Anarchrist
May 8th, 2007, 07:51 PM
Part I
It has become a common critique that being termed “Asian” is alienating and dispossessive in the sense that we are regarded by region rather than by skin tone (as in Black and White) or language (as in Hispanic). I was a supporter of this notion. I’m also one of these social scientist types that spend an indeterminate amount of time pondering these subtle issues always in search of a more critically viable answer. Playing with the channel guide on my new digital cable service something hit me today. It was a short blurb describing an episode of Law and Order that went: “A doctor becomes a suspect in an Egyptian man’s death.” The first thing that came to my sensitive and sociopolitically acclimated Asian-American mind was “Why did they have to call him an Egyptian man? Isn’t that a bit racist? They wouldn’t say White man or Black man-“ and suddenly a new theory dawned upon me. A new theory whose fundamentals if built sturdily enough could redefine some assumptions made by the Asian American paradigm about race and discrimination.
The adaptation of regional identification by western societies is well known. While the Chinese called the westerners waiguoren (foreigners), laowai (best translated as “Oh, those old foreign bastards”) by habit, Europeans and historical Americans, ever-diligent about recording and categorizing into academia every speck of finding they made during their multi-centennial tour of bloody colonialism came to identifying foreigners by region – The Orientals, the Arabs, the Moors, even (in a deeper and more complex pejorative historical context) the “American Indians”. Even in the more vulgar common tongue of western semantics today people are much more highly defined my region. Incidentally, in comparison, Chinese is simply outgunned in this area (nothing to be ashamed of in my book). But I digress.
Historically, Europeans, and later, Americans, carried with them a body of scholarship that formally categorized denizens of other nations and regions, yet informally categorized them hierarchically based on how they stood in the eyes of, for example, the British, in matters of economy, politics, trade, culture and military experience – in the collective American mindset it is my own theory that the latter, military experience, has had the greatest influence. The Europeans had a deep respect for Moors to call them Moors. Even the common British use of Turk, Oriental and Arab (as opposed to terms much more commonly used such as Black and Coolie to describe Indians and Africans) are regional derivatives that indicate a certain amount of conservancy attributed to regions that, coincidentally, never fully fell to the British Empire.
Although this comparative is far from tight, there is a consistency that I shall display indicating that, in historical context, the term Asian as we’ve been “designated” is at least in some part derived from the an attitude of respect Western civilization attributes us. Although this respect is still a kind of respect you pay a foreign people, a potential colony, or an exotic sex-object, I feel this image of respect should be cultivated or reformed rather than simply eradicated and replaced by terms such as Yellow, which some Asian-Americans have advocated in the past. (This includes the Yellow Movement of the 1960s, and the book “Yellow” by Frank Wu)
Although Edward Said illustrated the inequities established throughout the British academic history of Near East civilization in Orientalism, Despite their obvious negative portrayals of the “Orientals” there is something to be said of the British adherence to this term as opposed to their applied generous use of the word Coolie in describing Indians even in periodicals as formal as newspapers and memoirs. One obvious deduction could be made connecting the extent of British domination in the region to the “collective diplomacy” in the language they choose to use in portraying other societies. After all, although the British were able to seize Egypt, they were never able to completely secure and capture Istanbul nor take full claim for the Ottoman defeat. India, on the other hand, was a completely colonized nation under the British for more than a century. You can observe an even greater degree of debasement in identification and rhetoric describing Africans in British Colonies ranging from designations as “animals” and “cannibals” to that old nasty term that could only be spoken with least humanity when done with a British accent: “Savages”. “Nigger” saw some usage in African Colonies, the origin of the word being as much an abominable creation of the Dutch (Neger) as it was the British. Its real usage ad negative connotations, though, is an American invention and took hold primarily in Colonial America.
Before we proceed onto modern American semantics and regional designation vs. race I would like to draw some attention to the book by Robert Bickers called “Empire Made Me” that details the memoirs from a member of the British Forces in 1920s Treaty-Port Shanghai. Despite the epically degrading treatment the Chinese received during European Expansionism which probably led to myths such as the “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed” signage, this British memoir indicate specific tones differentiating British attitudes towards Chinese and Indians, noticeable favoring the Chinese. To boil it down purely to terminology, “Coolie” is used without regard to describe Indian soldiers and servants in Shanghai while “Chinese” and even “Shanghainese” is conserved when describing the Chinese denizens. This term differentiation can noticeably be associated with the degree of praise and awe the author illustrates of Shanghai, describing it as a Paris of the East which contended in its beauty with the spectacle of London. It is also noticeable that a degree of respect for the Chinese is retained by the author in realizing that, as a treaty port, there were portions of Shanghai where he was not allowed. Chinese portions.
