Summary Of Orientals: Asian Americans In Popular Culture

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Lee: Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture: Yellowface Short summary In this week reading the author talks about the unclear images of Asian Americans have always haunted western popular culture so much so that real flesh and blood Asians living and working in the United States have been reduced to pervasive stereotypic and racist caricatures imagined by non Asian polemicists and propagandists. The author argues that Asians in the west have always been classified as "Orientals", a term so grossly misused that the images of Asian Americans have become "the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook" (p.8). The six images treat Asian Americans as the consummate outsider and alien body that serve no purpose except to threaten the Anglo-Saxon national family in American. More detail…show more content…
As coolie labor, the "heathen Chinese" undermined the American workingman with his dangerously low wage and filthy work habits that bred disease and immorality. The "Chinese" even went so far as to covet Anglo-Saxon women or so proclaimed by such popular magazines as Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated
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