Said & Bald
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Said first defines the Orient as one of the West's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other," making it clear that much of what is generally understood as the Orient is simply the West's perception of it (1). Despite being an imaginative concept borne from Western ideas of otherness, these conceptions of the Orient have material implications since they are embedded within Western colonial systems and are used by these institutions to exert power over the Orient (Said 2-3).
These material implications can be felt through the examples discussed in Bald's book, of various African-Americans performing a "Hindoo" or Indian identity as means of escaping the anti-black segregation during the Jim Crow laws. He notes that whites during the time would treat men from India (or men assumed to be from India) differently, since they were interested in their "wisdom" and "magic" (Bald 50). He uses the term "well-calculated Indianness" to highlight the way in which Bengali peddlers would exaggerate their speech or manner in order to perform an image of the "imagined colonial subject" that attracted white people (Bald 50-51). There were no distinctions made between the vast cultures; everything considered part of the "Orient" from South Asia to the Middle East was simply part of the "store of exotic nations" that peddlers could draw upon to sell their goods (Bald 55). In this way, both black and brown folks were able to use Orientalist stereotypes to their advantage: by catering themselves to what the whites wanted to see from them, they were able to ensure their safety at the cost of demeaning their own culture and identity.