Eastern Personae

in America

“Troupe of Salim Nassar Bedouin Arabs Hassan Ben Ali, manager 1898”

Nate Salsbury Collection of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West,

Western History/Genealogy Department

Denver Public Library.

                                                            After investigating the history of alternative

                                                            spiritualities, I still had questions about how people

                                                            have decided who could speak for the Eastern

                                                            world. So I looked to the entertainment business to

                                                            sort out a very basic but related question: Why

                                                            have so many people in the US chosen to perform

                                                            in the guise of a person from the East?

                                                            When we look through the American past we can

                                                            find many thousands of such performers between

                                                            1790 and 1935. They all claimed knowledge of a

                                                            spectrum of countries stretching from Morocco to

                                                            India: poets and novelists who wrote home-grown

                                                            imitations of the stories of the Arabian Nights, Arab

                                                            belly-dancers and acrobats, impresarios from

                                                            Istanbul and Damascus, turban-wearing vaudeville

                                                            magicians, spiritual missionaries from India, and

                                                            even the Shriners. Some of these artists were

                                                            native-born, some were migrants or permanent immigrants from West and South Asia. They included equal numbers of professional and amateur entertainers, some of whom performed in a serious attempt to depict foreign lands and their people, some of whom performed a kind of Eastern minstrelsy only in jest, knowing the audience would see their personae as satirical caricature.

As continuous waves of immigrants and migrant workers arrived in the US, and Americans gained increasing access to the cultural production of the Middle East and Asia, those performances of Eastern personae became more and more important because they helped Americans perform their own identities as consumers coping with a market economy. 

That interaction continues today.                                                   

- Susan