The Fall Of Singapore Through The Eyes Of British Imperial Culture, 1890-1945

Title: 'The Yellow Peril of the fiction writer has become actuality'. The awakening of the East and the Fall of Singapore through the eyes of British Imperial culture, 1890-1945

Abstract: The subject of my paper would echo my Phd research in re-examining the discourse regarding cultural anxieties of the British Empire, and the way in which the rapid modernisation and expansion of Japan from the late 19th century until the Pacific war was interpreted and configured by British and Dominion popular culture and opinion over the longue durée. I intend to argue that over this period an Orientalist narrative of a malevolent 'yellow peril' threatening Britain's Empire was constructed (Said), and that this vision mutated from a fixation with Chinese anticolonialism during the Boxer Rebellion (1900), to fears of Japanese power in the interwar period, but always with the subtext that the East Asian man was an inherently alien and malevolent menace to white British supremacy. The paper will argue that such fears of impending racial conflict were also held in the white Dominions such as Australia, where popular fiction and journalism kept alive a narrative of an impending 'race war' between Asia and the British Empire, which again came to the cultural forefront with the fall of Singapore in 1942. It would be suggested that British and Dominion racial vitriol towards the Japanese during the Pacific war, rather than being an isolated phenomenon, had its origins in earlier imaginings of Asiatic threats that mutated from fears of the Chinese during the Boxer Rebellion (1900), to reflect anxieties over growing Japanese ambitions after victory in the Russo-Japanese war(1904-5).