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Michael Keevak , Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking . Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2011. Pp. ix+219. ISBN 978-0-691-14301-5 . £24.95 (hardback).
The work under review focuses on historical transformations in European as well as American colourization of Chinese and Japanese. It contributes therefore to the interrogation of racialist thought in the Western tradition exemplified by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze's Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (1997) and Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (1997), and Londa Schiebinger's arguments in favour of Joseph Needham's thesis that Linnaeus was the progenitor of 'Europocentrism', or 'linguistic imperialism'.
It is well known that, prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese and Japanese were often classified as 'white'. Furthermore, many pre-nineteenth-century authors considered the Chinese in particular as models to be emulated, without regard to the colour of their skin: these thinkers included the likes of Leibniz, Voltaire and Quesnay, although in the work under review the sinophilia of Voltaire and other philosophes does not, alas, rate a mention.
In a compact and compelling 144 pages, Michael Keevak sets out to show when and in what ways 'white' East Asians became the 'yellow peril' by examining the colour terms applied to them since the Middle Ages. He paints a vivid picture of the evolution of the Western view of Asians as 'yellow' by examining a large range of sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and Spanish, among other languages. These include travel accounts, dictionaries, medical and anthropological literature and even botanical texts.
The...