Buying Orientalist commodities was a way of possessing the Orient

Evidence

Orientalism is a pervasive intellectual movement that became broadly cultural, influencing fashion, advertising, architecture, literature, art, and eventually, film. To preface the following section, it is necessary to understand Orientalism as the source or inspiration for an endless number of commodities. The consumption of these products represents the European and American possession of the Orient and its people. In many cases, the consumption was literal—seen in purchasable commodities—textiles, lighting fixtures, furniture, objets d’art, jewelry, and other products. In other cases, it was metaphorical, such as viewing harem photographs or an Orientalist painting of a nude Muslim female. “Consumer Orientalism” resulted from growing consumerism, along with a desire to possess a token of Otherness. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 421

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the material-culture thread in the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure and dress-panic articles — possession of Otherness through physical objects. — connects to: Syrian merchants profited by supplying America’s Orientalist consumer fantasies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 226
• SEED: Material for an essay tracing how consuming exotic objects is a form of imaginative dominion — from textiles to harem photography.