Thats coming up next on booktv. Thanks for that kind introduction. Its truly an honor to be here at the museum of chinese and america, an institution that has done so much to increase public understanding of not only the chinese immigrant experience in the United States, but also of asianamericans and the asian diaspora more generally. Im particularly, im an editor at the new york times, and i mostly traffic in words. And do careful editing. Im very attentive. I try to be to nuances of word selection, diction, syntax but also meaning. But im also very, very aware of the acute and enduring power thank you very much of images. And what was most striking to me in looking at these two books is the immense visual array of whats been amassed here which is really something quite distinctive. I dont think in any of the books that ive read that arabamericans, that asianamericans have i seen such a visually rich and, frankly, disturbing collection of images. So i think thats very impressive. Im going to very briefly introduce because their biographies are in the program our three speakers this evening, and theyll each proceed to give a brief presentation about why they decided to write their book ors or in the case or collect their documents, these artifacts, and then well have some moderator q abe from me and most excitingly, i hope, some questions from you, the audience. To my immediate right is john tchen, hes a historian, your rater and writer, founder of this museum. New york china town history project. My apologies. Its hard to remember. [laughter] i remember it when it was down on east broadaway and then yeah. And then in the school building. Yeah. A very rich history of now almost 35 years. He is also the founding director of the asianpacific American Studies Program and institute at nyu and founding faculty member of the department of social and cultural analysis. Jack has just completed a critical archival study of images and essays, yellow peril, the subject of the discussion this evening. Hes also the Senior Historian on the chinese exclusive period for the New York Historical society, and his next book will be published alongside the the exhibition. To jacks right is dylan yeats, doctoral candidate in history at nyu. He specializes in United States history with a focus on the political demonology and structures of authority. He writes and teaches about american politics, asianAmerican History and islam phobia. Hes also a public historian and a sightseeing guide who is licensed to give tours in new york city. Id like to take one sometime. All right. [laughter] finally, at the end of the table is dr. Jack shaheen. His lectures and writings have focused on negative imimagines ander stereotypes of asians, blacks and other minorities and disadvantaged groups in the world. He has been a professional film consultant on popular on very popular hits like syrian that and three kings which id like to learn more about, and hes received several awards for his contributions to cultural understanding. And his new book, a is for arab, draws from a trove of of objects and materials from a collection that he had donated and deposited at new york university. This is a special collection of more than 4,000 images including motion pictures, cartoons and Television Programs as well as toys and games featuring antiarab and antimuslim depictions. So were going to actually start can jack shaheen, and then well move to john tchen and dylan yeats. Thank you. Well, thank you for that very gracious introduction. Im extremely pleased to return to this museum. Wiz here i was here right after it opened a few years ago and was impressed with the commonality that exists within asianamericans and arabamericans and some of the stereotypes that theyve had to endure over all these years, and i want to compliment my dear friends and colleagues, dylan yeats and john tchen, on their new book, yellow peril, which is a brilliant book. I couldnt put be it down. Professor tchen offered to buy me a latte if i plugged the book tonight [laughter] so ill take him up on it as soon as this session has ended. But seriously, the a is for arab book is based on four decades of work whereby i, along with my dear wife bernice, went about collecting images of arabs in american popular culture. More than 2,000 films and television shows, hundreds of comic books, toys and games, cartoons. And it all began innocently, actually. I never intended to look at this particular topic. I dont look arab, you know . I have green ideas, and shaheen sounds irish. So it was sort of nothing that really appealed to me until one day i was upstairs, it was in the mid 70s, and my children came running up the steps saying, daddy, daddy, theyve got bad arabs on. And i really didnt know quite what to do except i went downstairs and there on the Television Set we saw cartoons like porky pig, popeye, bugs bunny counting all these arabs. And i thought, well, isnt this interesting . Cartoons vilifying arabs this the mid 70s. So i asked our children, michael and michelle, if they would be so kind and document all of these images for their dear father. So on saturday morning id be having coffee with my wife, and id hear, daddy, daddy, and id run downstairs was at the time i didnt have a vcr, and i would start writing frantically about these cartoons. Well, today at the library at nyu youll find literally dozens of childrens cartoons which show the vilification of arabs with pork key pig, bugs bunny. I brought with me, i couldnt resist. One of main offenders was disney. I just brought with me one visual. This is an old disney 1947 cartoon called crazy with the heat where you have arab with the semitar trying to do away with donald duck and goofy. And today my next book, if i have time to finish, will deal with the cartoon arab because ive documented more than a thousand childrens cartoons that in one way or another show the arab as the evil enemy other. Whats interesting about tonight is that this is not a session about one group of people or another. Its a session about the vilification of a people. Of any group of people. And what goes into that vilification process. The sins of mission and commission. How you dehumanize a people by excluding