To think of the relationships between the West and the East, between the Orient and the Occident, is an exercise in deconstruction – understanding, analyzing and interpreting the manner in which they are constructed, through specific sets of knowledge that are aimed at promoting and advancing a particular point-of-view or world view. At the same it forces us to think through the manner in which we, in our daily lives, reaffirm these differences in order to comprehend our “others”, those that are racially, ethnically and culturally different from us. Analyzing stereotypes requires one to be critical of their role in society, and to be conscious of how we appropriate them as an exercise in cross-cultural communication and understanding.
The film The Cheat and the books Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale demonstrate these points well. Both use stereotypes of the West and of the East strategically, on one hand reaffirming Western civilization and culture as a dominating force in the world, while at the same allowing us to deconstruct ethnic identity (Asian American) and its positioning in the American imaginary.
In The Cheat, the Burmese trader (Hishuru) and the space he occupies is constructed as the “other”. He is both feminized in his representation and his “queer” sexuality is constructed as a treat. His relationship with Edith is problematic (the fear of miscegenation), as this has implications for the imagination of the American nation as “white”. The text employs the classic stereotypes of the Orient that has a familiar history in the West. The domestic space of Hishuru’s house and room, his clothing, the sound track, his gentle (yet threatening) demeanor is in stark contrast to the stereotype of white masculinity. However, he is positioned on the same level as Edith, the over performing, hysterical white women, also constructed as the “other” in the text. The film interesting conflates the “Orient as feminine” (through space and the Burmese trader) with white femininity, emphasizing the “white” nation as patriarchal and heteronormative. While the film positions white women as core to the survival of the nation, through her “biopower” (biopolitics) (Foucault), she is also constructed as a threat because of her very essence – her sexuality. The film speaks to the anxieties in American society during that historic moment –that of miscegenation and its treat to a white nation. In contrast to Edith and Hishuru, Richard is portrayed as the logical, capitalist, white male who is in control and whose superiority is reasserted at the end of the film, by re-appropriating his wife into the control of patriarchy. By the end, the film also controls and manages the threat of the Oriental male, reinscribing a social order that asserts heteronormative whiteness at its core.
Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale, are complex texts that introduces the figure of the hybrid subject. In Madame Butterfly, Cho-Cho-San marries Pinkerton (an American) and in his absence has his bi-racial child. In A Japanese Nightingale, Yuki and her brother Taro are bi-racial subjects that complicate the narrative and the relationships between the East and the West.
The texts abound in Oriental stereotypes that construct a clear dichotomous relationship between the East and the West. Cho-Cho-San and Yuki are infantilized throughout the texts. They are positioned as younger women who succumb to the Oriental fantasies of the Western man. Cho-Cho-San performs her role as the wife of an American man, which in her imagination elevates her status in her world. Yuki’s performance in the beginning is of a humble, exotic Japanese girl who is subservient and meek. These are stereotypes of Oriental women and female sexuality that are at the core of the Western imagination of them. Yuki’s performance unravels in the book – she constantly shifts from being satisfied and cheerful to being sad and burdened by her destiny in life. These women are also described as objects (compared to the picture perfect Japanese fans, or Japanese ornaments). They have been reduced to commodities who have a “value” (in the very Marxist sense) determined through their sexuality and performance of femininity (Cho-Cho-San more than Yuki, although, the American man she tries to escape to the West with, sees her as a commodity, a spectacle, he can sell in the West).
In Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale, the hybrid children represent the very literal meeting or mixing of East and West. Cho-Cho-San sees her child as instrumental in maintaining her marriage to an American man. She assumes that the hybrid (mixed race) child will bind her and Pinkerton forever. However, for Pinkerton Cho Cho San was a “plaything”, a temporary arrangement while in Japan. The child is not the culmination of a love relationship that will keep them together forever.
The positioning of the mixed race children in A Japanese Butterfly is more complex. Yuki and her brother Taro are children of a Japanese mother and an American father. Yuki is positioned as the subservient, loyal and self-sacrificing Japanese girl. Although she is Japanese in every way, her difference is clearly marked through her hair and her eye color, rendering her even more attractive and mystical in the world of the geishas. Her brother Taro has made the transatlantic journey to the West to be educated. Upon his return, he has become “Westernized” and this complicates his position in Japanese society. His return to Japan is symbolic – his mixed race nature makes him a treat to American society, yet his Westernization in the West compromises his position in Japanese society. The narrative deals with this by killing him off.
In these books, the United States (and Western thought in The Cheat) is constructed as modern, superior and civilized while the East is constructed as pre-modern, uncivilized and inferior in every way. The biracial children are problematic as they represent the fusion of modernity with the pre-modern, the civilized with the un-civilized, further complicating their identities and creating them as liminal, perverse beings. Yuki’s liminality is manageable in the narrative as she has assimilated into Japanese culture and tradition and is not a threat to the imagination of the United States as a “white” nation. Taro’s movement between the East and West constructs him as a danger to Western civilization and imperialism. He is never allowed to fully enjoy “modernity”. A Japanese Nightingale suggests that the hybrid body cannot negotiate modernity (as represented by the West) and therefore has to either die or remain contained in the East. The books interesting reaffirm the manner in which race, sexuality, gender and geography are imbricated and the manner in which the subject is produced through the interaction and relationship between these factors.
The stereotypes in the books and the film allows us to understand the manner in which the West perceived the East, and at the same time the manner in which the West constructed the East through these stereotypes as its “other” (Edward Said, Orientalism). We all approach the world we live in with stereotypes that allow us to negotiate and understand our worlds. Do stereotypes allow us to understand different cultures, societies and individuals? And what their limitations? Are all stereotypes negative or carry negative connotations? Can we move beyond stereotypes in our understanding of the world?
Written by Jordache A. Ellapen
No comments:
Post a Comment