigration, social welfare
Race is tied to life chances
Treating race as a personal or individual issue allows us to avoid
discussions of inequality, power and the privileges of whiteness
Race is a social construction
Race is not a natural category based on biology or genetics
Race is a sociohistorical construct :
Meaning of race changes over time and space
Racialization is the process of racial meaning being attached to a
relationship, social practice, or group
How did race become so powerful?
Capitalism created a drive for profit 
Systems of exploitation based on the slave trade and colonialism
Justification: ideology of mission to civilize the indigenous
populations
How did race become so powerful?
Science created systems of racial classification to support the
idea that slaves and the colonized were less than human
Scientific racism: uses science to prove that there is a hierarchy of races
determined by biological differences
Skull size, bone lengths, etc  racial category  abilities (e.g. intelligence,
athleticism, criminality)
2. Racist ideologies produce race
Systems of racial classification did not produce racism
Racism produced racial classification to justify colonialism, slavery, and
other systems of exploitation
Example: U.S. Immigration Policy
History of immigration policy and other laws can show us how
“whiteness” has been constructed
the human-ness of all people who have been considered to be legally
non-white has been under discussion at some point
1882-1965, immigration policy included restrictions based on race and
nationality, underlying question: who is “fit” to be a citizen?
Racialization
A process by which racial meaning and identity is attached to or erased
from a group
Example: Groups like the Irish and Italians were not always considered
white
Race, Ethnicity and Nationality
Ethnicity: based on a shared cultural identity
Nationality: based on citizenship or residence in a nation
Racial Identity:
Examples: Black, White, Asian, Native American
Racism & Prejudice
Racism
ideology that supports the belief that one racial group is innately
superior or inferior to another
Prejudice
Generalizations or stereotypes about other groups of people
Racism
Racism is a large system that goes beyond individual ideas and
prejudices
Racism is not usually not intentional but happens in subtle ways
Discrimination
Institutional
when opportunity, privileges, and rights are denied, usually through
policies which make the discrimination seem “normal"
Attitudinal
shows up in everyday interactions and practices
Discrimination
institutional discrimination is often invisible and indirect 
harder to talk about
Racial Positioning of Asian Americans
From Kim (1999). “The Racial Triangulation of
Asian Americans.”