Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space ed. by John Potvin (review)

While Orientalism has been a central concept in the humanities for nearly forty years, it has had relatively little to say about interior design. The fifteen essays collected here aim to correct this omission by describing the people and objects that have long populated Orient-inspired interiors as participants in a process of “importation and adaptation” that “at once subverts and maintains cultural stereotypes while offering something new” (5–6). The chapters move through an eclectic assortment of objects—potted plants, rugs, porcelain, yoga studios, museum displays, and ocean liners, among others—to model new ways of thinking about cultural exchange. Linking them is the essays’ shared focus on morality and its power to shape how subjects and objects interact with one another. The volume suggests that interior spaces might serve as possible “third spaces” that allow less-binary relationships to emerge, and Potvin lobbies in the Introduction for an approach to Oriental interiors that is not so blinded by its concern for appropriation that it misses other forms of cultural encounter.

The collection is organized into three parts. The first, “Representations,” looks at examples of art that blur the boundaries between East and West. For example, in “The Exhibitionary Construction of the Islamic Interior,” Solmaz Mohammadzadeh Kive describes how museums often frame their Islamic art exhibits to provide an aura of authenticity around the works on display, creating for the public the illusion of having been transported to another place and time and maintaining a unified vision of the East untroubled by nuance. Aesthetic concerns (rugs arranged to give the gallery the right feel, for example) frequently displace historical ones, and Kive points out that “[w]hile for Western art, contextualization is a means of understanding the artwork, the arts of the ‘others’ [. . .] have remained a means of understanding their cultures” (41). In “Orientalism and David Hockney’s Male-positive Imaginative Geographies,” Dennis Gouws argues that Oriental interiors in Hockney’s pictures resist colonial power and heterosexist depictions of the East by creating what he terms a “male-positive imaginative geography” (63). He allows that while Hockney’s photographs exemplify certain definitions of Orientalism by projecting a sexual fantasy onto a foreign context, their depiction of male-male desire “offers new possibilities for understanding the homoerotics of Orientalism” (72), where the exotic geographies on display offer an intimacy to their human subjects but are not there to be conquered.

The book’s second section, “Gendered and Sexual Identities,” focuses primarily on masculine experiences of Oriental interiors and calls the reader’s attention to alternative forms of social expression at play there. Chris Reed argues, in “Bachelor Quarters: Spaces of Japonisme in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” that the late eighteenth-century French fascination with japonisme was in part a project of creating homosocial domestic spaces and expressing non-normative forms of masculinity. And in “Coming out of the China Closet?: Performance, Identity and Sexuality in the House Beautiful,” Anne Anderson looks at Lord Frederick Leighton’s extensive collection of ceramics as a subversive gender practice (such men did not, typically, collect china) that needed to be redeemed through display in the masculine space of the dining room.

The volume’s final section, “Spaces and Markets of Consumption,” examines how objects are produced, imported, purchased, and displayed, as well as how these material histories participate in various forms of myth-making. Laura Sexto’s “Promoting the Colonial Empire through French Interior Design” explores how the French media promoted colonial wood in the 1920s and 30s and the extent to which French displays of interior design demonstrated a growing economic and aesthetic dependence on the colonies. And in “Posturing for Authenticity: Embodying Otherness in Contemporary Interiors of Modern Yoga,” Laura Bird describes the modern studio as a fluid contact zone where Western habits of consumption and a nascent appetite for wellness abut with Hindu religious imagery. She concludes that while “Orientalism, colonial discourse and cultural appropriation are all features of these studios that require thorough self-reflection, [. . .] the studio nonetheless remains a...