their humanity, be they ail yep or arab. Alien or arab. How you show only the negative attributes. You take a grain of sand, and this that grain of sand you in that grain of second you take out all of the sort of pieces that dont fit, and you say these pieces represent the people. And you turn it into a sandstorm. So that when you look at images of arabs, you know, you have the terrorists, you have the sheikh, you have the boisterous bargainer, you have of you have the women who are portrayed as being submissive. Politicians love to pick up on that, you know . Anthony weiners wife, huma, im not quite sure. Yes, i think Rush Limbaugh or someone said, of course, you know, shes married hes married to a muslim, no wonder he gets away with all these things. Muslim women are submissive. And i thought to myself, really . Thats new to me. And you could look at, you know, the role of asian women, theyre submissive, boisterous belly dancers and sexual images and is forth. So there are many commonalities which i hope well get into during this discussion. And the other thing that ive always talked about with my students and here at nyu and i must say im deeply gratefulful to nyu, professor tchen and the people at the Kevorkian Center for accepting my collection and utilizing it and sharing it with students and faculty. Its a wonderful resource material. But getting back to the commonalities and the differences, when you vilify a people, innocence dies. You compare Saddam Hussein to hitler, it makes it that much easier to go to war in iraq. Over and over again, you repeat the same imagings. Images of sameness. The sins of mission and commission. And so you dehumanize a people primarily by excluding family. In other words, an asian or an arab couple cannot be aptly married, they cant have children, they cant go out and go on a picnic, okay . Because if you do that, if you see a family together, you know, going to mcdonalds and having french fries, all of a sudden they become like us. And in order to make sure that never happens, you exclude family from the images, and you focus only on those grains of sand that portray a people and their culture as backward and bar bar barbaric. And a line that has been used over and over again and we still hear it today is those people do not value human life as much as we do. Hmm . Whether its the jews being vilified during world war ii as an excuse for the holocaust, the chinese for the chinese exclusion act, the japanese for the incarceration of japaneseamericans during world war ii, blacks for the justification for lin lynchings where white families could actually go to lynchings and have a picnic and enjoy themselves as young black men were being hanged . How does that happen . So history has all of these lessons for us. And our goal, our challenge is to really learn from those lessons. And im hoping that the dialogue that we have tonight will take us, you know, not only revealing the warts and the disturbing images and the consequences of those images, but possibly and hopefully some solutions as to how we can best shatter that mythology and move forward so that we can unite rather than sort of split ourselves apart and point and say, you people are not as humane as us, etc. , etc. , etc. So with that, i give you dylan and jack. Its a delight to finally be on a panel talking about these issues. This is something that dylan, jack shaheen and i have been going over for years and years and years but really with the original collection of the films, the clips, the sound bits that we have, and were now able to talk about in public. So really delighted to have this opportunity. Let me just tell you a little bit about how this began for a medium, and then well talk about some of the connections. Dylan and i are going to do a little tag team here with our time. I was the first one in my family born in this country. My parents were refugees, and i found myself growing up in the prairie of, outside of chicago. Watching black and white tv and seeing flash gordon and few man chu films and charlie chan films, and i could not figure out what was going on in this stuff. [laughter] it just didnt make any sense to me. So i realize i must have been traumatized or something at that moment, because ive spent, i think, most of of my life really trying to unpack stuff and trying to make some sense of what was going on. So in some ways that meant that id be collecting tidbits and fragments from things that are just like in the air floating or comments that people would make or things that i would find in a used bookstore. And i, as a process, just kind of expanded. So i kind of expanded from looking at what happened to chineseamericans to also thinking about japaneseamericans to also thinking about what happened in california with other asian groups and then to opening up to the americas and thinking about the larger context because chinese were also excluded in canada and also vim ma story actions towards other asians. So this became a larger and larger project as time went on. So in some ways in this book, yellow peril, an archive of antiasian fear is really something that has been the consequence of these decades of exploration. Looking this from the sweet spots we think of in terms of the chinese exclusion act and japanese incarceration and concentration camps in the United States, but looking back deeper, what are the roots of this. We go far back. You see the pride in the book, but we brought it forward, and well talk about some of this. Let me just say, briefly, and then ill pass it over to joan. In the collection process, of course, theres a lot of good, and for doing this and noting, i think in the world of journalism, we think of word and images, what we deal with, electronic media, and, certainly, it sounds and smells and in the sense of a touch, also deeply communicated. In terms of ideas, oriental otherness, and when i use the word ordinary , reasonable , and oriental, we are talking far eastern, geographically confusing, the far east, meaning japan, china, korea, maybe the philippines, were not sure, so america senses east and west. Its very confusing. Its east on the the point of the view of the earth, and the middle east, and theres jews, for that