Fyi....rdc

-----Original Message-----
From: Mao, LuMing R. Dr. 
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 9:14 PM
To: Detloff, Madelyn M. Dr.; Shaffer, Marguerite S.; Coates, Rodney D. Dr.; Money, Nicholas P. Dr.; Jeep, John M. Dr.; Vanderbush, Walt
Subject: Please help with publicizing Keevak's Talk on _Becoming Yellow_ (sponsored by AAA)

Dear Program Directors, 

Please help publicize this event and encourage your colleagues and students to attend. See the message from Yu-Fang, who has put together this event for AAA. The poser is attached.

Best,

LuMing
________________________________________
From: Cho, Yu-Fang Dr.
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 8:22 PM
To: Mao, LuMing R. Dr.; Jayasena, Nalin Asoka Dr.; Raval, Vaishali V. Dr.; Wilson, Elizabeth Dr.; Ahmed, Fauzia E.
Cc: Mannur, Anita
Subject: Please help with publicizing Keevak's Talk on _Becoming Yellow_ (sponsored by AAA)

Dear friends,

Would you please help with this event sponsored by AAA, which we hope will increase the program's visibility on campus and our dialogue with other constituencies? An E-poster is also attached for your information.

Thanks,
Yu-Fang

__

"How Did East Asians Become Yellow?"
November 3 (Thu.), 2011 at 4:00pm
Shriver Center Heritage Room

Public Lecture by
Dr. Michael Keevak
Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies at Yale University Visiting Fellow in History at Princeton University Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University


In their earliest encounters with East Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white, yet by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did "Asians" become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Professor Keevak explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. He argues that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped together as members of the "Mongolian race" they began to be considered yellow.

Dr. Keevak is the author of Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008); The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001).