Serial Fu Manchu - Oxford Journals

ALH Online Review, Series III 1 Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 216 pp. Reviewed by Hsuan Hsu, University of California, Davis Drawing from seminal arguments such as Benedict Anderson’s identification of newspaper reading as an important national ritual and Jean-­‐‑Paul Sartre’s account of the passivity of radio listeners and voters, media studies has become increasingly attuned to the material, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions of seriality. Like the mass cultural productions it produces, seriality’s dialectic of repetition and difference has given rise to opposing interpretations: on the one hand, Anderson’s fascination with its democratizing potential to produce “quotidian universals” across an international network of print media; on the other hand, Sartre’s concern that mass media can transform deliberation itself into a process of “serial thinking” that undermines the institution of the vote. Instead of equating seriality with either of these tendencies, Ruth Mayer’s Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology demonstrates how the transmedial figure of Fu Manchu embodied different iterations of the logic of seriality’s “spread” throughout the twentieth century. Tracing the figure from its initial emergence in Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” (1913) to its deformation and dissolution in recent fiction and film, Mayer offers far more than an authoritative study of Fu Manchu as a Yellow Peril stereotype. By situating Fu Manchu at the center of the twentieth-­‐‑century’s development of a transatlantic media network and transmedial networks of serialization, Mayer suggests that racialization—and specifically the sinicized figure of the Yellow Peril—was pivotal to both the historical spread and the aesthetic logic of British and US practices of serialization. Following the figure of Fu Manchu from transatlantic story magazines and pulp novels to Hollywood films, TV shows, cartoon animation, comic books, and eccentric twenty-­‐‑
first century deployments of the figure in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and Gary Indiana’s novel The Shanghai Gesture (2009), Mayer argues throughout that Fu Manchu expresses a “nightmarishly inverted modernity”—a Yellow Peril myth embodying modernity’s mechanisms of serialization, alienation, and capital circulation as a disavowed, perpetually foreign presence. The book begins by drawing a suggestive analogy between theories of transmedial seriality and the dynamics of uncontainable spread at the heart of prominent anti-­‐‑Asian stereotypes. Mayer then provides a comprehensive history of Fu Manchu, documenting his evolution from the personification of secretive, phantasmatic networks of control in Rohmer’s fiction to a decontextualized cinematic icon, a comic-­‐‑book villain serving Cold War and © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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2 ALH Online Review, Series III multicultural ideologies, and finally an unstable, even dissolving figure of global financial flows in a startling reading of the Asiatic plot elements of Batman Begins. In addition to a carefully theorized historical overview of Fu Manchu’s circulation throughout twentieth-­‐‑century mass culture, Mayer offers striking close readings showing how the texts reflect (and reflect upon) the logic of seriality: Fu Manchu’s mediated quality vis-­‐‑à-­‐‑vis mirrors, electrical apparatuses, and televisions; the recursive, nonlinear logic embodied by his “loop needle” weapon (which makes victims experience reality as déjà vu); the “critical retconning” whereby the decades-­‐‑old supervillain Yellow Claw is revealed to have been a robotic construct all along, rather than a Chinese man. Moments like these demonstrate that a formalist analysis of serial texts needs to attend to their cross-­‐‑references to earlier instantiations within the dynamics of serial loops and clusters, as well as their tendency to thematize the networks and machinery of seriality itself. Serial Fu Manchu makes an important contribution showing how media studies scholarship on serialization can contribute to our understanding of the spread, maintenance, and revision of ideology. While Asian American studies scholars such as Robert Lee, Darrell Hamamoto, Homay King, Sylvia Chong, Richard Fung, Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, Tasha Oren, and Mimi Nguyen, and Thuy Linh Tu have produced important work on media studies and mass culture, much of it so far has appeared in either the exploratory format of essay collections or in monographs focusing on a single medium. Mayer’s focus on transmedial seriality shows the importance of tracing and theorizing the circulation of serial figures across diverse media and historical contexts. In addition, her careful readings challenge the adequacy of ideology critique as a response to mass media stereotypes: as Mayer puts it, “critique and demystification have always been an integral part of the process of serial production” (104). Mayer’s analysis of Fu Manchu as a serial figure—and particularly her point that seriality has productive and fascinating dimensions as well as ideological ones—raises provocative questions about alternative approaches to seriality and serial production. For example, in a recent talk entitled “The Serialization of Sexuality: Lorraine Hansberry, the 1950s, and Anti-­‐‑Colonialism,” Roderick Ferguson theorizes serialization as a mode of tracing the movement of political affect and praxis across disparate domains as third-­‐‑world insurgencies of the 1950s influenced and “serialized” diverse forms of resistance and identity. How will seriality and Asiatic racialization be articulated in the wake of the (supposed) dissolution of Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, as new serial figures—for example the restaurateur, author, food network celebrity Eddie Huang, whose biography provides the basis for the new serial comedy Fresh off the Boat—emerge? How do twenty-­‐‑first century digital media affect transmedial serialization, as the means of producing and remediating serial figures ALH Online Review, Series III 3 becomes more accessible to global audiences? While her focus is on critical serialization rather than the serialization of critical figures, Mayer prepares for future scholarship on the serialization of (arguably) critical figures like the celebrity chef and memoirist Eddie Huang or the recovery of figures bypassed by serial media—such Chu F. Hing’s 1944 Green Turtle comic superhero recently recuperated in Gene Leung Yang and Sonny Liew’s miniseries, The Shadow Hero (2014)? Mayer’s contributions to scholarship on Yellow Peril ideology are provocative, but her central claim about the analogy between such myths and the repetitive, de-­‐‑
individualizing logic of serialization would benefit from deeper engagement with the vast Asian American scholarship on the Yellow Peril. While Mayer does attend to the origins of Fu Manchu and Yellow Claw in 1890s imperialist adventure fiction, her focus on post-­‐‑1913 Fu Manchu narratives largely neglects the connections between Fu Manchu’s individual embodiment of Yellow Peril anxieties and the encoding of anti-­‐‑
Chinese stereotypes in popular nineteenth-­‐‑century texts such as Chinese invasion narratives, white labor rhetoric, and the transmedial, serial figure of Ah Sin. By 1913, Yellow Peril stereotypes were already quite developed and consequential, having helped pave the way for Chinese Exclusion, the Geary Act, and a range of public health regulations targeting the Chinese in the US. Why did the individualized embodiment of the Yellow Peril in the figure of Fu Manchu emerge so late in the development of anti-­‐‑Chinese discourses, and what are the implications of the transition from the inherently “plural” nature of the “coolie” stereotype to this individual embodiment of Chinese malice? Mayer’s book also opens up questions about how Fu Manchu—as the dominant figure of Chinese “spread” through much of the twentieth century—interacted with other representations of Asiatic character: while Mayer offers a nuanced discussion of the appearance of an assimilated Asian American counterpoint to Yellow Claw in 1950s and 1960s comics, she does not explore whether Fu Manchu had repercussions for cultural perceptions of Chinese women or other East Asian and Southeast Asian ethnicities (ranging from Japanese immigrants to Filipino colonial subjects and Vietnamese and Hmong refugees) across the twentieth century. With its focus on transatlantic, Anglo-­‐‑American mass media, Serial Fu Manchu helps delineate new directions for research that might result from a deeper engagement between media studies and Asian American studies scholarship on racialization, gender, sexuality, pan-­‐‑ethnicity, and empire.