#nplusone

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I thought about how most of my experience of going to Peru to drink ayahuasca had been about working through the shame of having done such a thing in the first place. I spent half a month's salary and met some awful people and a few good ones to discover a fact that I disclose with not a little embarrassment: plants can communicate. Some people will think I'm a crazy asshole for saying so, but they never gave a plant money and had the plant tell them actual facts in return."

If the Orientalism described by Said was consolidated in the age of European, especially British, empire, then Asiaticism belonged to the American century. Within this racial form, Lye writes in America’s Asia, the distinguishing trait of East Asian peoples has been excessive economic efficiency. Certainly this belongs within the Orientalist tradition of exoticization, but the temporal assumptions stand in stark contrast to those of earlier modes. As a shorthand, we can distinguish between the traditional “Oriental,” fit for conquest by the West, and the hypermodern “Asiatic,” feared for its conquest of the West.

Whereas classic Orientalism understood the East by foregrounding its despotic rulers, the “Asiatic” is represented through a plural figure, coolies, who — from railroad workers in Utah to sweatshop workers in Guangdong — are seen as a faceless mass and personify the logic of capitalist exploitation. Whereas the “Oriental” was traditional, the “Asiatic” is postmodern; whereas the “Oriental” was irrational and superstitious, the “Asiatic” is calculating. The “Oriental” referred to a geographically contained culture; the “Asiatic” points toward a transpacific, even global, flow of goods, capital, and people. The “Oriental” was archaic and conservative; the “Asiatic” is future-oriented and progressive. If, in short, the “Oriental” meant exclusion from the march of progress of capital, then the “Asiatic” represents its full realization as well as its dark excesses.