Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (review)

Since at least the age of Marco Polo, entangled layers of desires and fears—often more so than lived realities—have shaped Western representations of Asian cultures and peoples. Jane Naomi Iwamura explores twentieth-century evolutions of this fraught relationship by elevating for sustained scrutiny the previously overlooked icon of the “Oriental monk” to be set alongside the already well-established tropes of the “Inscrutable Oriental, evil Fu Manchus, Yellow Peril, heathen Chinee and Dragon Ladies” (7).

Iwamura deftly melds a transdisciplinary arsenal of approaches drawn from cultural, media, religious, literary, and historical studies to scrutinize a twentieth-century array of visual representations of Oriental monks, each of which addressed a shifting set of national anxieties and longings. In concert with entwined Occidental fascination and repulsion for Oriental sexuality, civilization, debasement, and stagnation, Eastern spirituality provided a combustible brew of heathenism and savagery weighed against attributions of greater affinities for enlightenment and transcendence over material selfishness. Although grounded in a longer history of religious curiosity and encounters, it is no accident that Iwamura’s main narrative begins during the Cold War, when international politics and the United States’ need for Asian allies had elevated respect for their cultures and traditions. The American general public received its first introduction to Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Asian spiritualities just as some parts of the Orient were laying claim to modernity.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist monk, professor, and translator, was a leading figure in this movement whose third sojourn in the United States between 1951 and 1958 provides fodder for Iwamura’s first substantive chapter. Suzuki had first traveled to America during the 1890s and had authored and translated many works concerning both Japanese and Chinese Buddhism for English readers in a long and well-regarded career teaching religion at institutions like Otani University in Japan and Columbia in the United States. Famous enough to be featured in a Time magazine profile in 1957, Suzuki was portrayed as a “‘soft-spoken,’ ‘humorous,’ ‘charming,’ and ‘earnest’” personality whose reputation as a living Buddhist sage was mitigated by his academic credentials and sphere of activities (27). As a proponent and practitioner of both meditation and the mind, Suzuki provided a palatable version of Eastern spirituality because he was seen as operating primarily as an intellectual rather than as a proselytizer, who informed rather than converting his Western audiences to new beliefs and social formations. With Suzuki, Americans could relish a growing sense of cosmopolitanism without fear of substantive change to core values and ideas.

In contrast, the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi’s very success in attracting a large American and European following, including celebrities such as the Beatles and Mia Farrow, suggested a more troubling degree of intercultural interactions. The Maharishi Mahesh gained fame during the turbulent 1960s, an era associated with the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and societal norms, violent protests, heightened individualism, and the rise of a pleasure-seeking, youth-oriented culture. He seemed to exist in a constant flurry of camera flashes flanked by crowds of uncomfortably unquestioning white acolytes drawn to the higher spiritual order promised by his practice and beliefs. Photographs of his many public appearances showed the religious leader surrounded by adoring white acolytes and reflected the international, multisited, and apparently wealthy organization supporting this range of activities, thereby suggesting that Maharishi Mahesh transgressed popular conceptions that a Hindu yogi should be an unworldly, asexual, ascetic. To be an Asian spiritual leader required a more limited sphere of active engagement.

Iwamura identifies the television show Kung Fu (1973–1976)—featuring the biracial Shaolin-trained monk Kwai Chang Caine—as resolving the tension between the wisdom and peaceful guidance offered by Eastern spirituality and fears of being subsumed into an alien culture. As played by the white actor David Carradine, Caine was a childless, martially trained version of Charlie Chan wandering the American West who drew upon his training to provide superior spiritual insights...