Hearing orientality in (white) America, 1900-1930

Lancefield, Robert C.

doi:10.14418/wes01.3.2

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Neil O'Brien's visits provided opportunities for the Knights of Columbus to gather together and act out their collective identity through communally reaffirming spectatorship (Lancefield 2004, p. 594). O'Brien, as a skilled professional in minstrelsy, gave speeches and acted as the master of ceremonies for Knights of Columbus entertainments.…”

Section: Private Identity: Performing For Fraternal Society Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A strictly American institution: Neil O'Brien, blackface minstrelsy, and the invention of white Catholic identity

Blake

2019

Pop. Mus.

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This article examines the politics of race, religion and nation in relation to blackface minstrelsy during the first decades of the twentieth century. Having been superseded by more modern amusements, minstrelsy was outdated as a performance genre, yet the minstrel show served as a forum for Neil O'Brien and the Knights of Columbus fraternal society to participate in the invention of a white American Catholic identity. For fraternal society members, estranged from national belonging by religious difference, these performances situated the group as proponents of an old-fashioned American tradition, structured around anti-blackness. At a time of anti-Catholic sentiment, Catholic fraternal society members gathered for minstrel performances, distancing themselves from black people and marking themselves as white Americans.

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Section: Private Identity: Performing For Fraternal Society Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A strictly American institution: Neil O'Brien, blackface minstrelsy, and the invention of white Catholic identity

Blake

2019

Pop. Mus.

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“…These performances are about garnering a positive affect toward China through momentary embodiments of Chineseness. Lancefield (2004), in his examination of early 20th century US representations of the Orient in musical performances, uses the term "orientality" to refer to "'what it was' that many people felt they heard or saw or embodied in moments of orientalist performance" (2004:41, italics added). Combining Lancefield's use of orientality with Lau's (2009) term re-Orientalism, I argue that what is happening in the performance of Chinese culture by non-Chinese bodies in CI activities is a process I am calling re-orientality (conceptually distinct from reorientality or that marketable, orientalist aspect of Chinese culture I theorized earlier), in which the non-Chinese body (preferably a white body) is asked to momentarily embody and thus feel Chineseness in some way.…”

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confidence: 99%

China's Confucius Institutes and the "Necessary White Body"

Schmidt¹

2013

Can. J. Soc.

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Abstract. Confucius Institutes (CIs), modelled on similar European organizations, promote China’s official national language and culture abroad. Unlike their European counterparts, however, the interactions between CIs and Canadian audiences are haunted by complex histories of a racialized “Oriental Other” in Canada and “Western Other” in China. Through ethnographic research on the Confucius Institute in Edmonton and the CI Headquarters in Beijing, this paper explores racialized representations of China and Chinese culture, as well as racialized understandings of the desired Western audience, in both locations. I argue that representations of Chinese culture are caught between two competing logics which I term reorientalism and reorientality. Reorientalism attempts to reclaim definitions of Chineseness and redress misunderstandings about China while simultaneously making China comprehensible and ultimately marketable through reorientality, or a use of familiar Orientalist tropes. Canadians (most often imagined and represented as white) are encouraged to engage with this reorientality through their own performance and embodiment of Chinese culture (a conceptually distinct process I call re-orientality) as a means of understanding the project of reorientalism. However, the spectacle of Chinese culture through CIs resonates with Canadian multiculturalism in ways that may unintentionally reproduce a social landscape that normalizes whiteness and the consumption of ethnicized Otherness.

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Hearing orientality in (white) America, 1900-1930

Abstract: Hearing orientality in (white) America, 1900America, -1930

Cited by 2 publications

References 94 publications

A strictly American institution: Neil O'Brien, blackface minstrelsy, and the invention of white Catholic identity

A strictly American institution: Neil O'Brien, blackface minstrelsy, and the invention of white Catholic identity

China's Confucius Institutes and the "Necessary White Body"

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