Racializing Print Capitalism in the Transimperial Pacific: “The Printers Fear the Invasion of the Yellow Peril”

Abstract

Abstract This article uses the Victorian Master Printers’ Association of Australia’s 1908 protest against Japanese print artifacts as a backdrop against which to rethink print capitalism’s relationship to race. First, rather than national imaginaries, I demonstrate that flows of print capital illuminate the formation of racialized class identities across a transimperially contested Pacific. Second, I argue that to better understand print capitalism, historians might direct their attention away from novels and newspapers, and instead toward the political economy of “jobbing”—the production of cards, envelopes, labels, posters, menus, and other non-codex print artifacts. Jobbing’s political economy spanned a network of Pacific port towns including Yokohama, Melbourne, and San Francisco. The uneven development of lithographic expertise essential to modern jobbing placed Japan in the position of offering finely printed designs for lower costs, leading American print shop owners to subcontract with Japanese artisans to produce works for Australian markets. It was these artifacts—advertisements, handbooks, placards, and other sales ephemera bearing Australian names and imagery, but made in Japan—that the VMPA protested. These protests crystallized in a “locative demand”: that printed artifacts attest to their original location of manufacture, and that this identity be used to regulate print circulation in a manner parallel to restrictions on non-white immigration. In this manner, jobbing in the Pacific thrust race and class into the limelight as mechanisms of reterritorialization that would resolve contradictions posed by the tangled transnational vectors of print capital itself.