Evil “Oriental” villains

You sense he is there lurking in the shadows, just beyond the periphery of your watching eye. Even if one could catch a glimpse of him, he is still only visible to the trained eye. You can't exactly say why, but you know that he is responsible for the dread and threat you have felt as soon you entered this dark, unknown terrain. Nevertheless, you proceed into unknown danger . . .

He is the evil “Oriental” villain from popular culture. Perhaps not as prevalent in contemporary popular culture, the evil Oriental villain was a familiar staple in early and mid-twentieth century popular fiction, comic strips, motion pictures, and radio serials. While certainly a racial — and racist — stereotype, the language of stereotypes does not explain the evil Oriental villain. Knowing what something is doesn’t necessarily explain how it works or why it came to be. The question to ask is what specifically the stereotype or figure represents and why. In other words, the key to understanding the evil Oriental villain is to situate the figure within the specific historical social and cultural circumstances that produced it.

“Orientalism” in American culture

To state the obvious, evil Oriental villains are not real. They do not correspond to, were not modeled on any actual Asian American person. They do not express any aspect of the experiences of Asian Americans. They are part of Asian American “culture” because they are, or were, a larger American popular culture’s expression of ideas, largely imagined about Asians and by extension, people of Asian ancestry.

Like other racial tropes in American popular culture such as blackface “ministrels,” they were products of a complex racial dynamic within cultural practice and representation: racial social categories allowed ideas — indeed, whole structures of ideas — about a racial group by the dominant group to substititute, almost to exclusion, ideas by members of the racial group itself. Often expressing the dominant group’s anxieties, such expression reinforced and recapitulated social and political inequality in cultural terms, solidifying imagined racial tropes so they became more “real” — often with the additional weight of “objective” truth and verifiable fact — than the experiences of members of the racial group.

The term, “orientalism,” comes from Edward Said’s book of the same name. Although there is a long and general tradition of European – and later American – fascination with the “Orient,” “orientalism” is a more specific issue.

Popular/Mass Culture

Villains in popular culture.

Not just your standard Yellow Peril

Villains were singular, not mass hordes. and the issue wasn't labor, but science, expertise, and knowledge.

Asians, aliens, and science fiction

Some Famous and Not So Famous examples

Fu Manchu

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."

The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

Wu Fang and Yen Sin

Ming the Merciless