Mari Yoshihara

On a larger and sort of deeper scale, the reevaluation around Butterfly is centered on it as an Orientalist work.

Orientalism is a big academic topic, which University of Hawaii professor Mari Yoshihara, in a panel discussion for Boston Lyric Opera's The Butterfly Process series, summarized this way.

Quote, Orientalism is a concept that was most powerfully theorized by cultural literary critic Edward Said in his book called Orientalism, originally published in 1978.

And to put it very simply, Orientalism is a Western discourse, so to put that even more plainly, the Western ways of understanding and representing the so-called Orient that's premised on two most basic assumptions.

Impacts.

For a member of the majority culture, it can be tempting, even from a casual good faith perspective, to say, why does any of this matter? It's from 120 years ago.

So what? This is a big question I should probably stay out of, but I think at least a partial answer is in the self-perpetuating inertia of these tropes, as laid out by Mari Yoshihara in that Boston Lyric Opera discussion series.

Quote, Orientalism keeps producing and reproducing these tropes, right? Tropes or vocabularies or narratives about the Orient that then inform each other.