White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia
Orientalist and colonial frameworks that reinforce whiteness as the principal progressive, scientific, modern subjectivity.
The recognition of contemporary Indians (both East Indians and Native Americans) complicates, and even renders impotent, these processes of romanticization. Native American struggles against poverty, substance abuse, and domestic violence and their resistance to continued colonial oppression sit uncomfortably within the nostalgia for magical holism. Similarly, the nuclearization of India, its environmental degradation, and the co-option of yoga into the various militances of Hindu nationalism problematize the notion of Indic religiosity as an unsullied alternative to rationalized and industrialized modernity. Instead of furthering the political fight to remake society in solidarity with Indigenous and Asian peoples, the turn toward religious exoticism depoliticizes the critique into a quest for personal development and therapeutic experience.
White embodiments, adoptions, and performances of Indigenous and Indic cultural forms represent a globally ubiquitous form of cultural contact and exchange. But they also enact a particular form of white possessivism. Even the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century were successful in introducing cultures to each other;92 but they too were dependent on the ambivalences of white attractions to the exotic other. As Eric Lott writes in the afterword to the twentieth anniversary edition of Love and Theft, “Fairly soon, ‘love and theft’ became a kind of shorthand for the dialectic of white racial attraction and repulsion, cultural expropriation born of cross-racial desire, that first arose in public commercial terms in the antebellum minstrel show but is plain today wherever you look.”93 Discussions of cultural appropriation run warp and woof through online forums, college campuses, and art museums in the English-speaking West. Practices of cultural appropriation are most frequently criticized when whites appropriate the culture of the oppressed and thereby profit from it.94 In William Crane’s bald summation, “Appropriation of culture never happens without a corresponding appropriation of labor and human lives.”95
How might it be different if the affection, and even love, expressed through religious exoticism echoed the sense of what Leela Gandhi refers to as an “affective community,” meaning an unlikely community of affinity based in a tentative ideological proximity to the other? Religious exoticism, which is dependent, at least at the outset, on a lack of knowledge about the other, cannot accomplish the political solidarities of what she refers to as “the politics of friendship,” if friendship is, as Aristotle says, “the bond that holds communities together,” which I will discuss in the next section.96 In fact, in many cases, religious exoticism seems to create disaffection from members of the appropriated culture. It simultaneously creates relatively homogenous communities of whites, who build solidarities primarily among themselves in their shared affinities for religious exoticism.
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