Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925

American Orientalism: Objectification Through Chinoiserie

Before the Chinese started to migrate to the United States in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans had formed ideas about the Chinese culture and what they called the Orient (includes the vast number of countries east of Europe). They shaped beliefs often based on objects imported from the country, travelogues and writings from Westerners. In the 17th – 19th century, many in society held notions of China without ever being in the country or interactions with the Chinese.1 Guangzhou was the only Chinese trade port open to outsiders in the mid 18th and early 19th century. 

In the early 18th century, Americans had developed a fondness for China. Many leaders of the American Enlightenment including Benjamin Franklin held the Chinese civilization in high regard and admired the Confucian harmony and social order principles. China insulated themselves from Western countries and did not allow much knowledge to interchange between countries. Any information on China that came through to America via Catholic missionaries. These accounts portrayed China as a compassionate autocracy with an elite educated ruling class.2

“Although he never visited China during his lifetime, much evidence exists that he took a great interest in the country and admired its culture and government long before his fictional account from 1786. For example, he published an essay entitled ‘The Morals of Confucius’ in several installments in his 1738 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin also looked to the philosophies of Confucius when forming his own habits. Franklin’s conception of China and Confucian virtue that inspired his own habits also had an effect upon his peers. Some colonial Americans, such as Franklin and Jefferson, fit their understanding of China within their own Enlightenment worldview. For these persons, Chinese goods and chinoiserie in American homes not only reflected the owners’ desires to keep up with European fashions, but also carried associations with Enlightenment thought.”3

The British and Europeans also were attracted to China’s long-standing advanced culture. Americans sought to continue aristocratic fashionable trends from Britain and Europe. This included bringing the British taste for the Orient overseas with them, including the exotic luxuries Chinese tea, porcelain tea services and silk bed curtains. George Washington held this personal taste and followed this fashionable trend. His residence in Mount Vernon held a wide array of ceramics and Chinese porcelains that is telling of his personal taste for following a popular fashion trend among the American elite. Elegantly furnished dining and tea tables were common among the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England and France, and prosperous Americans imported similar luxury goods both before and after the Revolution.4 Tchen calls this aristocratic affinity to Chinese goods and philosophy “patrician orientalism.”5

The market for Chinese goods had grown so much by the seventeenth century that Europeans began producing their own versions of Chinese designs to meet demand and cost. These European versions of Chinese goods are termed chinoiserie. It is a broad term, encompassing primarily Chinese-inspired designs but also including Japanese, Turkish, or any other motif or combination of cultural designs deemed exotic by the western world (the Orient- East of Europe, Near East, Middle East and Far East). Europeans did not often try to distinguish between motifs and styles from different eastern cultures. To many Westerners “the spread of Chinese art…throughout Asia produced a similarity of art styles which, to many Westerners, reflected one cultural pattern and one classification of peoples.” Chinoiserie focuses on how the European objects reflect the Western perception of the Orient or what they think it should be. The chinoiserie style disseminated throughout the western world and became embedded in its culture.6
Starting early 19th century, a craze developed for things from China in America: shoes, jewelry, silks, porcelain, china, textiles, umbrellas, tea ware, dinner wares. The appeal no longer originated from the aristocratic class, but from the lesser gentry, middle class and the modest consumer. This proved to be a significant change as beliefs about China based on consumption become more widespread in America. The racialized commodities along with writings in newspapers and literature dictated perceptions of Chinese persons. Tchen calls the shift to a populist consumption of Chinese goods “commercial orientalism.” Commercial orientalism does not simply include the commodity of objects and things, but also persons and bodies as we see in the coming pages.7

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