english 150 midterm
"a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"flexible positional superiority"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
The Orient is "one of [Europe's] deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
Race as a Social Construction according to Robert G. Lee
"Race is not a category of nature; it is an ideology through which which unequal distributions of wealth and power are naturalized--justified in the language of biology and genealogy" and "Race is a mode of placing cultural meaning on the body"
"a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"Yellowface"
"marks the body as unmistakably Oriental" (Lee) "exaggerates 'racial' features that have been designated 'Oriental'"
"The Yellow Peril" racial characterizations
-Koreans: "lacking nerve...the perfect type of inefficiency" -Chinese: "the perfect type of efficiency" but lack "enterprise" due to restrictive government -Japanese: "brown men," warlike, adopted "machine civilization" of West
why look at popular culture to understand race?
-"The 'common understanding' of the Oriental as racialized alien...originates in the realm of popular culture, where struggles over who is or who can become a 'real American' take place and where the categories, representations, distinctions, and markers of race are defined" (5) -"popular culture as a process, a set of cultural practices that define American nationality" (6) -"popular culture is always contested terrain"
Fu Manchu: "the yellow peril incarnate"
-Created by English novelist Sax Rohmer in The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913) -"Imagine a person, tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government...Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man" -Featured in more than a dozen films: always played by a white actor in yellowface
"The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910)
-Reproduces some of "The Yellow Peril" and extrapolates from it -an early work of science fiction: imagines events "in the year 1976" -orientalist view of China and "West" as opposites -Japan's victory in Russo-Japanese War
"Mrs. Spring Frangrance" (1912)
-Sui Sin Far's only short story collection -title character, the wife of a Seattle merchant, has been in the US for 5 years -most obvious theme of the story is the comparison between "Chinese" and "American" values, framed through a lightly comic story of star-crossed lovers
What is Orientalism?
-a set of ideas and beliefs held by "the West" about the "East" -a process of identifying Asia as "the Other" against which Europeans/Americans define themselves -may include both attraction and repulsion, both identification and exoticism
Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far (1865-1914)
-born in England, to Chinese mother and white english father -"sui sin far" seems to have been not a pen name but a Chinese name given to her in childhood -"one of the first to speak for an Asian American sensibility that was neither Asian nor white American" -Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings -"Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909)
Figures and techniques in "A Broadway Pageant"
-figurative language -personification -Apostrophe -Anaphora -catalog poem
Orientalism in "A Broadway Pageant"
-orient as opposite -orient as ancient -orient as female -unity of "the Asiatic continent"
What are common orientalist themes
-orientals as "heathen" (fear of islam and non-christian religions) -"feminization of Asia" "soft men and erotic women" -"backwardness, irrationality, sensuality, and stagnation"
Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture
-study of stereotypes used to portray Asians in US popular culture (including the "pollutant," the "yellow peril," the "model minority" -emphasis on the way cultural representations (in lit, film, cartoons, journalism, etc...) are connected to histories of racism and racial inequality
"[T]he phenomenon of Orientalism...deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient...despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a 'real' Orient"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"[T]he Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"European culture was able to manage--and even produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"European superiority over Oriental backwardness"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original"
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"The Yellow Peril," Jack London (1904)
London's travels through Korea and Manchuria (a region of China then occupied by the Japanese) during the Russo-Japanese War
"Passage to India," Walt Whitman
Marks three major technological accomplishments: 1. completion of Suez Canal (1869) 2. Completion of US transcontinental railroad (1869) 3. Establishment of transatlantic communication cable (1866)
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
Study of European (particularly British and French) knowledge of and representations of "the Orient"
"A Broadway Pageant," Walt Whitman
written in response to the New York Visit of the first Japanese embassy to the US, 1860
