3.31.2006
Thinking Orientals (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America is a carefully plotted historical narrative of the rise and subsequent implications of the Chicago school of Sociology on the production of Asian American identity and racialization. In mapping this history through a single school of thought’s development, Yu makes important interventions and genealogical addendums to some of the key concepts of Asian American studies as currently conceived - Orientalism, marginality, culture and assimilation, just to name a few. Additionally, Yu’s mining of the strategies of dramaturgy aid in a dense, and at times, hidden, methodology of history telling, one that both demonstrates and obfuscates the same strategies used by scholars of the Chicago school to tell the stories of Orientals.
Much as a playwright might set the scene and time of a story about to unfold, Yu is attentive to space and place through out his book. As he says, “This story is about the origins and consequences of a widespread fascination with the Oriental in the United States.” (9) He begins this story by not only historically grounding us in the origins of the Chicago school’s interest in the Oriental problem as the meeting and collaboration between missionaries and scholars but by actually invoking the visualization of a map – “Imagine the map as a parchment through which to relive the past, a chart to trace the stories of people as they move about, leaving dotted lines that follow them from place to place.” (3) Throughout the first half of the book, titled “The First Movement – Coming to the West,” he introduces the reader to a cast of white sociologists, detailing both their physical and psychic movements into the world of the Oriental while developing a sociological methodology of detachment, marked by a belief that “all knowledge, not just that of the unknown and the strange but also the already known, was to be from the point of view of the outsider.” Yu confirms the performative aspect of maintaining this façade of foreign objectivity, but it is in the second movement of the book, the one which deals with the Oriental as Marginal Man, native informant and Asian American intellectual, that we begin to find a greater explication and unpacking of the theatrical nature of the costumes and stages of the subject and object stage production.
Yu begins this second movement with the ways in which Asian American scholars were drawn into the field of sociology as a means of “narrat[ing] their self identities through sociological theories such as that of the marginal man.” (111) Yu details the studies of these scholars and interestingly, unlike his discussion of the white founding fathers of the discipline, he allows these voice to be heard in direct quotes from their writings. This is particularly fascinating when laid against the use of these scholars as interpreters of culture for the same white sociologists discussed in the first movement of the book. Yu states critically that the role of the marginal man (while maintaining that the role did provide a valuable entrée into fields otherwise unknown to Asian American scholars) “as a translator and middle man between two cultures actually undercut the spectrum of acculturation on which it was putatively based” (123) he performs the critique in translating the words of the white sociologists into broadly brushed narrative while allowing the Asian American scholars to peer out boldly, in their own words, from within the text.
Yu’s knitting together of the historical exegesis of the first movement with the unmasking and critique of the second results in an important and biting critique of modern ideas of multiculturalism predicated on a erasure of race. He convincingly situates these ideas on the foundations of objectivism and the elision of bodily reality into culture and consciousness by the Chicago school. In Thinking Orientals, a Cartesian logic is belied and bodies do matter. The imbrication of time and place that is history clings to them as they inhabit the architecture of structural inequality. It is perhaps in the possible solution to these problems of structural inequality that Yu runs into a trope that is troubling to the rest of this very fine work.
Yu seeks a redemptive space in the field of Ethnic Studies and Asian American studies as a means to escape the reductive exoticism always present in majoritarian spaces – “Without at least some separate and viable institutional networks, however, the production of knowledge will continue to be dominated by the racialized structures of Orientalism.”(197) While this assertion does offer a solution to some of the concerns based on the power inequalities inherent within the academic institution (a critique Yu takes on earlier in the book when analyzing the networks of knowledge production in the Chicago school), it still leaves us with the problems of insider/outside, authentic/inauthentic that Yu unpacked so nicely in the context of the Chicago school. Further, Yu’s conclusion takes an uncritical stance towards liberal democracy in announcing “We need to create a universal standard that evaluates forms of knowledge not through the eyes of this highly restricted number of people [that is, the Chicago sociologists] but through a democratically defined dialogue that takes into account the mutual nature of ignorance and knowledge.” (Ibid) How then, after such a dialectical call, do we turn to the democratic? How then, if bodies really do matter and they matter in all their messy complexity, does the universal standard come to be? And finally, how does this democracy get mapped onto the rich narrative that Yu lays out, in which the history of one school of thought explodes out into a the multiple histories this book tells?