matter, but they are seen as orientals, so this category of orientals is quite significant, and theres not only this word of oriental and look of oriental, but the sound of oriental. I brought a little fun thing for you to listen to. It actually a 1930 sound bit from a cartoon called the laundry blues, and this is the very beginning, and i wish we could show the video, but youll go home and take a look at this. Its the opening in a chinese laundry, and its cats and mice, you know, a laundryman with long pigtails, and this is the music that it starts with. Okay, you get the idea. [laughter] this is the kind of thing i grew up with and many of you did, but even if youre a new immigrant coming into the country now, this is part of the exposure of becoming an american. Its not the part we tend to talk about, but its part that you begin to acquire. Its a certain kind of cultural and historical literacy people gain, and its not just flowing it in your brain and being tested for it. Its actually feeling a sense that with the gong and this kind of mincing music, that something oriental and strange and exotic and different is going to happen, and that sets up a whole set of problems because that can be seen as either benign or comical or dancing cats and mice with pigtails, or it could be seen as something really dangerous, and so unamerican that we really have to be weary, and, of course, were talking about the range, and its a visceral response, like a programmed response. Its not just about a rational kind of, oh, you know, im now hearing this and this and that. Its not that. The book is about that. We also think of the collections about that. We want to kind of encourage all of you to be kind of digging through your papers and archives and things that you notice and see in bookstores, and begin to kind of develop a yellow peril collections project at large. We have to make this understanding palpable, and phil will talk about the next round. Okay. Thank you. Its really a thrill to be here, and, thank you, everyone, for coming out. Im asked a lot about why i worked so long on projects like this because, as you may be able to tell, im not asianamerican, and, therefore, in theory, not the sort of subject to the malicious nature of the stereotypes, and i actually started getting involved in this stuff because i almost randomly took a class with jack in the class of 2002. The pictures are coming. [laughter] and i was, like, you know, i just moved to new york and was interested in new york history, figured id take his class, and it really opened my eyes to an aspect of American History i was not familiar with before, and asianAmerican History, generally, and i was really impressed with just how much mainstream American Culture is obsessed with these images, and more than just obsessedded is their many decades and centuries of documentation about how whiteness in particular have been sort of defined against this fantasy or yenalness, and that was something that i had not thought about before, and i think my experience was similar to what many other people are when they get into this material, which is its both surprising and not surprising because as someone socializes in the society, it all sort of rings true, but we never ever really step out and reflect on what it means so over the last, you know, 12 years, ive been looking to keep working and they were watching the implications of some of this fobility of thinking and the stereotypes and traditions define what americans, what americans think of themselves as, and the implications as both suggested are scary, and, you know, weve seen the erosion of the political and civil liberties, and weve seen rushes to war, and excessive civilian collateral damage, and all sorts of other changes. We watch islamphobia rise up, not that it was not racism before, but its taken on more in the last decade, and that got me thinking of what is latent in the mainstream america and culture that allows for people to be duped in this way, and as i was experiencing watching that in our country, i was also reading a lot of the early asianamerican Movement Material trying to connect racism here with Foreign Policy, and that argument makes sense all the way back in American History where forms of domestic racism and stereotypes really affect the sort of u. S. Foreign policy in general and the willingness to invade or the willingness to allow for the deft of less than human people, and so one of the things that weve been trying to do by gatt and the key threads of that and the idea of the coming war, and i think it really ill lot straits the problem for all americans even if they dont think of themselves at the direct targets targets theres christian superiority, and in that context as problems arise, as Foreign Policy fails or has Economic Policy that fails, theres no room for introspection for selfreflection and blaming someone else, theres a long history of blaming people we think of of eastern or oriental we try to mask in the book, and it shifts depending on different moments in time, but theres always always their fault instead of our fault, and so i think everyone should be invested in trying to selfreflect for themselves and promote analysis, that sort of lowers the stakes of that context, exposes it as a misunderstanding, and sometimes a purposeful deception so that we can look with fresher eyes dress this rather than hunting phantoms. The term was coined, and 2014 is an important year, perhaps more than other parts in the world, especially europe, and i was interested, very, very much in how 1914, a century ago, a period of empire, american empires not acknowledged, and defining empyres, octoberman empire, obviously, had more than seven centuries controlled the islamic world, brought to an end, obviously, by world war i, and cartoon in particular that you selected that cartoon is a depiction interestingly enough, you know, i thought the term peril, i thought it had to do i just assumed surely it has to do with antiasian immigrant sentiments. Not at all. Its only 20th century depiction and relates to the japanese expansion as it was at the time in east asia as a result of the industrialization modernization, and what that meant at the time,