The Unsecular Yellow in Richard Marsh's The Joss : A Reversion

Abstract: This article examines the way visions of the Yellow Peril upend the metanarratives of liberal secularism, via a reading of Richard Marsh's 1901 novel, The Joss: A Reversion . Following the movements of a bloodthirsty East Asian cult, The Joss occasions reflection on the extent to which its Orientalized villains continue to shape a secular project that remains indebted to Christianity. Against the backdrop of the Victorian empire's turn to secularism, Marsh's novel anticipates what I call the unsecular yellow, a visual field whose sinister occupants pull the basis for post-Christian secular dominion away from tolerant universalism and toward stark racial binaries. Foreshadowing the anti-Asian paranoia of today's religious and post-religious right, The Joss prompts consideration of how contemporary talk of massing Asian bodies reinvigorates the late Victorian intertwining of secular and Christian conceptions of yellow heathenness.