Keywords
Narration, Knowledge, Migration, Sociology, Oriental, Marginal
Other QE Works Cited
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America is a carefully plotted historical narrative of the rise and subsequent implications of the Chicago school of Sociology on the production of Asian American identity and racialization. In mapping this history through a single school of thought’s development, Yu makes important interventions and genealogical addendums to some of the key concepts of Asian American studies as currently conceived - Orientalism, marginality, culture and assimilation, just to name a few. Additionally, Yu’s mining of the strategies of dramaturgy aid in a dense, and at times, hidden, methodology of history telling, one that both demonstrates and obfuscates the same strategies used by scholars of the Chicago school to tell the stories of Orientals.
Much as a playwright might set the scene and time of a story about to unfold, Yu is attentive to space and place through out his book. As he says, “This story is about the origins and consequences of a widespread fascination with the Oriental in the United States.” (9) He begins this story by not only historically grounding us in the origins of the Chicago school’s interest in the Oriental problem as the meeting and collaboration between missionaries and scholars but by actually invoking the visualization of a map – “Imagine the map as a parchment through which to relive the past, a chart to trace the stories of people as they move about, leaving dotted lines that follow them from place to place.” (3) Throughout the first half of the book, titled “The First Movement – Coming to the West,” he introduces the reader to a cast of white sociologists, detailing both their physical and psychic movements into the world of the Oriental while developing a sociological methodology of detachment, marked by a belief that “all knowledge, not just that of the unknown and the strange but also the already known, was to be from the point of view of the outsider.” Yu confirms the performative aspect of maintaining this façade of foreign objectivity, but it is in the second movement of the book, the one which deals with the Oriental as Marginal Man, native informant and Asian American intellectual, that we begin to find a greater explication and unpacking of the theatrical nature of the costumes and stages of the subject and object stage production.
Yu begins this second movement with the ways in which Asian American scholars were drawn into the field of sociology as a means of “narrat[ing] their self identities through sociological theories such as that of the marginal man.” (111) Yu details the studies of these scholars and interestingly, unlike his discussion of the white founding fathers of the discipline, he allows these voice to be heard in direct quotes from their writings. This is particularly fascinating when laid against the use of these scholars as interpreters of culture for the same white sociologists discussed in the first movement of the book. Yu states critically that the role of the marginal man (while maintaining that the role did provide a valuable entrée into fields otherwise unknown to Asian American scholars) “as a translator and middle man between two cultures actually undercut the spectrum of acculturation on which it was putatively based” (123) he performs the critique in translating the words of the white sociologists into broadly brushed narrative while allowing the Asian American scholars to peer out boldly, in their own words, from within the text.
Yu’s knitting together of the historical exegesis of the first movement with the unmasking and critique of the second results in an important and biting critique of modern ideas of multiculturalism predicated on a erasure of race. He convincingly situates these ideas on the foundations of objectivism and the elision of bodily reality into culture and consciousness by the Chicago school. In Thinking Orientals, a Cartesian logic is belied and bodies do matter. The imbrication of time and place that is history clings to them as they inhabit the architecture of structural inequality. It is perhaps in the possible solution to these problems of structural inequality that Yu runs into a trope that is troubling to the rest of this very fine work.
Yu seeks a redemptive space in the field of Ethnic Studies and Asian American studies as a means to escape the reductive exoticism always present in majoritarian spaces – “Without at least some separate and viable institutional networks, however, the production of knowledge will continue to be dominated by the racialized structures of Orientalism.”(197) While this assertion does offer a solution to some of the concerns based on the power inequalities inherent within the academic institution (a critique Yu takes on earlier in the book when analyzing the networks of knowledge production in the Chicago school), it still leaves us with the problems of insider/outside, authentic/inauthentic that Yu unpacked so nicely in the context of the Chicago school. Further, Yu’s conclusion takes an uncritical stance towards liberal democracy in announcing “We need to create a universal standard that evaluates forms of knowledge not through the eyes of this highly restricted number of people [that is, the Chicago sociologists] but through a democratically defined dialogue that takes into account the mutual nature of ignorance and knowledge.” (Ibid) How then, after such a dialectical call, do we turn to the democratic? How then, if bodies really do matter and they matter in all their messy complexity, does the universal standard come to be? And finally, how does this democracy get mapped onto the rich narrative that Yu lays out, in which the history of one school of thought explodes out into a the multiple histories this book tells?
Keywords
Narration, Knowledge, Migration, Sociology, Oriental, Marginal
Other QE Works Cited
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
# posted by SMRT : 9:31 PM
