Orientalist Kitsch

Desperate never looks good on a preppie.

Clothing companies like Gap, J. Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch are facing a crisis of cultural and financial capital. Brands that once dominated the landscape of cool have seen their stocks and sales slump to embarrassing lows over the past few years.

But when Ohio-based Abercrombie & Fitch released a line of T-shirts in April depicting Chinese laundry workers and smiling Buddhas, captioned by groan-worthy puns, the company was launched into the headlines, thanks to media-savvy Asian American college students protesting the reproduction of century-old caricatures.

Activists criticized the T-shirts for denigrating Asian Americans and trivializing "an entire religion and philosophy." Even as company spokespersons claimed innocence and regret, activists staged protests outside the retailers' stores, organized boycotts across e-mail lists, and demanded "respect" for Asian Americans as a lucrative market. I have to confess I was hardly shocked by the "Get Your Buddha on the Floor" or "Wok-n-Bowl, Let the Good Times Roll -- Chinese Food and Bowling" T-shirts, which are only the latest splashes in the tidal wave of kitsch merchandising and "orientalia" that's been crowding store shelves for years now.

But what this particular instance does reveal is that the demand for realistic and "positive" images of racial and ethnic communities in popular culture is often an inadequate response -- one that fails to address the other, often more complicated messages involved in the transformation of racial caricatures into products and the meaning of the way they are packaged.

To accuse the company of misrepresenting Chinese or Asian men, culture, etc. or of "misleading [consumers] as to what Asian people are" does not suffice. The company's now infamous "Wong Brothers Laundry Service -- Two Wongs Can Make It White" T-shirt is not meant to function as an "accurate" representation of Chinese masculinity. (Although the correlation between "white" and "right" in the pun is both banal and striking.) The clothiers acknowledge these are not realistic images.

Protestors also claimed that Abercrombie views Asian Americans either as laundry workers or (as one angry editorial writer put it) as a "mass of consumers [so] full of self-hate and self-loathing that they will latch onto any negative stereotype of themselves and parade it around town like a yellow minstrel." But these arguments imply that images can belong to only one of two categories: stereotypical (negative) and realistic (positive); and Asian Americans themselves can only be either authentic (protesting) or assimilated (buying). The criticism that these T-shirts "sell Asian self-hate and shame," or that Asian Americans who might buy them are "whitewashed," ignores the possibilities for other kinds of consumers, images or interpretations.

Rub My Belly Buddha and Art's Auto Body tees are better understood within the context of the rise of kitsch as the hallmark of "cool." They mark the emergence of what could be termed "orientalist kitsch," in which a racist caricature is resurrected and marketed as hip or trendy. But we need to recognize that the use of a racist image a century ago does not have the same meaning as the use of the same image -- or a similar one based on the same racial stereotype -- today. If we understand these images as kitsch, we can understand them as a function of marketing strategies such as parody and irony.

The Abercrombie PR honchos claimed these T-shirts were meant to be funny. Ironic, right? But in this instance, irony is conservative in its operation. It implies that if a long enough view is taken, all history becomes insignificant, including the history of oppression. The Abercombie & Fitch executives do not mean to reinstate turn-of-the-century Chinese exclusion, legal discrimination or even the emasculation of Chinese men, as much as dismiss these histories as meaningless today.