Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything
Asian Exclusion and the 1927 U.S.-Japan Doll Exchange
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12469216 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erica Kanesaka Kalnay (0000-0002-3867-513X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 93-124 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Asian American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1096-8598 • E-ISSN: 1097-2129 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jaas.2020.0003 |
| OpenAlex | W3007848813 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 7 |
This essay illuminates the role that Asian girlhood has played in the transpacific circulation of racial affects by reexamining the history of the 1927 U.S.-Japan doll exchange from an Asian American feminist perspective. In 1927, just a few years after the 1924 Immigration Act banned Japanese immigration, hundreds of "friendship dolls" traveled across the Pacific Ocean, bearing messages of peace and goodwill. I contend that although the exchange was designed to alleviate racial tensions, the warm welcome that the dolls received was contingent upon Orientalist notions of Asian femininity and the containment of attendant sexual anxieties through an appeal to girlhood innocence. Challenging the black-white binary through which childhood studies often understands race, I show how Asian girlhood calls for a transpacific framework that attends to histories of imperialism, militarism, and commodity capitalism while elucidating the figure of the doll in recent scholarship on Asian femininity and decorative embodiment
Adventure · Appeal · Art history · Cosmopolitanism · Femininity · Hegemony · Immigration · Militarism · Orientalism · Political science · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law
The price of visibility? Asian American representation and aesthetic exclusion
Looking for Stories and Context for a Photo of My Grandfather and the Blue-Eyed Dolls of 1927
Culprits or Victims? Social Media Use, Mediated Ethnic Blame, and Asian American Mental Health During Covid-19
Critical conversations
Kawaii Sweets and Boba Liberalism
The aggressive potential and yellow anger
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |