What role(s) did Orientalism and American desire for "Eastern" goods play in the Bengalis’ failures and success?
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For Bengali peddlers, Orientalism and the American fascination with the East were a double-edged sword. While the rise of American imperialism and class struggles between Americans fueled their demand, the rigid stereotypes upheld by Orientalism clashed with the everyday reality of these hardworking traveler merchants.
On one hand, over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ‘India craze’ played a fundamental role in the businessmen’s success. Bald notes that “Americans from all classes and walks of life were drawn to an “India” that was, in essence, a collective fantasy.” (Bald, 16) The increased demand for ‘Eastern’ goods was directly tied to the emergence of the US as a global superpower and the desire to mimic the practices of European empires (18). As the British and the French both long incorporated ‘Oriental’ goods as symbols of power and sophistication, the American elite began emulating European tastes by importing goods from India and the East to participate in these ivory tower trends. Additionally, upper-class white women were constrained by the domestic roles of the time. For this reason, they used exotic goods in their interior decoration as a form of symbolic mobility and “to assert their connection to a wider world.” (18) During the Gilded Age, upper-class women flaunted their wealth “in a society in which people’s identities and social standing were increasingly defined by what they consumed and displayed.” (18) Meanwhile, poor and middle-class often envied and mimicked them. As a result, Bengali peddlers found a successful market among class ascendent women who aspired to one day have the lifestyles of their wealthier counterparts. Particularly, they sold “exotic souvenirs, curios, and handicrafts to Americans on weekend day trips and holiday travels” (19) and gave the everyday American pieces of what “they imagined the upper middle-class and rich to enjoy.” (22)
On the other hand, Orientalist views contributed to the peddlers’ many hardships. In the American imagination, these merchants were the embodiment of Eastern mysticism and exoticism. A crude example of this lies on the pages of the Daily Herald’s May 25th, 1900 issue. In the article, the author mocks the appearance and behavior of a South Asian man he encounters with racial condescension (27-28). He wrote about his, and by extension, his readership’s, set of expectations and fantasies related to the ““mystic” and “stoic” Orientals” (28). As Bald remarks, “the article inadvertently recorded these Indian peddlers’ capacity both to use (as salesmen) and to defy such Orientalist ideas and expectations.” (28) Unfortunately, the limited and, more often than not, negative perceptions Americans had of South Asians could easily undermine their progress. By choosing to act as themselves and not perform their ‘Orientalism,’ the temporary enchantment with the exotic dissipates and so does their fleeting success. Strict and discriminatory immigration policies like the Asiatic Barred Zone Act show how the allure of Orientalism still could not shield minorities from exclusion and systemic racism.
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This is a great post, Maimuna. It is interesting to see how South Asians were able to find such an animated market for their goods in a country that simultaneously created so many legal barriers for them. In addition to your mention of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, there was also the Alien Contract Labor Law of the 1890s to the 1910s. An extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act, this law prevented foreign labourers from entering the country, which affected Bengali peddlers more than others (Bald 41). While they sold their wares, the threat of deportation hung over their heads, no matter how much the New Orleans economy depended on them (28). To quote Bald, “These men came to the United States on a thin edge between Indophilia and xenophobia” (46).
As you already described, displaying “oriental” objects in the home symbolized a higher class status for white Americans. Though my art history knowledge is rusty, this reminds me of a trend in some sixteenth and seventeenth-century European portraits, in which the European subject donned “oriental” garb to show that they were well-travelled or wealthy. Dutch Golden Age artists like Rembrandt (see Man in Oriental Costume, for example) featured exotic clothing in portraits and tronies to symbolize the nation’s wealth and the goods they were beginning to obtain from their flourishing trade routes. Cabinets of Curiosities were also popular throughout Europe during this period, which were filled with items obtained from places around Asia, the South Pacific, and the Americas. They represented the high and well-travelled status of the people that owned them, and were open for the public to admire. I find it interesting how the allure attached to these exotic visual signifiers continued to drive white Europeans and Americans to possess them across centuries.
Ironically, though “oriental” decorum represented wealth for white Americans, the people from whom those aesthetics originated did not enjoy much mobility themselves. As Bald shows in chapter five, even those that were able to upgrade from working as line cooks or street food vendors into having their own restaurants “were still living normal lives”, and that “even a ‘successful’ restaurant like the Kashmir did not make Nawab Ali a wealthy man” (Bald 180). Aside from exceptions like Ibrahim Choudry, most South Asian Muslims in New York did not have a public profile or ascend their working-class status (188). This contrasts with the white Americans whose fame was aided by their appropriation of “oriental” aesthetics, like Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and William Walker Atkinson (16).
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Maimuna and Saarah, I really liked your discussion posts and I was also thinking about this matter while reading the text. It is really fascinating that despite the discrimination and the racial inferiority which was imposed upon the peddlers, there had been this great demand for exotic goods which as Maimuna said, makes this condition a double edged sword. However, I was thinking of the power of culture when it comes to the systematic discrimination and exclusions. The desire for Oriental goods allowed these peddlers to establish networks and livelihoods across the U.S., despite systemic discrimination. The text even describes how Americans' fascination with the “mysterious and exotic Orient” created both opportunities and exclusions for these peddlers Actually this desire for the Oriental goods and the mysterious and exotic Orient made me think about the significance of culture on both ends. The opportunities and the possibilities of inhabiting a culture other than their own have played an important role in this context. The culture indeed found its way into American homes, but the people behind it were still often treated as inferior.