Orientalism in America, 1870 - 1930

Not surprisingly, the most pervasive influence in Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870 - 1930 is that of Edward Said whose 1978 study Orientalism led to a major reevaluation of the manner in which the Moslem peoples of North Africa and the Near East had traditionally been viewed by the inhabitants of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the U.S.  On the most basic level, Said posited a political agenda that willfully introduced cultural misconceptions and stereotypes of the Near East as a means of fostering a sense of otherness that in turn allowed Westerners to see themselves as superior to and more moral than Eastern cultures and populations.  Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures, written to accompany an art exhibit of the same name, takes as its subject the manifestations of Orientalism in the U.S. from roughly the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Depression.  Through a study of these artifacts, it attempts to document the transformation in the American imagination of the very concept of the Orient during this same period.

While the implications that Orientalism holds for political scientists and sociologists are at once obvious, it should be noted that Said's thesis has had a profound impact on feminists as well, for nowhere have the depicted differences between East and West been so pronounced as in the differing roles of women in their respective societies.  This has been made most manifest in Western portrayals of the odalisque, the slave woman of the harem, as shown in the paintings of Ingres and Gérôme.  It is a subject where exoticism has led inevitably to eroticism.

If the above summary sounds a bit dry, the book itself certainly is not.  Instead, the text challenges American preconceptions of the East in several well written and provocative essays.  The authors accomplish this primarily by tracing the development of Orientalism from high art, as exemplified in the 1870's in the paintings of such artists as Frederic Edwin Church, through the representations of the Near East presented at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the uses to which Oriental imagery was put in the early twentieth century in mass entertainment, such as the 1921 silent film The Sheik, and advertising.  There are lively discussions of subjects as diverse as belly dancing and cigarette packaging.  The essays are well illustrated and the catalog of the exhibition includes a fascinating array of excellent reproductions.  In the end, the reader is left with a better understanding of the ways in which Americans have projected their fantasies of the Near East into a distorted viewpoint that even today complicates international relations and cultural interaction.