Yellow Peril in Canada: “The Swamps Come Back” as an Anti-Asian Allegory Published in the August 1941 issue of Uncanny Tales, Nadine Booth Brumell’s short story “The Swamps Come Back” features a group of white men seeking to save the world from an alien race. Throughout the story, the alien race never explicitly harms anyone and never talks of a plan to take over the world. It is only the race’s intelligence, reproduction, and being yellow that are implied to be the issue at hand. This paper explores the ways “The Swamps Come Back” is an allegory to the social phenomenon of Yellow Peril and how the fears of the characters in the story mirror the real life fears of white Canadians in 1941.
The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought more than 15000 Chinese men to Canada. When the railway was finished, demand for Chinese labor had vanished, and white Canadians grew skeptical of those that chose to remain in Canada. Caught between the desire for cheap labour to fulfill its capitalistic ambitions and the desire to maintain its racial purity, Canada would struggle with its immigration …show more content…
Lowry, the leader of the group, says “That creature out there is the intelligent product of some mad sport of evolution, planning to make the world a place for its kind again.” Here we see Lowry mention evolution, the product of the race’s breeding, that is cause for concern. The narrator makes several mentions of the babies the creatures carry around, and the great numbers in which they are reproducing. The climax of Lowry’s fear is shown when he says “If each one of those black spots is holding one of those [babies], there must be hundreds, thousands of them!” (36). Again, the issue is not that the alien race is overt in their desire to take anything from anyone or be violent, it is implied through their prolific reproduction that, according to our white party, the world is in
The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought more than 15000 Chinese men to Canada. When the railway was finished, demand for Chinese labor had vanished, and white Canadians grew skeptical of those that chose to remain in Canada. Caught between the desire for cheap labour to fulfill its capitalistic ambitions and the desire to maintain its racial purity, Canada would struggle with its immigration …show more content…
Lowry, the leader of the group, says “That creature out there is the intelligent product of some mad sport of evolution, planning to make the world a place for its kind again.” Here we see Lowry mention evolution, the product of the race’s breeding, that is cause for concern. The narrator makes several mentions of the babies the creatures carry around, and the great numbers in which they are reproducing. The climax of Lowry’s fear is shown when he says “If each one of those black spots is holding one of those [babies], there must be hundreds, thousands of them!” (36). Again, the issue is not that the alien race is overt in their desire to take anything from anyone or be violent, it is implied through their prolific reproduction that, according to our white party, the world is in