Racial Worldmaking

The Power of Popular Fiction

Mark C. Jerng

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823277766, 9780823277759
• eBook ISBN: 9780823277773
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Literature

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named "racial worldmaking" because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

PART I

Yellow Peril Genres

CHAPTER 1

Worlds of Color

Racial worldmaking consists of narrative and interpretive strategies that embed race into our knowledge and expectations of the world. I begin with the most explicit example: the way in which “world” becomes operative as a category of racial meaning. We see this establishment of a new referential relationship in the application of racial predicates to the world itself, as in the phrases “white world,” “colored world,” or “yellow world.” Such phrases sound odd in the early twenty-first century—what would it mean to attribute the characteristics of race to something as abstract as world? But they were ubiquitous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, we can trace their uses quite precisely. Using color designations to describe something so encompassing as a world in a racial sense was new during the years leading up to and after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Prior to this moment, the phrase “white world” is most often used either in stories about going to the Arctic in order to denote a field of snow, a world in which you are surrounded by the whiteness of the physical elements.¹ Or it was used in Christian religious tracts to denote heaven as a dazzlingly bright, white world.² But beginning in the late 1890s and 1900s, the terms “white world,” “yellow world,” and “brown world” started being deployed in the sense of a geopolitical reordering of the world.³ This new referential relationship is most dramatically and influentially established in essays and arguments declaring a “conflict of color.” It is extended in the renewal of “yellow peril” fears in the years leading up to and after the Russo-Japanese War.

This phraseology is not just an unusual blip in the history of racial discourse. That it emerges as a direct effect of writers describing and evaluating the meaning of the Russo-Japanese War is not a coincidence. The event of the war was represented as a signal reversal of racial expectations—against all odds, a “colored” nation defeated a “white” nation. This way of narrating the event forced a shift in the racial imaginary. The racial ideologies of superiority and inferiority did not suffice as explanations. The explanations that did emerge manifested new ways of apprehending race and producing racism. These new ways implicated both subjects of Asiatic and black racialization. In the nineteenth century, these two groups were, of course, already co-constructed at times via the categories of “coolie” and “slave” and through debates concerning immigration and citizenship in the United States.⁴ Here, they are read through a new perceptual emphasis on the organization of the world.

What is remarkable about this mode of racial worldmaking is that it is not reducible to nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race and early nineteenth-century Romantic nationalist ways of speaking about racial essences, although it draws some of its logics from the latter, as well as from “climate-and-custom” racism, which I describe below. The referents that it deploys—“world,” “flood,” “danger,” “wave,” “disaster”—concentrate attention on a different kind of object. The typical objects of attention for nineteenth-century scientific racism and physical anthropology are the body and physical characteristics. For volkische nationalism, they are character, people, spirit, and/or nation. Here, the thing being described in terms of race is the world itself, an object that on the one hand constitutes everything around you, the totality of what can be grasped, and on the other hand is the most immediate sense of exterior reality. I argue that locating racial difference in both senses of “world” embeds race as a historical tendency and in our temporal structures for organizing the significant features and events of the world.

The application of predicate to thing shapes perception. The effective attachment of “yellow,” “white,” or “colored” to “world” prompts us toward an apprehension of “world” that is predicated on race as an ordering form. The philosopher Nelson Goodman describes this process in the context of making strong claims for the formative force of language on objects: “Whether a predicate applies to a given thing often depends . . . on the realm of discourse”; “establishment of the referential relationship is a matter of singling out certain properties for attention, of selecting associations with certain other objects. Verbal discourse is not least among the many factors that aid in founding and nurturing such associations.”⁵ This chapter tracks and analyzes this emergent understanding of race as denoting a world and race as a world-organizing force. First, I detail the ways of worldmaking shared by B. L. Putnam Weale, author of “The Conflict of Color” (1909) and Lothrop Stoddard in The Rising Tide of Color (1920). I tease out the implications of their linguistic and narrative techniques on our specific ways of knowing and inhabiting the world. Rather than place these works in a genealogy as prime examples of white supremacist discourse, I contextualize their work as responding to the Russo-Japanese War, the emergence of Japan as a power on the world stage, and the failure of dominant racial modes of thought to account for the Japanese. It is only with such an understanding that we can see the distinctiveness and influence of Weale’s and Stoddard’s deployments of race within and against the dominant racial ideologies of the time. We discover that their work is not so much the extreme extension of scientific racism and social Darwinism as it is a response to their limitations.

