'Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture, by Jane Naomi Iwamura.'

Abstract

Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. By Jane Naomi Iwamura. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 232 pp. ISBN 9780199738601 (hardcover), $99.00; ISBN 9780199738618I (paperback), $24.95.Reviewed by Jonathan H. X. LeeWhen and where did the figure of the American popular and culture originate? How has the figure of the monk been imagined and re-imagined? What does it reveal about the interplay of historical events, translation, and production vis-a-vis Asian religious traditions the United States? Jane Naomi Iwamura addresses these questions Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. Iwamura employs Edward Said's concept of to construct a paradigm of Orientalism anchored a critical racialization perspective. She defines Orientalism as a type of cultural stereotyping by visual forms of media that train the consumer to prefer visual representations and adds gravitas to the narrative and creates its own scene of virtual (p. 7). The combination of Orientalization and racialization serves to blunt the distinctiveness of particular persons and making the popular production of the monk not only consumable, but immediate and widespread (p. 6). The monk is not just someone we imagine, but a figure that is made real to us photographs, movies, and on pages of popular magazines.In Virtual Orientalism, Iwamura narrates the cultural-historical genealogy of the monk figure U.S. popular culture and media, noting its complexities, contradictions, and contemporary manifestations. It is through popular that the predominately Christian and non-Asian American public consumes, an accessible and virtually sensuous way, Asian religious figures and teachings before only accessible in the mind's eye only through the literary word and imagination (p. 5). Iwamura argues that the commercialization and fetishism of the monk icon, beginning the 1950s, and ending with today's Spiritual Romance, has delivered to the spiritual marketplace of American popular culture and a racialized monk who is no longer Asian. Iwamura argues, Although the figure is easily recognizable today, the monk did not miraculously appear from out of nowhere. Rather, we have been primed for his appearance: trained to identify him from knowledge of his character, which can be traced to a series of historical encounters and imaginative engagements (p. 6).Iwamura provides three case studies representing three types of encounters with the monk figure American and popular culture. In chapter two, Iwamura discusses D.T. Suzuki and the American encounter with Zen Buddhism the 1950s. In chapter three, covering the 1960s, she describes the American encounter with a Hindu monk the figure of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In chapter four, she analyzes the Hollywood-American invention of the monk who is half-Chinese and half-white as visually represented the 1970s TV series Kung Fu. In her concluding chapter, Iwamura discusses new iterations and new imaginations of the monk who is only stereotypically coded as Asian cartoon figures such as Kung Fu Panda.In her chapter on Suzuki and the period of Zen's flourishing the U.S. the 1950s, Iwamura notes that Suzuki was portrayed as a mysterious Oriental whose wrinkled features hint at an ancient wisdom that harked back to an age far beyond his considerable years (p. 26). The medium through which Suzuki was consumed by the American public was popular and fashion magazines (Harper's Bazaar, Look, Time, Newsweek, Life, and Vogue). The combined effect of the racialization and Orientalization of Suzuki popular magazines produced a persona that was simultaneous incomprehensible yet wholly comprehensible to his 1950s American audience (p. …