Being Modern: The Circulation of Oriental Objects

This essay argues that a central force that mediates the relation of modern consumption to individuals is the figuration of the Far East Orient in America. The paper suggests how the Orient (as object and concept) acts both as an agent for and a palliative against the contradictions activated by modern consumption. The first part of the essay looks into the agendas of collectors, taste professionals, and travel writers such as William Griffis, Edward Morse, Clarence Cook, and Robert Blum that brought the Far East closer to the American consumer. Both the pedagogical and performative aspects of the Oriental object reveal how the Orient comes to be almost exclusively associated with things, things that can gather the problematics of the Orient both inside and outside America and things that can showcase the modernist dialectic of distance and proximity within the registers of history and geography. The traffic in aesthetic Oriental objects—and their absorption into the very homes of middle-class consumers—occasions an intimacy with the other, and the essay will go on to show how this process creates destabilizations in the time and space of the self and its attendant culture even as it ostensibly promises self-aggrandizement.

The essay also captures the infiltration of the Orient-as-object into the disciplinary procedures of ethnography, and delineates how an aesthetic discourse of beauty epitomizes the ahistorical, apolitical engagements with the Far East that permeated both scholarly texts and mass media. The paper suggests that an aesthetic ethnography (exemplified by the travel narratives of Lafcadio Hearn and Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore) has the power to mediate the commensurability of the modern and the Oriental. Finally, the essay investigates a few exemplary popular and literary texts for their seminal figurations of the Orient(al) within the nexus of modernity and consumption. Readings of short stories by Beatrice Grimshaw and Frank Norris dramatize the intimate and reciprocal relation between the Orient and the modern. The texts demonstrate how fungible the Orient-as-concept can be within modern narratives of cultural translation and purification, the moral crisis of being possessed by objects, and the unsettling consciousness of experiencing the "past" and the "present" as coeval in everyday life. The paper also examines Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat to capture the overdetermination of the American Orient in the film and how deftly the narrative stabilizes the dangers of overconsumption and the fears of a publicly traded material world. Consumption, capitalism, and questions of modernity are crystallized in the figure of the modern Oriental.