<em>Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish</em>: A Play in Three Acts

Abstract

192 John Whittier Treat Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish: A Play in Three Acts Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not a tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvre china every day?” —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting” I begin with the intuition that the Western penchant for collecting things, and occasionally people, from Asia is related to the erotics of acquisition and especially the potential of those erotics to encode and even embody illicit sexualities hardly expressible without recourse to a particular geohistorical imaginary (e.g., the “Orient”). I hope to prove this intuition via a tour of our modern libraries, our simultaneous celebration and medicalization of bibliophilia, and the international wanderings of first a German Jew (e.g., an “Oriental”) and last a collection of miniature, often risqué, Japanese figurines. My aim is to open the notion of collecting, the theme of this issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, to further considerations of the Orientalism and queer insights already implicit in the heightened critical attention we now pay bibliophilia , all the way from an appreciation of the elite connoisseurship of classic editions at one end to the latest fashionably psychosexual malady of “hoarding disorder” at the other. The workings of the fetish that unites both these ends maps an “Asia” equally material and immaterial, its ultimate borders decided only by libidinal desires equally frustrated and fulfilled. Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish 193 Peter X. Zhou’s (2010) edited volume of essays on North American East Asian libraries, Collecting Asia: East Asian Libraries in North America , 1868–2008, tells readers that many East Asia library collections in North American universities began through the efforts of a single person gifted with exceptional drive and dedication, and, occasionally, a fortune. In Yale’s case, for instance, that man was Yung Wing, Yale class of 1854 and the first Chinese to graduate from an American college. In 1874, he donated his personal collection of 1,280 Chinese volumes to his alma mater, where they formed the early nucleus of today’s collection. Yale historian Asakawa Kan’ichi, the first Japanese to teach at an American college or university, augmented the collection in the early decades of the twentieth century many times over with funds from his university and the Library of Congress. In some cases, though, the early benefactors of East Asia collections were not expatriate Asians but instead evident Caucasians who, through a variety of personal or professional encounters with the East, brokered contributions of East Asian materials to schools in the New World. For example, James A. Thomas’s gift in the late 1920s founded the East Asia collection at Duke University. Thomas was the managing director of the British-American Tobacco Company in China from 1905 to 1922 and a friend, fortuitously for the university that now bears their patronym, of James and Benjamin Duke. Another of the best-known patrons of East Asia collections in North America was Horace Walpole Carpentier, a man born in New York State in 1824, the son of a cobbler (the family name was “Carpenter”—Horace would add the i in adulthood to appear less common) who, after graduating from Columbia, struck it rich in the California gold rush, not by prospecting but by provisioning those who did. He eventually established the Bank of California in San Francisco and became the first mayor of Oakland when he persuaded the new state legislature to incorporate the settlement as a municipality in 1852, though he was quickly ousted from his post after the electorate discovered he had reserved all development rights to the city’s waterfront for himself. In time he endowed East Asian studies at both the University of California, Berkeley and, even more generously, Columbia. He acquired the moniker “General” when he was appointed to the rank of major general in the California State Militia in 1854. Carpentier returned to New York, by 1888, a wealthy man, with homes in both the city and his upstate birthplace of Galway. He...