Orientalism and the Orator: Mukerji’s Soapbox and the Troping of East and West

This essay explores Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s understudied autobiography Caste and Outcast (1923) and its elaboration of Orientalism. Linking theories of American Orientalism, racial form, and Asian American rhetoric, it shows how East and West work as tropes within the autobiography on two levels, as formulaic motifs and as expansive metaphors. Faced with Orientalist constructs that appear insurmountable, Mukerji creates a new figure: the soapbox orator who performs the work of troping and reshapes life story as argument. This bold rhetorical posture offers an important strategy for reading Orientalism, representing leaps of figuration that undermine inert polarities of East and West.