Serial Fu Manchu

"Before Osama Bin Laden there was Fu Manchu. Ruth Mayer brilliantly tracks the first ‘greatest villain ever’ across the terrain of print and visual culture from novel to magazine to feature film to TV. Mayer carefully shows how the serial form itself operated as a technology through which Orientalized terror was embedded in our brains." —Robert G. Lee, American Studies, Brown University , and author of Orientals: Asian Americans and Popular Culture

"Serial Fu Manchu is impressive and substantive. With great nuance and great depth, Ruth Mayer persuasively argues that the serialized media production of Fu Manchu is a foundational and overlooked formal-structural feature of the racialized and ideological ‘other’. This book constitutes a major theoretical contribution to literary and media theory, propaganda and political culture studies, and ultimately to decolonizing studies of ‘Western civilization’." —John Kuo Wei Tchen, founder of the Museum of Chinese in America, and editor of Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear

"Much more than the definitive account of Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril myth, Mayer’s book revitalizes the seemingly well-trodden study of popular culture writ large. Mayer meticulously demonstrates that popular seriality is not modernity’s excess, but rather its essential modality for the ‘transmedial’ circulation of ideology and culture. Serial Fu Manchu is analytically rich, theoretically astute, and altogether exciting in its ground-clearing implications for further scholarly inquiry." —Glen Mimura, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Asian American Studies, University of California, Irvine

"Mayer's book is fascinating look at not only the concept of seriality but a reminder that when the character Fu Manchu debuted in 1912 in a story and began his life as a serial the following year, China was regarded by the West as a backward, troubled mess. Thus, this book is worth reading for those interested in popular culture and the intersection in fictional form of East and West.... This is a solid contribution to cultural studies." —Critical Margins

"Mayer argues perceptively and persuasively that the serial nature of the transmedia appearances of Sax Rohmer's iconic Chinese supervillain Fu Manchu not only informs and represents 20th-century Anglo-American fear of the racial and ideological Other (in the form of Asian, "yellow peril" for short), but is also constitutive of that fear, integral to the ideology of industrialization, modernization, and colonization.... Mayer's study is theoretically grounded and finds connections across popular culture to inform its arguments. Summing Up: Recommended." —Choice

"Meyer explores the pervasiveness of the Fu Manchu figure in twentieth-century American popular culture.... Serial Fu Manchu points to the importance of serialization in American popular culture and the common practice of creating and repackaging characters such as Fu Manchu within it. This practice reinforced Asian and Asian American stereotypes and affirmed American imperialist and nativist attitudes and policies in the twentieth century." —Pacific Historical Review

"Serial Fu Manchu demonstrates how the transmedial figure of Fu Manchu embodied different iterations of the logic of seriality’s 'spread' throughout the twentieth century.... Mayer offers far more than an authoritative study of Fu Manchu as a Yellow Peril stereotype.... 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." —American Literary History