ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two specific representations of individuals with an East Asian appearance and of an East Asian origin in contemporary Swedish visual culture, namely, the themes that we have named the East Asian caricature' and the East Asian character'. It contributes to the whole field of representation studies within critical media scholarship by bringing in an ethnic group which is also relatively invisible in the public sphere in general. During the classical colonial period here meaning more or less from 1492 to 1975 visual representations of native populations and ethnic minorities played a crucial role as a tool of governance and as a part of the general knowledge production of the others in the European colonial empires. The anti-Semitic visual imagery from the first half of the twentieth century is a good example, when fear of an imagined powerful group resulted in negative, feminized and downgrading representations on a mass scale.
