The East is a career

I first came upon the statement, "The East is a career," in an epigraph to one of the chapters in Edward Said's Orientalism. 

It's a quote from the 1847 novel, Tancred, by then British premier and writer of novels of social realism, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was presiding over the British Empire, that had reached a dizzying height in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a complex quote, and as unraveled by Said, it suggests that the East at that time in the Western imperial imagination existed as a springboard from which a promising young English lad could launch his career in the Imperial civil or military services, or could launch his career as an entrepreneur as well.

The East, in short, was a passive market to be exploited by and for the benefit of the imperial West.

The East is still a career, I think, and I articulate this position in response to an online discussion on the subject matter of the Study Abroad Program, a program that is becoming a silent imperative for American high schoolers and College students today.

The East is a career for many in the contemporary American military-Industrial complex, especially in two of its more obliquely occupied territories like Iraq and Afghanistan (though I can't imagine a career being launched in the terrains of Afghanistan known for hosting missile launches). 

In Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram For The King, a failed American entrepreneur migrates to the land of an Arab despot somewhere in Jeddah, to reignite his economic dreams. 

The Study Abroad Program was conceived to reignite, not the economic, but the cultural part of a young American's being in the world. 

The Program is premised on the ideal that to adapt and adjust to an increasingly globalizing world (though I can't for the world of me fathom how the world can globalize), young Americans need to experience that world first hand, and the best way to achieve that is to live for a brief period of time in a foreign country.

I think the ideal is an empty one; in real terms it's pure balderdash. Young Americans who do the Study Abroad Program do it as a stepping stone toward a fruitful career. In a global economy everything, including culture, is translatable into money if one knows how to.

How many of the sons and daughters of America's underserved can afford to partake in this most expensive of acculturation programs? The mantle of "global citizenship" can be worn, as it were, only by the children of America's privileged class.

A stint in a foreign country is good for the resume, just as a stint with the Peace Core is. Also, an "immersion" in a foreign culture and language (add to that the value system), sits well with prospective employers in American multinationals who prize multilingual employees anyway. But not all multilingualism is equally valued; Mandarin, for instance, is valued over Hindi, in the corporate corridors of transnational corporations. 

China is a career for many young Americans today as a large number of transnational corporations (they are really American in one form or the other) eye China as a magical market in the way Aladin eyed the magic carpet.