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1 Going Serial Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril, and the Machinic Momentum of Ideology the spread of the thing is phenomenal. —sax rohmer, The Mask of Fu-Manchu (1932) T here was a time when Fu Manchu was everywhere and everybody seemed to know him. those days are over. today, the Chinese master criminal who emblematized the yellow peril from 1913 to the 1970s is almost forgotten. like his popular cultural counterpart Charlie Chan, the embarrassingly harmless Chinese detective, Fu Manchu lost his powerful position in transatlantic popular culture; at best, people recall the mustache. some may have vague memories of Christopher lee reruns on tV, and film buffs sometimes remember Boris Karloff and his oriental gear, but mostly the figure of Fu Manchu seems to have disappeared without much of a trace from Western popular culture and its collective memory. When The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, Peter sellers’s weak parody of the Fu Manchu films, appeared in 1980, Fu Manchu’s fate had already been sealed: Pop cultural villains thrive on the narrative modes of horror and mystery, so once ridicule and irony overtake their representation , they are usually finished. the Fu Manchu replicants and clones who did not too obviously share the figure’s foregrounded Asianness fared slightly better than their blueprint . thus, Dr. no, James Bond’s opponent with the prosthetic arm in the eponymous thriller (Khoo 2007: 78; Black 2000: 32), is still remembered . Dr. no is of Chinese ancestry, but he is also half-German. Ming the Merciless of the Flash Gordon series may have survived because he is as much an alien as an Asian (Ma 2000: 7–10). Moreover, in the 1986– 1987 and 1996 tV series, Ming turned from yellow to green, and the most recent tV serialization of the material to date, running from 2007 2 Chapter 1 to 2008, turned him into a blond Caucasian to be altogether on the safe side. the same happened to Batman’s serial opponent ra’s al Ghul, who was originally clearly cast in the mold of Fu Manchu but survived because he never was completely Chinese, veering between different ethnic ascriptions until he finally morphed into a Caucasian in Christopher nolan’s Batman trilogy starting in 2005 (Darius 2005: 30–31). Fu Manchu, however , is first and foremost Chinese, or, to be more precise, he is nothing but a yellow peril figure. if you take the Chineseness away, there is nothing left of him. of course, Fu Manchu’s demise was not sellers’s doing. the figure’s disappearance has many causes, among them the vehement battle over cultural representation waged by activists and scholars in the second half of the twentieth century, who spoke as representatives or on behalf of aggrieved communities and marginalized groups. Frank Chin’s derisive correlation of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu as mutually enforcing stereotypes of Asian masculinity demarcates this line of reasoning exemplarily when it culminates in the admonition not to underestimate the political impact of popular culture: Devil and angel, the Chinese is a sexual joke, glorifying white power: Dr. Fu, a man wearing a long dress, batting his eyelashes, surrounded by muscular black servants in loin-cloths, and with his bad habit of caressingly touching white men on the leg, wrist, and face with his long fingernails, is not so much a threat as he is a frivolous offense to white manhood. Chan’s gestures are the same, except he doesn’t touch and, instead of being graceful like Fu in flowing robes, he is awkward in a baggy suit and clumsy. (1998: 95–96) this critique of Fu Manchu’s (and Charlie Chan’s) stereotyped Asianness has been flanked, substantiated, and amended by more analytic approaches to the figure’s ideological work and political effectivity (Wu 1982: 164–182; r. lee 1999; hevia 1998; Chen 2005; Knapp 2010; tchen 2010). But the waning of the figures’ cultural impact also brought about attempts at rehabilitation or recuperation: For Charlie Chan, Yunte huang recently goes as far as to propound the character’s secret subversive spirit by reading him as an ethnic trickster figure: “he reminds me of Monkey King. in Chinese folk myth, Monkey King is an invincible trickster. . . . But he is also the African American signifying Monkey, or the native American Coyote” (2010: 287). i would not go that far regarding Charlie Chan (for an interesting alternative, see r. J. Williams 2011), and i certainly do not intend to propose...

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