Becoming Yellow by Keevak Michael;

Author:Keevak, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

“MONGOLIAN” BODIES

Despite all its eccentricities, one of the most familiar things about Crookshank’s reading of Mongolism is his breathing new life into the centuries-old notion that if there were “Mongols” in “our” midst it was because the Mongolian was an essentially invading race. Like epicanthic folds, pigment spots, imitative brains, and childlike physiognomies, these were long-standing prejudices about East Asian bodies that found their way into medical characterizations of “Mongolian” conditions. And much as in the obsessive quantification of skulls, bones, faces, and skin color that preoccupied the study of comparative anthropology, medical researchers and practitioners were obsessively trying to measure white Western normalcy as against the physiological and pathological “defects” of the Mongolian.51 A sacral pigment spot or an epicanthus could be seen as debilitating markers of “Mongolianness,” and Down syndrome, which was originally thought to afflict white bodies only, was viewed as a similar taint of a “lower” race.

Yet also like the anthropological debates we have reviewed in the previous chapter, medical deliberations regarding Mongolian eyes or Mongolian spots or Mongolism were not just derived from contemporary theories about race but actually helped to produce and to strengthen them; “Mongolianness” was clearly a rationale for racism just as much as the other way around. An excellent case in point is Chambers’s explanation of ethnic hierarchies, which could supposedly show that there really were measurable differences between the races, a circular process of reasoning that was made more difficult when (as was typical) the data failed to demonstrate what the researcher had set out to prove. This is nowhere more apparent than in the case of skin color, which Chambers, interestingly enough, also claimed to be an example of racial “perfection.” “Why are the Africans black,” he asked, “why are the Mongolians generally yellow, the Americans red, the Caucasians white? . . . All of these phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. . . . May not colour, then, depend upon development also?”52

But as I have repeatedly asked, how might one actually be able to explain yellow as a “developmental” color? Why should one decide upon yellow rather than an infinite array of other possibilities, many of which were chosen before yellow (or Indian red) and had become a collective Western fantasy? How does one explain yellowness on the basis of theories of arrested development, recapitulation, or degeneration? The Mongolian eye fold might be fetal in all races; Mongolian spots were often described as a racial throwback or a trace of pigment that either disappeared or spread out over the entire surface of the body; and Mongolism was said to bear a certain resemblance to a fetal formation as well as to a “lower” race. But the yellowness of the Mongolian was simply assumed from the start, although a variety of natural metaphors (dead leaves, desiccated lemon peel, jaundice) were regularly invoked to support it. In Chambers’s case it was not that East Asians simply looked yellow or that yellow was the most appropriate intermediate shade between black and white.

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