Globalization and Orientalism

Orientalism” was used to create a divide between the “west” and the “east” and sparked the notions of “racial othering” in America. Popular understanding of Asian Americans has changed historically, but for many centuries maintained the same general trajectory; Prashad explains that “Americans shared the European view in which the Orient and Occident were separate worlds,” but differed from the European view as they “hoped for some transfer of values to benefit their new republic and prevents its decline into the morass of materialism.” The American idea of “Orientalism” was based on the belief that Western Civilization (Europe and America) are the center of “progress, civilization, and rationality,”  while the tales of Mandeville and Marco Polo depicted the “East” as a “filthy and barbaric” place, illustrated women of Asia as having “boars’ tusks and oxen’s tails growing out of their loins” and reinforced standards of European “Occidentalism” by emphasizing their “bizarre physical appearance."

A key aspect to the study of Asian-American immigration and culture is the differentiation between the “Pacific” and “Oceania.” Before this week I knew little about the “anthropological classifications” that separate Micronesia from Polynesia or Melanesia, but information about these groups of people is largely important in understanding the history of “Oceania” as a whole. The importance of shifting our understanding of “the Pacific vs. Oceania” is paramount; Oceania is characterized as a “vast, expanding, hospitable and generous” place that is divided by physical and linguistic characterizations, and brings to light the importance of the “borderless ocean” that connects indigenous peoples. Categorizing “Oceanic” people as just being from “the Pacific” devalues their being and does not take into account the richness of their cultures or highlighting their acute differences. The idea of “Orientalism” is deeply ingrained in “the Pacific vs. Oceania” debate because the idea of keeping the “East” categorized as barbarically as possible was essential to maintaining the West’s “repulsion” of the “Asiatic people.” 

Before European contact, Hawaiian society was a monarchy that was rich culturally and had what we think of today as “strong moral values.” Noenoe Silva explains in her article that “[Hawaiian] legends contain strong female models” and that “Hawaiian women were celebrated” and “portrayed as potent beings in myth and symbolism.” However, European influence, arriving on the islands in the form of missionaries and US industrialism, struck down these moral “fruits” embedded in the natives’ culture; Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown, the power of the people of Hawaii was stripped, and Hawaii slowly turned into a “strategic military base” for the US and the power and self-determination of the native people was essentially obliterated in favor of business interests.