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Uncovering the overlooked histories of Asians in the American South.

In sharp contrast to the “melting pot” reputation of the United States, the American South—with its history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement—has been perceived in stark and simplistic demographic terms. In Far East, Down South, editors Raymond A. Mohl, John E. Van Sant, and Chizuru Saeki provide a collection of essential essays that restores and explores an overlooked part of the South’s story—that of Asian immigration to the region.

These essays form a comprehensive overview of key episodes and issues in the history of Asian immigrants to the South. During Reconstruction, southern entrepreneurs experimented with the replacement of slave labor with Chinese workers. As in the West, Chinese laborers played a role in the development of railroads. Japanese farmers also played a more widespread role than is usually believed. Filipino sailors recruited by the US Navy in the early decades of the twentieth century often settled with their families in the vicinity of naval ports such as Corpus Christi, Biloxi, and Pensacola. Internment camps brought Japanese Americans to Arkansas. Marriages between American servicemen and Japanese, Korean, Filipina, Vietnamese, and nationals in other theaters of war created many thousands of blended families in the South. In recent decades, the South is the destination of internal immigration as Asian Americans spread out from immigrant enclaves in West Coast and Northeast urban areas.

Taken together, the book’s essays document numerous fascinating themes: the historic presence of Asians in the South dating back to the mid-nineteenth century; the sources of numerous waves of contemporary Asian immigration to the South; and the steady spread of Asians out from the coastal port cities. Far East, Down South adds a vital new dimension to popular understanding of southern history.

Asian Americans have become the love-hate subject of the American psyche: at times celebrated as the model minority, at other times hated as foreigners. Wen Liu examines contemporary Asian American identity formation while placing it within a historical and ongoing narrative of racial injury. The flexible racial status of Asian Americans oscillates between oppression by the white majority and offers to assimilate into its ranks. Identity emerges from the tensions produced between those two poles. Liu dismisses the idea of Asian Americans as a coherent racial population. Instead, she examines them as a raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized group producing varying physical and imaginary boundaries of nation, geography, and citizenship. Her analysis reveals repeated norms and acts that capture Asian Americanness as part of a racial imagination that buttresses capitalism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and the US empire.

An innovative challenge to persistent myths, Feeling Asian American ranges from the wartime origins of Asian American psychology to anti-Asian attacks to present Asian Americanness as a complex political assemblage.

Feeling Yellow examines how yellowface has persisted on the contemporary musical stage and how Asian Americans have contested yellowface, as they stake their own claim to the theatrical stage and nation state. Donatella Galella boldly argues that the pleasures of musical theatre and the disavowal of systemic anti-Asian racism enable the ongoing portrayal of Asian and Asian American characters by non-Asian actors. Galella offers two concepts to understand these phenomena: feeling yellow and yellowface without yellowed faces. Feeling yellow encapsulates the racialized anger, despair, and alienation of Asian American artists and audiences. Yellowface without yellowed faces denotes subtle ways of conveying Asianness, such as performing Asianness with exaggerated irony, using racialized costumes rather than yellow skin and slanted eye makeup, and setting musicals in fantasy Asian lands populated by multiracial casts. 

Galella utilizes musicals such as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Anything Goes, The Mikado, and Soft Power, to understand how Asian and Asian American representation is connected to larger questions: How does racial identity shape emotional reactions to musical theatre? Why does yellowface and anti-Asian racism persist? What are the terms for Asian Americans belonging in the United States? Using a range of approaches from dramaturgy to auto-ethnography and materials from interviews to Reddit posts, Feeling Yellow spotlights Asian American affect, artistry, and activism.