Sean Metzger (Theater, Film, and Television, UC Los Angeles)

“Oriental sensitivity” is a term introduced in "The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization", where it marks attention to the shifting demographics of Martinique and the activities of a tai chi club on the island. This concept, deployed with intentional irony in a monograph about what one might initially understand as Eastern cultural interactions in the West, describes a part of the research process that produced the text: in this instance, the aptitude for studying ostensibly Chinese flows in the Francophone Caribbean and also the contradictions engendered in the doing of that work. This talk extends Oriental sensitivity beyond the coordinates of the book’s case study and in relation to theories of Orientalism more broadly in order to elaborate this concept as an analytical tool for global research