Using Orientalism as a tool of success.

[karla_stephan]

“Even as U.S. laws and attitudes turned against Asian immigrants, these men worked the India craze to their advantage,” Bald writes in Chapter 1 of Bengali Harlem. In the United States, consistent legal frameworks have created obstacles to immigration, with the different countries of origin facing denial throughout history. Bald explains how, for Indians, there were acts such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885. These correlate to the period when Indian immigration to the United States was prevalent, as the British colonization of India had a great effect. In my Media and Empire class, we discussed how the British colonial project depicted Eastern societies, especially visually, as a foreign, exotic, and mystical land. Many tropes of colorfulness and luxury were fulfilled by propaganda. Interestingly, these merchants were using colonial strategies and stereotypes to their benefit and to have greater success in selling their goods. This connects to Said’s Orientalism as this “Otherness” that the Western world defined and described the Eastern society to be was just turned on itself for the business benefits of the East. Said says, “The Orient is not a free subject of thought or action; it is the object of the West’s imagination, which both sees and defines it” (Said 5). The West sees what they curate to see and defines it in a way that benefits them. In this time that Bald speaks about, Western consumers were in the “​​midst of a fin de siècle fashion for the exotic ideas, entertainments, and goods of India and ‘the East.’” Did playing into these ideas further stereotypes of Bengali and Indian merchants and further attitudes of hate towards them? Yes. But at the same time, playing into these ideas created an entire market where they could create their “global networks” and live successfully in the United States that had denied them and their existence. It is cool how there were legal frameworks that were systematically designed to keep immigrants out of the country and the playing field of labor, yet they were able to create their own industry and thrive off of the white man's dollars and naivety.