Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. By Mari Yoshihara. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; pp. 242. $55 cloth, $19.95 paper; Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. By Christina Klein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; pp. 316. 55 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Extract

Since Edward Said's influential formulation, scholars in a variety of disciplines have unpacked orientalism in its various incarnations. Within American studies, theories of orientalism have been used to understand more fully both the relationship of the United States to Asia during the “Pacific century” and the history of racial formation and racism with regard to Asian Americans. One of the prevailing tendencies has been to posit the Oriental as that which is marginalized and excluded, as either the exotic Other or the yellow peril. Both Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East and Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism do much to refocus this discussion, using contexts that demonstrate how Asia and Asian Americans were not just treated as, to use Alexander Saxton's phrase, “the indispensable enemy,” but rather held, both politically and culturally, within a much more paradoxical “embrace.”