Dissertation
Brown peril: rhetorics of South Asian American racialization, 1900-1939
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Spring 2024
DOI: 10.25820/etd.007330
Abstract
Brown Peril illuminates the discursive dynamics and development of South Asian anti-brownness in the early twentieth century United States. In this project, I argue brownness surfaces as a distinctly transnational rhetorical logic of racialization during the first half of the twentieth century to reconcile the entrance of South Asians on North American shores, emplacing them within maturing white supremacist racial hierarchies. While scholarship on brownness in Asian American studies often focuses on contemporary post-9/11 security culture, I argue anti-brown rhetoric, as a framework to articulate South Asians as racial threats, can be traced to early twentieth century public discourse with the arrival of South Asian Indians to North America. I build on scholarship on historical anti-Asian rhetoric that prioritizes a “yellow peril” framework, emphasizing East Asian subjects, by offering anti-brownness as a conceptual frame that more effectively accounts for the nuances of South Asian American racialization in the early twentieth century. Utilizing racial rhetorical criticism, I analyze archival materials, including newspapers from the early 1900s covering the arrival of South Asians in the U.S., a 1923 Supreme Court case that determined South Asian Indians could not access legal citizenship, and the first Hollywood films about South Asian Indians released during the Great Depression to reveal how rhetorics of South Asian racialization during this period are defined by a transnational visceral anti-brownness that functioned to proffer a public sense of fear and disgust towards South Asians marked in contrast to the rhetoric of “yellow peril.” I reveal the dimensions of a racialized public lexicon about South Asians that positions South Asian Indians as a “brown peril,” a threat that is unassimilable, incapable of accessing citizenship, and visually parodied as a transnational insurgent horde in defiance of colonial authority.
Ultimately, through an introduction and conclusion, along with a chapter on the global rhetorical history of brownness, and three case study chapters, I uncover how transnational, inter-imperial, and relational racial scripts guide, make legible, and assist in the production and cogency of anti-brownness as a form of anti-South Asian racism. I advance a theorization of South Asian anti-brownness to engage the complex relational rhetorical processes that underwrite the public accessibility of brownness as a racializing modality. Brown Peril highlights the transnational and inter-imperial dimensions of how anti-brownness becomes intelligible in early twentieth century U.S. public discourse through blackness, Indigeneity, and British coloniality and imperialism.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Brown peril: rhetorics of South Asian American racialization, 1900-1939
- Creators
- Andrew Parayil Boge
- Contributors
- Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (Advisor)Jiyeon Kang (Advisor)Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (Committee Member)Deborah Whaley (Committee Member)Junaid Rana (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Communication Studies
- Date degree season
- Spring 2024
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.007330
- Number of pages
- xvi, 380 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2024 Andrew Parayil Boge
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 04/16/2024
- Description illustrations
- illustrations (some color)
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (page 345-380).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
When South Asian migrants first start coming to the United States in the early 1900s, they were one of the first group of immigrants to arrive on U.S. shores in meaningful numbers from Asia in about twenty to thirty years. There was not an established public understanding of how South Asians fit into emerging racial hierarchies. East Asian migrants (such as Chinese and Japanese laborers) were understood through the language of a “yellow peril”—a potential horde, flood, and looming threat to the establishment of white, Western power. What language did U.S. publics employ to name and locate South Asian Americans as racial others?
Through archival research, and close textual analysis of newspapers, legal cases, and popular culture, I uncover how South Asian migrants became understood in public as racial others through the language of brownness. South Asians were repeatedly named as Brown others that posed a threat the United States. My research demonstrates that South Asian Americans became constructed in public discourse as a brown peril for white working class men, a dangerous Brown risk to white women, excluded from accessing citizenship rights, and visually portrayed on movie screens as violent, dis-loyal Brown threats to Western authority. Anti-South Asian racism relied upon the language of brownness as a way to signal for U.S. publics that South Asians did not belong to the U.S. nation-state.
Understanding how South Asian migrants become publicly understood as racial others has implications for understanding contemporary racism. Following the events of September 11th, 2001, Brown South Asian bodies are often marked as terrorists, religious threats, and disloyal Americans. My dissertation contextualizes how the contemporary sense of a brown peril does not begin following 9/11, but rather, starts when South Asians first come to the U.S. in the early twentieth century. I offer a complex history of anti-South Asian racism to understand how brownness circulates in public discourse as a mode of power to discipline, contain, and exclude South Asian Americans.
- Academic Unit
- Communication Studies
- Record Identifier
- 9984647647702771
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