The sexually enthralling Other: Oriental weddings in performance and American erotics of the Brown Threat

Abstract

International expositions held in America at the turn of the century developed discourses on ethnological living exhibits. These discourses were reinforced by an array of Orientalist images which stemmed mainly from a history including the fascination with the exotic and sensual Other. The artistic encounter of Moroccan acrobats with American audiences was also gendered. Entertainment newspapers and magazines did not only offer entries into Oriental wedding ceremonies enacted on stage for the delight of western audiences, but they were also concerned with interracial marriages of Moroccan performers with American women. I argue that such encounters add intricate insights into forms of knowledge about Self and Other within the racial hierarchies and ethnic taxonomies of entertainment spectacles and displays. Orientalist, imperialist and nationalist epistemologies coalesce to produce discourses about the Oriental Other as a network of anxieties and ambivalences. The Arab Other in American amusement industry turns into a ‘fearful double’; both as a site of desires where White sexual experiences would be inscribed and as potential threat for the construction of national identity. The revival of Othello syndrome in its temporal and spatial ramifications is activated and projected onto the experience of Moroccan gymnasts with American women. The ‘brown threat’ discourse becomes not only a compelling individual internalisation of the danger of interracial contacts, but a national fear associated with the need to monitor racial boundaries and reorder the nation within a rigid discourse that resists racial mixing.