Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism

Rating:
Summary: race and (not versus) gender
Review: Critical legal academics have warned people of "playing the oppression sweepstakes": fighting over which oppressed group is more oppressed. In this work, Dr Mari Yoshihara struggles with that issue as she attempts to flesh out and analyze what happened when fin-de-siecle, class-privileged, white women "embraced the East" or supported and practiced Orientalism.

In this book, Professor Yoshihara (a Brown alumna) jumps genres and mixes mediums. She demonstrates a strong knowledge of how Orientalism impacted business, material art, literature, anthropology, and vice versa. She proves her strong understanding of the histories and cultures of the United States, Japan, and China. This juggling is one of the resons why I love American studies and think the discipline has so much potential. This book continually brings up race, class, and gender simultaneously: Michael Dyson was correct in saying that bell hooks has to stop patting herself on the back for being a scholar able to do this. This was an impressive interdisciplinary book that should be of interest to women's studies majors, Asian Americaninsts, and comparative ethnic studies scholars alike.

On the one hand, a famed white actress who performed in yellowface also helped send nurses to wartorn Japan and A. Smedley applauded Chinese communists for their goals. On the other hand, Amy Lowell excluded Chinese women from her poetry anthology and white female artists purposely portrayed Asian women as submissive and stereotypical. Still, Yoshihara stresses that the women discussed were neither hardened racists or iconic anti-racists. Their success depended on Westerners who wanted to see these images and continues to this day by Asian scholars that are honored by this attention to them and their predecessors. This book demonstrates how power comes from all sources and social constructionism affects every phenomenon.

Yoshihara admits that the United States, China, and Japan are and were patriarchal. Though other academics have condemned discussions that conflate gender with sexuality, here she consistently brings up both topics and illustrates their intense interconnectedness. While the author only looks at Orientalism via Japan and China, she sets up a framework for others to discuss other nations. In "Playboys in Paradise," the author mentions 1950s Americans' fascination with Polynesia. I think a grad student could write a great work on Orientalism during the Vietnam War based upon Dr. Yoshihara's work.

In the text, the Professor states that she is only talking about upper-class women. She may have wanted to admit this in her title then. You can barely differentiate between quotes and text because she only left aligns them, rather than italicizing them or indenting quotes on both the left and the right. I, and I think most modern Western readers, were more familiar with the topics in the last few chapters. Thus, I wonder why this scholar placed the most recognizable material at the end.

Professor Yoshihara is trying to avoid the black-white paradigm, but I think a mention of black-white race relations would have added, rather than distorted, her examination. Ruth Benedict wrote inaccurate gendered inaccurate reports about Japan that seem very similar to Patrick Moynihan's attack on African-American families. Mari mentions that white women sometimes wore Asian garb just to do something new. As a reader, I wondered why she did not contrast this with white men who paraded around in blackface for very purposeful racist ends. Works by Marjorie Garber and Eric Lott exist for the writer to flesh out this comparison. She discusses patronizing white female artists and their relations with East Asians of both genders. This reminds me much of Carl Van Vechten's dynamic with Harlem Renaissance writers or Jean Genet's rapport with the Black Panthers.

The author leaves other things unexplored that I would have addressed. For example, she doesn't bring up regionalism. Most Asians historically have lived on the West Coast. Were white women there more likely to embrace them or reject them than, say, white women in Boston? On page 64, a white female painter's depiction of a Japanese mother holding her child to a mother. In the painting, you see the baby's face so close to the mother that her face becomes invisible. This seems like a blatant Orientalist attempt to equate Asian women with children, yet Yoshihara doesn't bring it up.

This book is awesome and Professor Yoshihara obviously has an exciting career ahead of her. This book will help modern readers to think about films like "Kill Bill, Part One," Madonna's videos and concerts, Bjork's album covers, and the "Notes of a Geisha" novel. I can't recommend this work enough.