Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture, by Jane Naomi Iwamura.

Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. By Jane Naomi Iwamura. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 232 pp. ISBN 9780199738601 (hardcover), $99.00; ISBN 9780199738618I (paperback), $24.95.Reviewed by Jonathan H. X. LeeWhen and where did the figure of the "Oriental monk" in American popular media and culture originate? How has the figure of the Oriental monk been imagined and re-imagined? What does it reveal about the interplay of historical events, cultural translation, and cultural production vis-a-vis Asian religious traditions in the United States? Jane Naomi Iwamura addresses these questions in Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. Iwamura employs Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" to construct a paradigm of "virtual Orientalism" anchored in a critical racialization perspective. She defines "virtual Orientalism" as a type of "cultural stereotyping by visual forms of media" that "train the consumer to prefer visual representations" and "adds gravitas to the narrative and creates its own scene of virtual encounter" (p. 7). The combination of Orientalization and racialization "serves to blunt the distinctiveness of particular persons and figures" making the popular production of the Oriental monk not only consumable, but immediate and widespread (p. 6). The Oriental monk is not just someone we imagine, but a figure that is made real to us in photographs, in movies, and on pages of popular magazines.In Virtual Orientalism, Iwamura narrates the cultural-historical genealogy of the Oriental monk figure in U.S. popular culture and media, noting its complexities, contradictions, and contemporary manifestations. It is through popular media that the predominately Christian and non-Asian American public consumes, in an accessible and "virtually sensuous" way, Asian religious figures and teachings before only accessible "in the mind's eye only through the literary word and imagination" (p. 5). Iwamura argues that the commercialization and fetishism of the Oriental monk icon, beginning in the 1950s, and ending with today's "Spiritual Romance," has delivered to the spiritual marketplace of American popular culture and media a racialized Oriental monk who is no longer Asian. Iwamura argues, "Although the figure is easily recognizable today, the Oriental monk did not miraculously appear from out of nowhere. Rather, we have been primed for his appearance: trained to identify him from knowledge of his character, which can be traced to a series of historical encounters and imaginative engagements" (p. 6).Iwamura provides three case studies representing three types of encounters with the Oriental monk figure in American media and popular culture. In chapter two, Iwamura discusses D.T. Suzuki and the American encounter with Zen Buddhism in the 1950s. In chapter three, covering the 1960s, she describes the American encounter with a Hindu monk in the figure of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In chapter four, she analyzes the Hollywood-American invention of the Oriental monk who is half-Chinese and half-white as visually represented in the 1970s TV series Kung Fu. In her concluding chapter, Iwamura discusses new iterations and new imaginations of the Oriental monk who is only stereotypically coded as Asian in cartoon figures such as Kung Fu Panda.In her chapter on Suzuki and the period of Zen's flourishing in the U.S. in the 1950s, Iwamura notes that Suzuki was portrayed as a "mysterious Oriental" whose "wrinkled features" hint at an "ancient wisdom that harked back to an age far beyond his considerable years" (p. 26). The medium through which Suzuki was consumed by the American public was popular and fashion magazines (Harper's Bazaar, Look, Time, Newsweek, Life, and Vogue). The combined effect of the racialization and Orientalization of Suzuki in popular magazines produced a persona that was simultaneous incomprehensible yet "wholly comprehensible to his 1950s American audience" (p. …