Coming next: Part II - Modern American Imperialism, warfare in Asia, and the institutionalization of “Asian”
It has become a common critique that being termed “Asian” is alienating and dispossessive in the sense that we are regarded by region rather than by skin tone (as in Black and White) or language (as in Hispanic). I was a supporter of this notion. I’m also one of these social scientist types that spend an indeterminate amount of time pondering these subtle issues always in search of a more critically viable answer. Playing with the channel guide on my new digital cable service something hit me today. It was a short blurb describing an episode of Law and Order that went: “A doctor becomes a suspect in an Egyptian man’s death.” The first thing that came to my sensitive and sociopolitically acclimated Asian-American mind was “Why did they have to call him an Egyptian man? Isn’t that a bit racist? They wouldn’t say White man or Black man-“ and suddenly a new theory dawned upon me. A new theory whose fundamentals if built sturdily enough could redefine some assumptions made by the Asian American paradigm about race and discrimination.
The adaptation of regional identification by western societies is well known. While the Chinese called the westerners waiguoren (foreigners), laowai (best translated as “Oh, those old foreign bastards”) by habit, Europeans and historical Americans, ever-diligent about recording and categorizing into academia every speck of finding they made during their multi-centennial tour of bloody colonialism came to identifying foreigners by region – The Orientals, the Arabs, the Moors, even (in a deeper and more complex pejorative historical context) the “American Indians”. Even in the more vulgar common tongue of western semantics today people are much more highly defined my region. Incidentally, in comparison, Chinese is simply outgunned in this area (nothing to be ashamed of in my book). But I digress.
Historically, Europeans, and later, Americans, carried with them a body of scholarship that formally categorized denizens of other nations and regions, yet informally categorized them hierarchically based on how they stood in the eyes of, for example, the British, in matters of economy, politics, trade, culture and military experience – in the collective American mindset it is my own theory that the latter, military experience, has had the greatest influence. The Europeans had a deep respect for Moors to call them Moors. Even the common British use of Turk, Oriental and Arab (as opposed to terms much more commonly used such as Black and Coolie to describe Indians and Africans) are regional derivatives that indicate a certain amount of conservancy attributed to regions that, coincidentally, never fully fell to the British Empire.
Although this comparative is far from tight, there is a consistency that I shall display indicating that, in historical context, the term Asian as we’ve been “designated” is at least in some part derived from the an attitude of respect Western civilization attributes us. Although this respect is still a kind of respect you pay a foreign people, a potential colony, or an exotic sex-object, I feel this image of respect should be cultivated or reformed rather than simply eradicated and replaced by terms such as Yellow, which some Asian-Americans have advocated in the past. (This includes the Yellow Movement of the 1960s, and the book “Yellow” by Frank Wu)
Although Edward Said illustrated the inequities established throughout the British academic history of Near East civilization in Orientalism, Despite their obvious negative portrayals of the “Orientals” there is something to be said of the British adherence to this term as opposed to their applied generous use of the word Coolie in describing Indians even in periodicals as formal as newspapers and memoirs. One obvious deduction could be made connecting the extent of British domination in the region to the “collective diplomacy” in the language they choose to use in portraying other societies. After all, although the British were able to seize Egypt, they were never able to completely secure and capture Istanbul nor take full claim for the Ottoman defeat. India, on the other hand, was a completely colonized nation under the British for more than a century. You can observe an even greater degree of debasement in identification and rhetoric describing Africans in British Colonies ranging from designations as “animals” and “cannibals” to that old nasty term that could only be spoken with least humanity when done with a British accent: “Savages”. “Nigger” saw some usage in African Colonies, the origin of the word being as much an abominable creation of the Dutch (Neger) as it was the British. Its real usage ad negative connotations, though, is an American invention and took hold primarily in Colonial America.
Before we proceed onto modern American semantics and regional designation vs. race I would like to draw some attention to the book by Robert Bickers called “Empire Made Me” that details the memoirs from a member of the British Forces in 1920s Treaty-Port Shanghai. Despite the epically degrading treatment the Chinese received during European Expansionism which probably led to myths such as the “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed” signage, this British memoir indicate specific tones differentiating British attitudes towards Chinese and Indians, noticeable favoring the Chinese. To boil it down purely to terminology, “Coolie” is used without regard to describe Indian soldiers and servants in Shanghai while “Chinese” and even “Shanghainese” is conserved when describing the Chinese denizens. This term differentiation can noticeably be associated with the degree of praise and awe the author illustrates of Shanghai, describing it as a Paris of the East which contended in its beauty with the spectacle of London. It is also noticeable that a degree of respect for the Chinese is retained by the author in realizing that, as a treaty port, there were portions of Shanghai where he was not allowed. Chinese portions.
Coming next: Part II - Modern American Imperialism, warfare in Asia, and the institutionalization of “Asian”