11/15/2023 0 Comments Memories of a geisha definitionSince the earliest colonizing contacts between the West and the Orient, the West has developed romantic yet ambivalent feelings toward the Orient. The colonized have had to accommodate and to assimilate to live in this world ordered and defined by the West. Since the colonial age that preceded World War II, the West has held the privileged position of interpreting the world through Western eyes, of constructing and controlling the dominant reality. ![]() The status of colonized people has been fixed in zones of dependency and peripherality, stigmatized in the designation of underdeveloped, less-developed, developing states, ruled by a superior, developed, or metropolitan colonizer who was theoretically posited as a categorically antithetical overlord” (Said, 1989, p. A social mechanism exists that sustains the hierarchal colonial power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and between the West and the Orient: Although some people of the Orient have since gained independence and power, the experiences of racism, exploitation, colonization, and oppression continue (Said, 1989). The word Orient is not only a Western word, but also a Western construction. Europe and the United States regarded the non-Western world as the Orient, a place with people who that could be described as strangers, others, and outsiders. Said (1978) traces the current period of Orientalism to about 1870, when most colonial expansion into the non-Western and non-European world began, culminating in World War II. Japanese studies, Orientalism, Intercultural studies Orientalism and Fiction Their success not only signifies the success of these devices with the target audience but also tells us something about American cultural tastes for the Orient. In this article, I apply Edward Said’s (1978) idea of Orientalism to the study of the fictional devices Golden used in telling the geisha story in print and which Marshall used in translating the story to film, with the American/Westerner as preferred reader of these texts. Golden treated Japanese culture and geisha as an object to be sexualized, exoticized, and romanticized. The binary of fact and fiction used by book author Arthur Golden and movie director Rob Marshall made the story appealing to Western audiences. ![]() ![]() Western audiences found the story of the fictional geisha, Sayuri, believable while Japanese audiences were not as enthralled. The fictional Memoirs of a Geisha, published in 1997, and its movie adaptation, released in 2005, were received with greater popularity in the United States than they were in Japan. Orientalism and the Binary of Fact and Fiction in Memoirs of a Geisha Kimiko Akita
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