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“Namaste,” a white woman in Lululemon leggings once said to my crowded yoga class, folding her hands as if in prayer. “That’s Sanskrit. It means I honor the way your body moves. Isn’t that beautiful?”
Oof. No. Red flag. Although namaste once translated to I bow to you in Sanskrit, it now connotes something closer to a simple hello. The instructor’s dubious translation not only spreads misinformation but exoticizes a common greeting — presumably to titillate the (mostly white) yoga students and exaggerate the foreign “mystique” of the yoga experience.
Her class is the rule, not the exception. Many yoga classes in the U.S. are colonial spaces. A typical session might involve the routine butchering of Sanskrit phrases and the fetishization of traditional practices and movements, while vaguely “exotic” strings-based instrumental music plays in the background. This curated environment tends to collapse the differences between far-flung traditions; the same studio may include a pastiche of Buddhist statues, Hindu symbols, and Sanskrit chants, flattening the diverse practice into a monolith for white consumption. Most yoga instructors are white women. Tank tops emblazoned with “om” and “namast’ay in bed” abound. The commodification of yoga facilitates exploitation, encouraging studios to reap profits from the appropriation of traditional spiritual practices, without paying or crediting the people who created them. Fundamentally, then, these yoga classes represent colonial, capitalist undertakings that advance at the expense of the very bodies they are built upon.
In other words, your everyday yoga class is actually a textbook case study in Orientalism. In his pioneering 1978 book Orientalism, postcolonial studies scholar Edward Said defined Orientalism as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and … ‘the Occident.’” Put simply, the “Orient” is a colonial invention. Orientalism is a collection of binaries — between “East” and “West,” foreign and familiar, civilized and uncivilized, primitive and progressive, colonizer and colonized, self and Other. It is a system of representation through which the West produced the East as its opposite, its “surrogate and underground self” — a strange, backward, barbaric land, steeped in mysticism and danger.
Tellingly, Orientalism opens with this Karl Marx quote: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” As Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British politician who imposed English colonial education on India, once infamously stated, it could not be denied that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Given the assumed superiority of Western culture and literature, it fell to the West to represent the East. Western colonial powers assumed this paternalistic obligation by manufacturing the body of theory and practice that became the “Orient.” This representation permeates our culture; you’ve almost certainly come across classic Orientalist products before. To this day, they form some of our most enduring images of the alien “East.” Remember the feral child Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, or the meek Indian servants in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden? These representations illuminate how insidiously Orientalism functions — by exaggerating, essentializing, and exploiting the supposed difference between the East and the West, Orientalism legitimized Western white supremacy.
Through the colonial project of Orientalism, the “Occident” produced the “Orient.” However, and perhaps more importantly, the “Orient” also produced the “Occident.” Without the East, there is no West. The Orient “helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” European culture came into being “by setting itself off against the Orient” — by defining the “self” as what it is not. Think of the Tethered in Jordan Peele’s Us: a shadow class of people who provide requisite contrast to the protagonists, whose exploitation the protagonists’ lives hinge upon, and through whom the protagonists’ humanity is defined.
Edward Said stressed that the Orient “was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.” In essence, to be “Oriental” is to be “Orientalized” — to inhabit whatever vessel deemed appropriate for you at any given time, whether that be a bloodthirsty terrorist or hypersexualized yogic fantasy. Fatimah Asghar aptly captures this slippery, shifting state of personhood in a poem: “you’re kashmiri until they burn your home … you’re muslim until you’re not a virgin. you’re pakistani until they start throwing acid. you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous ... you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.”
