Virtual Orientialism: Asian Religions Without the Asians

Paul Harvey

A couple of posts coming up here (falling behind already this semester -- the world rushes on, committee meetings must be attended, papers graded, and our poor little blog gets left ignored in the corner) about new books of interest just reviewed in Choice. I've tried to pick out selections here from works which cover subjects that are receive less attention than one would want both here at the blog and in American religious history more generally (our blog contributor Mike Altman is working on Hinduism in America and knows a lot more about this subject generally than any of the rest of us here, so Mike weigh in here with thoughts that you have!).

The first comes from an author familiar to many of you, Jane Iwamura, whose new book about Asian religions and American popular culture is out. Having grown up on Kung Fu and still able to quote lines from it, I certainly am familiar with the topic of "cultural stereotyping by the media" mentioned in the review below. For that and many other reasons, I look forward to picking this work up soon.

Aside from the review, here's a great short piece by Prof. Iwamura drawing on the book. And if you would like a more in-depth scholarly discussion of the book, here is Rudy Busto's discussion of the book, from a panel discussion at McCormick Theological Seminary last year. Finally, I would remind you of the great selection of primary sources on Asian American religions with Asians in Tweed and Prothero's Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History, still an indispensable primary source compilation.

Iwamura, Jane Naomi. Virtual orientalism: Asian religions and American popular culture. Oxford, 2011. 214p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780199738601, $99.00; ISBN9780199738618 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2011oct CHOICE.

Deeply indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism (CH, Apr'79), infused with Jean Baudrillard's conceptions of the hyperreal (Simulacra and Simulation, 1994), and written in the style of Judith Snodgrass's Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West(CH, Jan'04, 41-2767), this volume more fully develops Iwamura's examination of the "Oriental monk" icon and narrative, which first appeared in Religion and Popular Culture in America, edited by Bruce Forbes and Jeffery Mahan (CH, Oct'00, 38-0893). Iwamura undertakes an analysis of photographic and television images appearing in popular media between 1950 and 1975. Through a close reading of representations of three Oriental monks--D. T. Suzuki, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Kwai Chang Caine (Kung Fu)--Iwamura (Univ. of Southern California) variously unpacks Americans' unfolding perceptions of the East, the dynamics of cultural consumption and appropriation, and the systematic processes of cultural stereotyping by the media. Easily accessible, this work will interest students of American popular culture, media studies, and Asian American religiosity. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic libraries supporting upper-level undergraduates and above. -- M. A. Toole, High Point University And for further information, here's a bit about the work from the book's website:

Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar characters on the American popular culture scene. Jane Iwamura examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. Encounters with monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions provided initial engagements with Asian spiritual traditions. Virtual Orientalism shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements with specific individuals to mediated relations with a conventionalized icon: the Oriental Monk. Visually and psychically compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a ''figure of translation''--a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being. Through the figure of the solitary Monk, who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian religiosity is made manageable-psychologically, socially, and politically--for popular culture consumption. Iwamura's insightful study shows that though popular engagement with Asian religions in the United States has increased, the fact that much of this has taken virtual form makes stereotypical constructions of "the spiritual East" obdurate and especially difficult to challenge.

Citizens of a Christian Nation, Redux

Paul Harvey

Several months ago Ed Blum posted his thoughts on Derek Chang's Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (and some other books dealing with religion and war) here. My review of Chang's fine book has just come out in the Journal of American History, and I'm posting it in below.

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White northern Baptists in post-Civil War America perceived themselves as “emissaries of the Christian nation.” They carried the gospel of Christ and of American civilization to the freedpeople of the South and to Chinese immigrants in the West. They sought to create a “conduit for the inclusion of alien populations into the brotherhood of Christianity and the nation.” For them, this was part of the new birth of freedom. In doing so, however, they also produced “discourse of difference that made that inclusion yet more difficult.” In seeking to “uplift” African Americans and Chinese, they perpetuated “racial difference through culture and religion” (68-69). The heathen black and the heathen Chinese could be transformed, but they also had to be transformed. In return, the African American and Chinese immigrant subjects turned the language and institutions of uplift and nationalism to their own benefit. Especially by working to establish independent institutions and find leadership roles within them, “their example undermined a significant part of the ideological foundation on which white evangelical uplift was based” (125).

So Derek Chang argues in this engaging study of the work of the American Baptist Home Mission Society in North Carolina (mostly in Raleigh, focused on the building of what became Shaw University) and in Portland among the Chinese community there. Chang gives the evangelicals their due. In the face of Klan violence in the South and anti-Chinese hooliganism in the Northwest, American Baptists worked to develop institutions that would incorporate the freedpeople and the Chinese into a Christian brotherhood.

Ultimately, neither the well-intentioned evangelicals nor their freedom-seeking African American and Chinese subjects fulfilled their dreams and goals as they wished, for “acts of racial terror limited the radical hopes of the home mission project and frustrated the attempts of evangelicals, blacks, and Chinese to fashion an inclusive nation through such interracial enterprises” (157). In the end, while the white Baptists took refuge in a “strain of evangelical nationalism that emphasized orderly hierarchy and stability over redemptive quality and democracy,” African Americans and Chinese “continued to fight for the transformation they desired, using mission resources to “position themselves in the larger battle over their place in the civic order” (158).

Focusing on freedpeople in and around Raleigh, North Carolina and Chinese immigrants in Portland Oregon, Chang’s comparative research and theoretical reflections shed fresh light on the subject of post-war religious reconstruction. Specialists will enjoy the endnotes, where Chang dialogues at length with fellow scholars. More general readers likely will be surprised by the efforts of white elites in Portland to restrain anti-Chinese violence. Despite being “permanent aliens,” for a time the Chinese in the Northwest enjoyed a degree of social inclusion never experienced by African Americans, who theoretically were included in the nation through the postwar constitutional amendments. In the end, both groups suffered at the hands of the virulent racial terrorism of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Their American century would have to wait.

American Buddhism as a Way of Life

Paul Harvey

A couple of new books of note, with short reviews from Choice:

1) American Buddhism as a Way of Life

2) Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America's Culture Wars

I'll put the Choice reviews up as separate posts. First, for American Buddhism:

American Buddhism as a way of life, ed. by Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge. SUNY Press, 2010. 217p index afp; ISBN 9781438430935, $75.00; ISBN 9781438430942 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2011jan CHOICE.

This useful series of essays focuses on ways Buddhism has been transmitted to the US in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Beginning with an analysis of the influence of pivotal Buddhist teachers Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, this book proceeds to evaluate some basic elements of the fusion of the many forms of Buddhism into American culture, along with the pivotal tensions created by that fusion. One of the most valuable features of these discussions is the selection of such a wide range of examples illustrating a central point: that in spite of the apparent conflict in basic categories (e.g., Buddhism's emphasis on no self, impermanence, and interdependence versus the American culture of individualism, self-reliance, privacy, and self-promotion), large numbers of Americans, though not formally "Buddhists," have been profoundly influenced by Buddhism, while Buddhism has in turn demonstrated that it can adjust to American culture. The result is an original, representative, and thoroughly informative look at "American Buddhism" introducing itself into and becoming an accepted part of American life. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. -- J. M. Boyle, formerly, Dowling College