14 Introductionare drawn primarily from the Middle East, Iwamura’s mostly swing to the Far
East, but neither captures appropriately the specificity of elements construed
as South Asian. Iwamura sees the Oriental Monk as coming to ascendance
after World War II when images of evil Fu Manchus and the Yellow Peril are
replaced with “friendlier, more subservient” models,^23 with only a brief nod to
the Transcendentalists and the 1893 World Parliament of Religions. However,
a look at the prewar period reveals a different yet equally complex picture.
Iwamura’s Oriental Monk with his spiritual enlightenment can perhaps be
seen as the culmination— or the further Orientalist dilution— of the mystic
Yogi, who ultimately reigns supreme in cultural longevity over his more exotic
counterparts.
Accounts of the time period in question largely bear out a treatment of the
Orient as a single mass entity. A pseudo- sociological study published by Harold
R. Isaacs in 1958 makes the following elucidating remark:
Hardly anything marks more clearly the limits of the American world
outlook than the official and popular acceptance of the term “East– West
struggle” to describe our conflict with Russia. It suggests how unthink-
ingly we can still accept the notion that “East” means Eastern Europe, how
truly dim and undefined the farther “East” really is, how unblinkingly we
give currency to a term that cuts us off psychologically from the “East” and
allows Russia so much more easily to identify with it.^24Thus, if in the 1950s, Russia was still commonly construed as the East, then
it is not at all surprising that the Russian expatriate Helena Blavatsky would
have had no trouble laying claim to an Oriental exoticism when founding the
Theosophical Society over three- quarters of a century earlier in 1875. It is even
less surprising that Americans of the same period would have been virtually
unable to distinguish between South Asians, Middle Easterners, and North
Africans, especially once a turban was involved. While Isaacs found that his
subjects, slightly more than half of whom had had some professional involve-
ment with Asia and Asian affairs, did have a slightly better sense of China than
they did of India, they nevertheless characterized both nations in terms of
extreme Otherness, either racial or religious. Many kinds of people inevitably
bled together into a single foreign sea of humanity, as his subjects gave impres-
sions of dark skin, strange customs, different languages, different minds, differ-
ent morals, different souls.^25
Unlike British and French Orientalism, however, American Orientalism
was not accompanied by a colonial project and thus took on a slightly differ-
ent tenor than these European varieties. According to anthropologist Milton