In the decades since Said published his seminal text, the term Orientalism has trickled into the mainstream. However, in the process, the concept has been diluted — severed from its radical roots. These days, the word Orientalism conjures up images of glittering saris, Chinese dragons, and cramped, dusty cities. Maybe a snake charmer or two, for good measure. While these tropes are, of course, part and parcel of Orientalism, the heart of Said’s theory is that Orientalism is not an abstract concept — not just an “airy European fantasy” — but instead “a relationship of power, of domination.” The West’s “material investment” in creating and maintaining the structure of Orientalism sanctioned the violence of European imperialism. As Said puts it in another work, Culture and Imperialism: “‘They’ were not like ‘us,’ and for that reason deserved to be ruled.” Orientalism underpins the systems that allowed Europe to “manage — and even produce — the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.” At its core, then, Orientalism is a symbolic and literal battleground, littered with thorny questions around power, profit, and personhood. Who wields power? To what end? Who tells what story? Who profits? And at whose expense?
Said’s theory is just as urgent today as it was at the time of its publication. Like virtually every colonial hangover — from Western capitalism to the gender binary — Orientalism didn’t end, it just shape-shifted. It takes on a variety of guises, from well-intentioned but hamfisted “celebrations” of foreign cultures to outright racial terror. Orientalism is yoga studios and bindis at Coachella. It’s Starbucks profiting off a popular South Asian drink by rebranding it a "golden turmeric latte.” It’s Bridgerton romanticizing the aesthetics of British aristocracy while glossing over where (and who) the heroes’ riches came from. It’s a white woman falling “in love” with chai after visiting India and then proceeding to make millions selling the drink. It’s calling COVID-19 “kung flu.” It’s my former history teacher asking her students to debate the “pros and cons” of colonialism, while consistently mixing up the only two South Asian girls in her class. It’s every “empowering” Netflix show that depicts a Muslim woman taking off her hijab for a mediocre white man. It’s the fact that, as of 2017, the majority of The New York Times’s Chinese and Indian recipes were written by white people. It’s Trump saying, “I love Hindu,” and then striving to impose a Muslim ban. It’s the British Museum hoarding looted Indian artwork in glass display cases. It’s Steve McCurry achieving global fame after National Geographic published his photograph, “Afghan Girl,” while the portrait’s subject, Sharbat Gula, not only never received a penny for the photo but was allegedly imprisoned because of its impact. It’s the pervasive rhetoric painting U.S. military imperialism as “a fight for the rights of women” who are in desperate need of saving from their barbaric homelands by white Christian Westerners.
The key takeaway here is that Orientalism is not just a trendy buzzword, but a fraught framework that grows out of bloody histories of colonialism, capitalism, and domination. It’s simultaneously timely and timeless. Orientalism names a power struggle that stretches back centuries and continues to structure our lives. Its ubiquity has dire consequences: Orientalism is a site of violence. In March 2021, the white man who killed eight people — including six East and Southeast Asian women who were working in Atlanta massage parlors — told the police he carried out this massacre because he had a “sexual addiction” and wanted to eliminate a “temptation.” As scholar Rumya Putcha points out, massage parlors like the ones the shooter targeted, or yoga studios like the one I mentioned at the start of this essay, are “part of a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people and Asian women, in particular, possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga, meditation, and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape.” The long history of fetishizing and sexualizing Asian women animates Orientalist fantasies. While my yoga instructor’s mistranslation of namaste as I honor the way your body moves may seem innocuous, this kind of mundane Orientalism injects a simple greeting with sexual innuendo and a foreign, mystical charge. As we saw in Atlanta, that process of Orientalizing can yield material violence against “Orientals.”
Don’t worry, you don’t have to quit your yoga class. After all, Orientalism doesn’t end when you roll up your yoga mat and head out for a smoothie. It follows you through the door. It saturates our world. Because Orientalism is a product of empire, resisting Orientalism goes hand in hand with the concrete, political work of decolonization. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization looks like the end of settler colonialism, the repatriation of Indigenous lands, the erasure of borders, mutual aid networks, prison abolition, and disability justice. It looks like liberation for queer and trans people, Black people, Indigenous people, fat people, and Dalit people. It looks like wrenching the pen back from colonizers who have “represented” us for so long and, instead, writing our own stories. In Said’s words: “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Colonialism, Explained
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