The Anthropological Gaze and the Touristic Siting of Chinese America

The Anthropological Gaze and the Touristic Siting of Chinese America JAMES S. MOY The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enlerprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre, Such was the bourgeois dream of empire expressed by Dickens through his first novel, Dombey and SOil (1848). The imperialist perspective articulated here is clearly one taken for granted by late nineteenth-century writers, and one which so thoroughly imbued the psyche of the national consciousness that such grand projections seemed ordinary. It is within this context that the department of knowledge ca\led anthropology comes into existence during the nineteenth century as an enterprise in which white men looked at and studied peoples of color. This developing anthropological gaze, an Imperialist gaze, emerges as the mechanism by which the common man came to participate in national dreams of empire. While late nineteenth-century America had yet to achieve the empire of some of its European counterparts, the American desire for this Imperialist gaze is clearly manifest in American institutions of the day. This essay will focus on the effect this gaze had on representations of Chineseness in the drama of the period and subsequent re-inscriptions of these into the cinema. In this regard, I will examine the evolution of the anthropological gaze which, while denying overt connection with empire, nonetheless a\lowed America to claim equal status in the community of Imperialistic Western powers, but under the sign of altruism. In turn this altruistic anthropological desire enslaved the Asian subject to yield a kind of stage character befitting the imperialistic gaze, now reconstituted as American. By the middle of the nineteenth century two tendencies for the management Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 81 82 JAMES S. MOY of the empowering or authorial gaze become clear, the serial and the voyeuristic . The popular form of the serial or survey offered amusements which brought together apparently authoritative sequences (series) and collocations of objects to create the potential for significance. Panoptic in sensibility and often non-narrative, these forms employed displacement as a structural force, and included entertainments like vaudeville, circus, travelogues, and even melodrama. The potency of this mode of production lay in its ability to obliterate geography and narrative time, in the process offering the viewer an almost god-like option to look at or ignore the efforts up on stage. While these offered the potential for meaning, nothing would come of it as producers used this potential as little more than a proairetic to fascinate its audiences while entrapping them for future exploitation. The voyeuristic gaze, generally associated with the emergent self-conscious literary elite of midnineteenth -century narrative realism, served to affinn the authority of the looker, generally at the expense of the object - which in tum was often reduced to stereotype. Clearly, both ways of looking operated to reinforce a particular institutional culture. The former offered an amusingly empowering dismissive gaze to entertain the masses while the latter laid claim to exquisitely fashioned fetishized visions which could inspire polite conversation for the learned elite. Significantly, both within the space ·of potential meaning of the serial and the reductive quality of the voyeuristic form, the promise of the real often yielded stereotypical racial representations. Still, each seemed limited to its own audience. As dreams of American empire in a liberal tradition developed, previously popular·entertainments were often collapsed into projects which promised scientific knowledge through careful study. This tendency is perhaps most easily articulated in the enterprise of the museum as large scale WUllderkammer for the display of souvenirs of colonial expansion.' One of the most famous of the early American museums, Barnum's, offered little more than collections of freakish novelties gathered from around the world. Displayed within the cases were collections of dead things which in real life would never have been caught dead together. Still, as sequences which provided the potential for intertextual meaning, these objects were sufficiently fascinating...