From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back to Yellow Peril

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some perceptions of Asian Americans in the United States shifted as anti-Asian hate crimes escalated. However, little is known about how these shifting views manifest in K-12 schools. This qualitative case study uses Asian critical race theory to examine how two Southeast Asian American students faced exclusion and erasure before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and how their Southeast Asian American teacher advocated for them at a public elementary school in the Pacific Northwest. Implications include how researchers can pursue inquiries about Asian American students' holistic development and how in-service and pre-service teachers can address anti-Asian xenophobia.

Exploring Racial Microaggressions Toward Chinese Immigrant Women in Greater Boston During Covid

This study was an initial qualitative exploration to (a) capture varied experiences of racial microaggressions directed at Chinese immigrant women before and during Covid and (b) investigate different forms and levels of microaggressions based on socioeconomic status, age, and other characteristics. Racial microaggressions were examined by interviewing 12 foreign‐born, Chinese immigrant women aged 23 to 80 years old, with most of the participants identified as middle class or above. Building upon previous scholarship on racial and gendered microaggressions, an analytical framework was developed using 12 major themes to identify and interpret discriminatory behaviors. Our main findings suggest that the research sample encountered more blatant hate incidents and expressed heightened concern over their physical safety in the post‐Covid period. Young women, compared to their older counterparts, were more inclined to report microaggres-sion episodes and distinguish more subtle forms of discrimination. These findings could serve as preliminary evidence for future research. © 2023 by the author(s).

From Model Minority to Yellow Peril: The Shifting Narratives of Asian International Students

The ongoing pandemic, COVID-19, has demonstrated how quickly depictions of Asian individuals can shift from "model minority " to "yellow peril " during times of crisis. These times were particularly difficult for Asian postsecondary international students who were directly impacted by these shifting narratives, as many faced discrimination, violence, and prejudice as a result of the rise of anti-Asian hate that occurred across Canada. Thus, utilizing critical race theory (CRT), the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of these contrasting narratives, how the "model minority " and "yellow peril " can contribute to the maintenance of White supremacy, and possible considerations and interventions to better support Asian international postsecondary students during their studies in Canada.

Bio-orientalism and the Yellow Peril of Yellow Life

While recent literature on Asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents Asian life as mechanically non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and other developments under the Anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of Asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the West. In this article I argue that a unique discourse of bio-orientalism contributes to the depiction of Asians as a "Yellow Life" that is an existential threat to Western forms of life. Western life posits that this Yellow Life must be resisted and ultimately eliminate for the flourishing of all non-Asian life. Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in yellow peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Rather than embracing an Asian Americanist response that would also seek to disavow Yellow Life, in a reading of Bryan Thao Worra's poetry I speculate upon embracing Yellow Life as another mode in which Asian American studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary Western-centric and humanist responses to anti-Asian racism.

Sinophobic Epidemics in America: Historical Discontinuity in Disease-related Yellow Peril Imaginaries of the Past and Present.

Modern scholarship has drawn hasty and numerous parallels between the Yellow Peril discourses of the 19th- and 20th-century plagues and the recent racialization of infectious disease in the 21st-century. While highlighting these similarities is politically useful against Sinophobic epidemic narratives, Michel Foucault argues that truly understanding the past's continuity in the present requires a more rigorous genealogical approach. Employing this premise in a comparative analysis, this work demonstrates a critical discontinuity in the epidemic imaginary that framed the Chinese as pathogenic. Consequently, those seeking to prevent future disease racialization must understand modern Sinophobia as fundamentally distinct from that of the past.

When "model minorities" become "yellow peril"-Othering and the racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as a case study, this paper engages with debates on the assimilation of Asian Americans into the US mainstream. While a burgeoning scholarship holds that Asians are "entering into the dominant group" or becoming "White," the prevalent practices of othering Asians and surging anti-Asian discrimination since the pandemic outbreak present a challenge to the assimilation thesis. This paper explains how anger against China quickly expands to Asian American population more broadly. Our explanation focuses on different forms of othering practices, deep-seated stereotypes of Asians, and the role of politicians and media in activating or exacerbating anti-Asian hatred. Through this scrutiny, this paper augments the theses that Asian Americans are still treated as "forever foreigners" and race is still a prominent factor in the assimilation of Asians in the United States. This paper also sheds light on the limitations of current measures of assimilation. More broadly, the paper questions the notion of color-blindness or post-racial America.