Your Beginner’s Guide to Orientalism
Understanding the Asian American experience means understanding Orientalism
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There is no stopping anti-Asian hate without Asian American history. My previous article details how our responses to Asian hate need to be steeped in history to stop perpetuating the ideas that oppress Asians and start promoting the ideas that will lead to equality.
Discovering, learning, and analyzing Asian American history and the authentic diasporic Asian experience is a complicated endeavor. It is all the more complicated by how history weaves the Asian experience into the experiences of other marginalized groups. Yet that makes the endeavor all the more necessary.
We know why we must set out on this journey, so the question becomes where to start.
Asian hate is founded on the “othering” of Asians: the claim that people of Asian descent are somehow inherently different from everyone else. The post-colonial theory called Orientalism explains this othering and its purpose. You may have already seen the term thrown around in discussions about anti-Asian hate crimes, media representations of Asians, and more. It’s an important concept to understand the Asian American experience.
We also need to understand the term, where it comes from, and why it is so significant.
What (really) is Orientalism?
In short, Orientalism describes how the West, namely Europe and the United States, has come to understand, represent, and ultimately oppress the East. The Eastern “Orient,” opposite the Western “Occident,” refers to both the land, including Asian American homelands, and the people, Asians born in Asia and born in diaspora alike.
We’ve come to understand the term “Orient” and its derivatives as outdated if not altogether offensive. Yet even if it has exited the modern vocabulary, the idea of the Orient still looms over present Western perspectives on Asia.
Our awareness and criticism of Orientalism can be traced back to the work of late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. The term and the theory originate from Said’s 1978 eponymous book Orientalism. In the book, Said posits that Western representation of the East, embodied by descriptions of the Orient, is neither accurate nor in good faith.
It is important to understand that Said centers his analysis of the East on his personal experience and scholarship of the Middle East and the Arab World, including Palestine. However, his analysis extends to what Americans more readily recognize as the East: East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.
As this is an article with an Asian American lens, my analysis will lean more heavily on the latter than the former. Still, we must remain mindful of the connection and solidarity, especially with the current struggle in Palestine.
Through the Orient, Western books, art, film, and the like project an exaggerated understanding of “Asianness” onto Asians. It is an understanding that is wholly dictated by the West with Asian voices minimized if not altogether silenced. No matter any truth that may be found, if at all, the exaggeration ultimately damages and disenfranchises Asians. Orientalist works support and arrive at the same conclusion: that the East is inferior to the West in one way or another. We most clearly see this understanding manifest in stereotypes about Asians, but the scope of Orientalism is so much greater.
Said necessitates the study of Orientalism by pointing out how ingrained “the basic distinction between East and West” has become in history, arts, and attitudes about Asia. Said points directly to the absurdity in “elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on.” These manifestations of Orientalism are not just historical but still very much part of the present understanding of Asianness.
The power of Orientalism is in its ability to have representations of the Orient reproduced and recycled throughout history until they became the foundational understanding of Asians. It is so powerful that, without a clear understanding of it, even Asians themselves are in danger of perpetuating harmful representations under the guise of “truth.”
Ultimately, Orientalism is about the maintenance of white supremacy. It justifies racist thought against people who originate from the so-called Orient. It justifies Western war and colonization and exploitation that continues to decimate the East. And it justifies the violence that has called upon us to #StopAsianHate.
How does Orientalism work?
Orientalism discourse and related academic study are immense in both depth and breadth. But for the average person, the average Asian American, there is no need to unpack and contextualize it all.
There are accessible means, both in history and the present, that reveal Orientalism’s influence. One way is in discussing familiar tropes about Asia. These tropes are so prolific, so often reproduced in representations of Asia that they are ingrained in the public consciousness.
Orientalist tropes often work off of two complementary processes. This first is mythicizing Asian cultures to the point of manic fantasy. The second is othering Asian peoples to the point they can only be seen as inferior relative to Westerners.
In these tropes, cultures are flattened into Middle Eastern and Far Eastern, with no mind given to the nuance of region or country. Any diasporic Asian may recognize this in the common sentiment that everything Middle Eastern is Arab, and everything Far Eastern is Chinese. And yet, despite ostensibly different aesthetics, both share the same Orientalist core that demonstrates an alien difference to the West.
Among these tropes are the exotic wonders from the Middle East’s bustling bazaars and to the Far East’s lavishly furnished kingdoms. Mystic powers conjured up by images of Middle Eastern fortune-tellers and snake charmers, Far Eastern enlightened buddhas and fearsome martial artists and swordsmen. And perhaps most tantalizing for Western colonialists and imperialists, the boundless resources underlying it all: the coveted spices and gold of the Middle East, the silk and jade of the Far East.
The othering of “Oriental” people works in tandem with the myth of “Oriental” culture. According to Orientalism, Orientals could not live up to the noble greatness of their cultural legacies.
Two ways in which they were insufficient were by either being exploitable or exploiters.
Exploitable Oriental men are slothful and incompetent. They do not possess the physical, mental, or intellectual means to utilize the land and resources that brought greatness to their Oriental forefathers.
The impotence of the Oriental man, then, is also at the expense of the Oriental woman. They are so overflowing with unfulfilled carnal desire that it defines them, with Middle Eastern belly dancers and Far Eastern concubines corralled into harems.
We recognize these ideas today as the inadequacy of Asian masculinity and, more dangerously, the fetishization of Asian femininity.
Orientals who were not feeble were, instead, despotic. Pharaohs, sultans, Great Khan, emperors ruled the backward East with bloody fists. Poor Orientals who did not know better were forced into submission by armies so barbaric, so uncivilized that they were simply incapable of knowing better. Their unenlightened scholarship, their unchristian religions, especially the fixation on Islam, reflected such.
We recognize these ideas in modern Western framing of Asian politics, especially in Asian threats to Western power.
To rule the East, the West would be doing Orientals a favor. The West would bring order, freedom, God. Or so Orientalism goes.
This understanding of Asians is ultimately the justification for the stereotyping, tropifying, and dehumanization of Asians that we see playing out today in anti-Asian hate incidents. This dehumanization is also what drives the injustice and mistreatment Asians face throughout history, including war, colonization, and imperialism.
Starting to connect Orientalism to Asian America
By reading some of the tropes, you may already have thoughts percolating on problematic Asian representation in the media.
But it cannot be overstated that these tropes are merely symptoms of the much greater problem. That problem is the racism and marginalization so embedded into our culture that we have accepted them as truth, which then justifies further beliefs and actions that enact harm.
Through Orientalism and other obscured histories and critical analyses, we can begin to untangle the racism and marginalization in our lives, especially in ways we did not consider before. Orientalism’s place in parsing that Asian American history is best expressed by Said in this passage:
The Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination. … The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” … but also because it could be — that is, submitted to being — made Oriental.
The abstract relationship between “Occident and Orient” that Said expresses is the actual relationship between America and Asian America. Orientalist tropes reveal America’s power to wholly dictate the exaggerated representation of “Asianness” projected onto Asian Americans.
Armed with an understanding of Orientalism and some of its manifestations, our next step is to understand how the duality of domination and submission over history, cultures, and peoples has allowed Orientalism to persist. To reach this understanding, we can look at how Orientalism has been used in U.S. history to maintain white supremacy.
With history as our guide, we can start to grasp how particular ideas of anti-Asian hate manifest, from the thought that even American-born Asian Americans cannot be considered American to the model minority myth’s attempts to elevate Asian Americans above other minorities and closer (but never at the same level) as whiteness.
