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This article originated as a paper presented to the fifty-first annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Honolulu, November 2006. Research for the paper was made possible by funding from the UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asian Studies, two Kenyon College Whiting Foundation grants, and a UC Davis faculty research grant. I would like to thank three anonymous readers for the journal for their excellent suggestions and editorial assistance.
The powerful concept of orientalism has undergone considerable refinement since Edward Said popularized the term with his eponymous book in 1978.1 In a nutshell, orientalist discourses construct an essentialized perception of "the East," broadly construed, that enables and justifies unequal power relations between "West" and "East." Orientalism typically is presented as a totalizing, hegemonic process that creates polar oppositions between a masculine, vigorous, superior West and a feminine, passive, subordinate East. Cultural critics have argued, however, that orientalism is, in Lisa Lowe's words, "a heterogeneous variety of discursive formations of cultural difference," 2 and, that given the contradictory, dynamic, and unstable nature of orientalist discourses, it is more productive to speak of multiple orientalisms, which are distinguished by time, place, and circumstances of a discourse's origin, as well as the geographic location and characteristics of the imagined East it creates.
Recent analyses of orientalist discourses also question the polar opposition of West and East, and acknowledge that Westerners can identify with as well as position themselves against the characteristics usually associated with the Orient. Mari Yoshihara suggests, for example, that some U.S. women engaged in orientalist discourses in part to challenge their own subordinate status. 3 American orientalisms reflect uniquely American approaches to situating one's self within larger communities and forging a coherent identity by articulating relationships to one's community and drawing boundaries with one's Others. Although Said focused his analysis narrowly on European literature that engaged with the Near and Middle East, the same basic principle has been used widely to analyze other imaginaries as well, and the "Orient" often subsumes the whole or parts of East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and even Africa. U.S. orientalisms often focus on East and Southeast Asia, reflecting a geographic and political proximity to the Pacific Rim, as well...