Campus Humanities Calendar

When Did East Asians Become Yellow?

Event Type: Lecture
Sponsor: Yellow Peril Redux Project
Date: Apr 14, 2023 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Michael Keevak, professor of foreign languages at National Taiwan University
Registration: Registration
Contact: Yangyang Liu
E-Mail: yl92@illinois.edu
Views: 14; Professor Michael Keevak (National Taiwan University) will dig into the intriguing historical process by which East Asians became “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?