This response of building race into the world finds its most formally codified development in the “yellow peril.” The majority of this chapter thus focuses on the renewal of yellow peril fears in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both nonfictional and fictional speculative work, including Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), Homer Lea’s Valor of Ignorance (1909), M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898), and H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air (1908). The yellow peril is conventionally defined as a set of overtly racist representations of Asiatics and the irrational formation of fears concerning disease, lowered standards of living, and the decay of Western (white) civilization when beset by large numbers of Asiatics.⁶ But this chapter recasts the yellow peril not merely as a set of stock representations but as a genre that keys readers’ temporal experiences of their worlds and projects coherent structures of meaning for the reader to inhabit.⁷ Mobilizing future war stories, the yellow peril genre embeds the salience of racial difference in the cognitive activities of retrospection and prediction.

Reducing this mode of worldmaking to the given racist ideologies of the time is to overlook the production of race at levels other than biological or anthropological differences between persons. Analyzing the yellow peril as genre delineates the narrative strategies that instruct readers to notice race in curiously intangible, abstract ways. Those abstract ways, I argue, construct new ways of seeing, new objects of attention, and new ways of connecting diverse experiences such that one cannot frame the world without instituting racial difference in its composition. In other words, the coherence of the world as such, the coherence of a global perspective, is made to depend on certain built-in knowledges of race. “Color” takes on a certainty of representation through which the world becomes present “before oneself” as such.⁸ Despite being known as the body of literature most responsible for sensationalizing particular racist representations of Asiatic persons, the yellow peril persists, I suggest, because of these more abstract ways of seeing the world and race together.

The Russo-Japanese War was immediately narrated as a conflict between the yellow race and the white race. Jack London’s newspaper dispatches in May 1904 already staged the conflict in these terms: “The doubtful old world had shaken its head and said: ‘The Japanese are Asiatic. Hitherto they have fought only Asiatics. But what showing will they make when they go up against our own kind, the white kind of the earth?’ The Japanese have been very sensitive to this, and they have been fiery to prove themselves fit from the white man’s point of view by facing white men. To prove themselves fit at the very start was enormously to add to their prestige and enormously to make Russia ‘lose face’ in the eyes of other Asiatic peoples.”⁹ It would seem a short step from the designation of yellow and white races to yellow and white worlds, where “worlds” is merely a spatial extension of peoples. However, the Japanese themselves occupied a deeply ambivalent relationship to racial categories. The Japanese were “civilized,” “modern,” and wielded technocratic power in ways that did not jive well with certain anthropological and scientific discourses that linked racialized peoples to primitivism via either physical characteristics or culture.¹⁰ London expresses this inability to simply incorporate the Japanese and specifically the phenomenon of Japanese modernization within dominant modes of racial thought.¹¹

London emphasizes the baffling nature of the Japanese and chides Americans for their presumptuous superiority and belief in knowledge:

An American lady of my acquaintance, after residing for months in Japan, in response to a query as to how she liked the Japanese said: “They have no souls.” In this she was wrong. The Japanese are just as much possessed of soul as she and the rest of her race. And far be it from me to infer that the Japanese soul is in the smallest way inferior to the Western soul. It may be even superior. You see, we do not know the Japanese soul, and what its value may be in the scheme of things. And yet that American lady’s remark but emphasizes the point. So different was the Japanese soul from hers, so unutterably alien, so absolutely without any sort of kinship or means of communication, that to her there was no slightest sign of its existence.¹²

