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introduction .................................................................................................................. Playing Eastern s a historian, I have studied intercultural communication for many years. I have been most compelled by the workings of the entertainment business and the men and women whose bread and butter was live performance. This interest has driven me to consider a phenomenon I seem to find hidden in plain view everywhere I look in the American past but especially between 1790 and 1935: Why did so many choose to perform in the guise of persons from the East? And what practical and cultural rules governed who could speak for North Africa, West Asia, or South Asia in such a way? When we look for them, we can find tens of thousands of such performers in the United States in those years. They all claimed special knowledge of an ethnically and religiously diverse spectrum of predominantly Muslim lands stretching from Morocco to India: poets and travelers who wrote homegrown imitations of the stories in the Arabian Nights, traveling admirers of Sufism and Eastern fraternal orders, impresarios and merchants from the Ottoman Empire, dancers, acrobats , turban-wearing magicians, spiritual missionaries from India, and even members of the fraternal order known as the Ancient Arabic Order, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or Shriners. To borrow a phrase from Philip Deloria, all these people were engaged in the art of playing Eastern. For the first 150 years of American history, the most broadly influential people to speak about the Eastern world were people who played Eastern by presenting themselves in Eastern personae—or ‘‘Oriental’’ or ‘‘Moslem’’ or ‘‘Hindoo’’ persona as the patter might have required. Some of these individuals were native-born Americans, some were migrants or immigrants from North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia. They included equal numbers of professional and amateur entertainers, some of whom performed in a serious attempt to depict foreign peoples, some of whom performed a kind of Eastern minstrelsy only in jest. In character, these performers told stories about a√luent abundance , guilt-free leisure, spiritual truth, natural manhood, the mysteriously 2 ...Introduction exotic, feminine self-discovery, romantic love, racial equality, and the creative possibilities for individuation in a market economy. The men and women who performed in Eastern guise worked in a creative context largely defined by the standards of the commercial entertainment industry , whose comedic and dramatic logic was premised upon the performance of cultural di√erence. Within this expressive economy, the act of playing Oriental , along with blackface, ethnic, and gender caricature, was only one way of speaking about life and identity in a globalizing nation among the endless opportunities for sincere consumer self-fashioning the nation o√ered. Nevertheless , Eastern personae were uniquely important among the options for professional and consumer individuation in the United States because the leisure, abundance, and contentment many perceived in Eastern life was the same vision promised by the consumer capitalist ideology that would come to define the American dream.∞ The arts of playing Eastern percolated out into American life by way of two parallel modes: professional personae, normally in performances observers understood as staged entertainment, and nonprofessional personae, which viewers found in contexts that implied that the performer was expressing a sincere sense of him or herself whether this was true or not. In both cases, performers needed to come across in a way that balanced personal motivations and audience expectations. Both professional and amateur performers also shared the problem of financial viability, for the professional as a matter of making a living or financing the next show and for the amateur in using an Eastern persona to demonstrate one’s success in the market, either as a breadwinner or articulate consumer. The lines dividing professional and amateur performer, persona producer, and performance consumer were always blurry, always moving. Consumers often recycled and performed their own Eastern personae to create a broader context for those professional entertainers who would follow, and vice versa. The audience was thus not just a ticket buyer at the moment of the show but a purveyor of that content to others and an active player in the meanings and uses of the Eastern world within the United States. So how should a historian explain the phenomenon of Eastern personation in the United States up until the Great Depression? Once upon a time, one would have begun by reaching for a copy of Edward Said’s influential 1978 work Orientalism. Said famously asserted that Western-authored representations of the Muslim world were interreferential...

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