미국 시각문화 속의 서태후: 후기식민주의 시각으로 본 재현의 정치학

Abstract

This article is a part of a continuing research in which I investigate the system of representation for Northeast Asia and its women as they appear in American visual culture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The purpose of this article is to examine the images of Empress Dowager Cixi, including productions made in both the West as well as China, that were circulated in the U.S during her reign. The Empress Dowager Cixi,who ruled China for almost a half century (1861-1908), utilized the politics of “image-making” in her efforts to stand against the Western powers’imperialistic encroachment and the widely-circulating negative representations of herself in Europe and the U.S. A multitude of Cixi’s official portraits,executed in photographs and oil paintings as counter-images against Western Orientalist images, demonstrate the hybridity of the East and West, the fusion of Western and Chinese royal portrayals, as well as the ambivalence of illusion and reality. In tandem with the shifting political situations between the U.S. and Northeast Asian nations since the mid-nineteenth century, the images of the cultural and racial “other” have undergone several transformations,demonstrating the politics of representation. However, visual images of Northeast Asian women have generally remained in the form of two prevalent stereotypes: “the cherry-blossom or lotus-blossom ladies,” modeled on Madame Butterfly, and the dangerous and conniving "dragon ladies,"whose prototype is the Empress Dowager Cixi. The phenomenon portraying Cixi as a power and sex-crazed dragon lady, murderess, witch,hydra, or monster became extremely popularized in Western art and visual culture materials around and shortly after 1900, when the Boxer movement reached its height and overpowered the Westerners and Christians in China. As these negative images were rapidly replacing the reality of the Empress Dowager as China’s national identity and symbol, Cixi, taking a step similar to that of the Japanese Meiji Emperor who was in a comparable situation, launched a strategy of image-making for herself and China. By adopting Western methods of representational system and media,along with carefully calculated countenance, poses, and paraphernalia,Cixi had her photographs and portraits made for diplomatic, domestic, and personal purposes and thus created yet another illusionistic image, that refuted the Western Orientalists’ imaginary one. In this process, such Chinese photographers as Yu Xunling, as well as American painters,Katherine Carl and Hubert Voss, responded to her wishes by producing works that are a hybrid of the East and West as well as illusion and reality. The counter-images made in China and Japan against Western powers’Orientalist imagery and imperialistic ideology demonstrate diverse aspects of the politics of representation discussed in post-colonialist discourse,such as hybridity, mimicry, appropriation, and writing back. However, in the case of China and Japan, the issue becomes more complex as these two nations were also imperialistic and had an interest in colonizing East Asia.