Unable to locate superiority along physical or anthropological lines, London emphasizes unknowability. To be sure, this is an early example of the now-familiar discourse of Asian deceit and inscrutability.¹³ But while this makes the Japanese unrepresentable, it does not preclude them from being the object of speculation. In his essay “If Japan Wakens China,” London turns the inability of Westerners and Americans to “know” the Japanese into a problem of forecasting: “When one man does not understand another man’s mental processes, how can the one forecast the other’s future actions? This is precisely the situation to-day between the white race and the Japanese.”¹⁴ This inability to know defines the particular speculative threat that they pose—“the other’s future actions.” Indeed, as Kenneth Hough argues, Japan’s military efficiency during the Russo-Japanese war was highly exaggerated through these projective fantasies, setting off a futurological imagination of invasion.¹⁵ London continues this essay with a scenario in which Japan provides the managerial spirit and ethos by which to mobilize the Chinese and engage in a “race-adventure.”¹⁶ In doing so, he provides a clue into the new modes of thought based on forecasting that emerge from the attachment of race to world.

Weale writes his article “The Conflict of Color: The World Today and How Color Divides It” in this spirit of forecasting, except he adds a crucial element: the use of race to denote world. In this 1909 article, first published in the serial The World’s Work and subsequently republished as part of a widely reviewed book of the same title, Weale depicts both color as itself a motive force and the world as organized spatially in terms of color. Writing in 1909, Weale is clearly spurred by the recent Russo-Japanese War, highlighting in particular its racial implications. Noting the treaty between England and Japan at that time, Weale writes, “it [the treaty] was not, as has so often been erroneously stated, a fundamental departure in her foreign policy as a whole . . . it was a fundamental departure in her Asiatic policy—that is, in her policy in dealing with coloured races. For the first time in her history, she [England] placed herself by formal treaty on an absolute equality with an Asiatic race.”¹⁷ Starting with sections on “The Yellow World,” followed by the “Brown World” and the “Black Problem,” Weale reimagines the world as a totality mapped and configured in terms of racial color designations. This redescription singling out color in order to visualize the world leads to the inevitability of conflict between these worlds: “the next two or three decades must see a most surprising struggle, which will decide what the relations between the yellow world and the white world shall be for a very long time.”¹⁸

The terms “white world” and “yellow world” here are not simply an extension of the logics underlying terms such as “white kind,” “white nation,” and “colored nation.” Eliminating the referent of the person or a political unit such as “nation” and using the color designation to directly refer to the world requires a new form of perception, one that elevates race from describing a people or a nation to being an organizing principle. Weale foregrounds this shift in perception by beginning his article with the figure of the map, replacing political and national descriptors with the use of racial designations to describe not merely territories but also blocs of geography, peoples, and ineffable, shared spirit. Weale writes:

There are few more interesting studies in the world than the study of the map. For, if the truth be known, a big map of the world on Mercator’s projection should be to-day to every intelligent person something very like a horoscope of the human race—a horoscope, it is true, not cast as astrologers ordain, yet nevertheless enabling students to know within certain limits what should and should not happen to the various racial divisions and groups composing the human species, since the manner in which these divisions and groups are now distributed over the face of the earth is virtually an index to a great deal of the world’s future history.¹⁹

First centering the reader’s attention on the map as a technology of perception, Weale shifts our mode of perception yet again by merging the “map” with a “horoscope.” He thereby mixes the spatial register of the map with the temporal register of the horoscope. But this horoscope does not go from astrological sign to the future but rather from racial distribution to “future history.” This passage encapsulates Weale’s interpretive strategies. He engages in extrapolation in the sense that he is extending a present trend and continuing it into the future. He is not, however, just taking present “facts” but rather using the future posited “conflict of color” in order to identify a present tendency. He gives race...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Racial Worldmaking
• Part I: Yellow Peril Genres
• Part II: Plantation Romance
• Part III: Sword and Sorcery
• Part IV: Alternate History
• Conclusion: On the Possibilities of an Antiracist Racial Worldmaking
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index