By Iram Ahmad MD

In his 1580 essay, “On Presumption,” French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote:

… It is that I lower the value of the things I possess, because I possess them, and raise the value of things when they are foreign, absent, or not mine… between two similar works I should always decide against my own…ownership, of itself, breeds contempt of what we hold and control.

Fascination and appropriation of all things foreign pervades our culture even today. This was recently illustrated in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibit “China: Through the Looking Glass” which opened June 2015 and examined the impact of Chinese culture on Western fashion. More commonplace, consider the preponderance of restaurants featuring international cuisines adjusted to American palates, studios teaching yoga and mediation, shops selling Navajo sand paintings and Indian glass bangles. By nature, we are intrigued and interested in what is different from us, and we integrate them into familiar media as a way to make them more accessible to us, if not necessarily more understandable.

This is what consitutes modern-day American Orientalism. The meaning of the term “Orientalism” has changed radically over the past forty years. Originally, it simply meant the study of Eastern (Moroccan to Japanese) languages, customs, religions, not just for the sake of scholarship but also to inform imperial foreign policy.

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American Orientalism- article and figures combined