Politics of Representation of Japanese Culture in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of AGeisha

Abstract

Derogatory representation of Japan and its traditional culture along with its native people especially is the most dominant and repeated issue in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of A Geisha. Arthur Golden as the westerner has made the Japan and its traditional culture as the critical site of interpretation, analysis, demonstration and intervention. Politically he has fictionalized the Japanese culture with colonial binaries and stereotypes. The images of western power have been utilized by the writer in the mission of canonization of westerns and marginalization of Asians. The novel depicts the geisha women as uneducated, violent, irrational, superstitious, aggressive, devil where the positive attributes like rational, kind, educated, independent etc are assigned to westerns. In the text, there is the powerful opposition between civilization and savagery. The construction of non-western culture by assigning violence, prostitution, vulgarity, irrationality and abnormality is the justifying the superiority over Asians. He has produced so many myths about geisha women to create western hegemonic state or cultural imperialism over Japanese culture. The stereotypes and derogatory images have become the determining factors for representing the native place from the Western perspective. So, this research analyses the discursive formations and practices of representations on the orient and tries to dig out the politics behind the derogatory portrayals of native people and their culture by the young generation of Western colonizers.