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chapter 5 .................................................................................................................. Making the Familiar Strange: The Racial Politics of Eastern Exotic, 1893–1929 T he following three chapters all radiate out from 1890s Chicago to examine what native-born Americans did with the interventions people from North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia made into American culture. There is an important di√erence hereafter, though, which I must explain in regard to the previous chapter. In order to preserve the chronology of their first intervention into American culture beginning in the 1870s, Chapter 4 segregated North African and West Asian actors and the personae they suggested from audience’s uses of them. That construction, while pointing out the agency of foreign-born actors in elaborating some important entertainment practices when they did, also obscures an important reality of their lives in America. The fact is, foreign-born performers and native-born Americans mingled and interacted at all times, producing competing Oriental personae that consumers found tangled together in various venues, a scenario that invited confusion. The rest of this book is designed to show how this reality made hybridity of personae, conscious acts of passing, and mistaken identity common in American life, often giving Eastern personae great utility to people seeking to remake themselves through professional or consumer individuation. So to begin, this chapter sets the stage with a look at a particularly preeminent moment of intercultural observation and adaptation, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Various modes of playing Eastern became prominent there among native-born and foreign-born people who competed for press attention, income, and credibility. The o≈cial Ottoman Empire delegation to the Columbian Exposition sought to manage the Empire’s public image by using the fair to cross their state over to the American public as a cosmopolitan imperial power. However, the Sultan’s agents struggled mightily to be heard above the crowds of Oriental merchants, Bedouin horsemen, and others who appeared both at the exposition and around Chicago. Entertainers and entrepreneurs from North Africa and West Asia, as well as a diverse col- 138 ...Making the Familiar Strange lection of native-born visitors to the exposition, would redevelop the arts of playing Eastern during that summer for purposes neither exposition planners nor the various o≈cial foreign government delegations had intended. Among the unscripted innovators who emerged on the scene were members of the Ancient Arabic Order, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or Shriners. Fraternalists from the local temple in Chicago used their connections with Eastern entrepreneurs at the fair to develop Shriner performances that spoke of both commercial power and the bizarre. Simultaneously, African Americans were visiting the fair and were similarly inspired by the Eastern personae they discovered. In turn, they founded the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or black Shriners, to represent the respectability of black business and social organization in ways similar to the white order. The legal battles that ensued between white and black Shriners over the right to use burlesquing Mystic Shrine personae of ‘‘Imperial Potentate’’ and ‘‘Oriental Noble’’ show how valuable playing Oriental had become. Like the Ottoman o≈cials at the exposition, white Shriners were conscious of how Oriental-style performance could be poached by others in ways that invited confusion and ‘‘misrepresentation.’’ American and Ottoman elites at the fair both hoped to control the obvious democratization of Eastern personae and reserve the portrayal of the East for themselves, exposing their belief that use of exotic personae in the United States spoke of one’s political, economic, or social power. Their complaints pointed out to observers that there were racial politics to playing Eastern that attempted to reserve those performances for the wealthy and powerful, in one case, a cosmopolitan Ottoman elite and in another , the Anglo-American business and professional classes. Playing Eastern became democratized despite these e√orts at control because it was just as useful to native-born minorities and rural and working-class people as it had been to the Anglo-American middle and upper classes and foreign performers already. The adaptability of Oriental personae in the United States was in part a product of the fact that the exotic functioned in two directions. Recall that it was first a way for professional entertainers and salespeople to make themselves comprehensibly novel to domestic audiences, for instance, when North African and West Asian acrobats came across as optimistic self-made men and women who endorsed ‘‘American’’ values. Alternately, in the hands of nativeborn Americans, often amateur entertainers and...

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