#like please tell me how this ISNT racial or orientalist

[hergan416]

"While this passage may seem racist or orientalist to modern readers, Wilde here follows Huysmans in using 'the radically foreign (non-Western) as the occasion for showing that the discriminating observer can desire and regulate his body differently from the vulgar, inartistic, bourgeois.'"

Please, tell me why using non-Western music in this sense isn't racist or orientalist.

#liveblogging the uncesnored picture of dorian gray #like... this whole section has been about how Dorian Gray makes his contemporaries jealous that he's realized #what his contemporaries would have dreamed of doing while in school at Oxford or Eton #he hosts parties that are loved by high society #he dresses fashionably #has the greatest perfumes #and apparently the greatest foreign music #because his interests bounce from subject to subject #learning all he feels like he wants to then abandoning it #Dorian Gray is the EPITOME of bourgeois #so is the annotation above trying to say that the people playing the music he is studying are more discerning than dorian is? #because two paragraphs ago he was literally studying a movement that sounds an awful lot like a precursor to the nazi movement #(Darwinismus) #which the annotations say was a "German nationalist movement that harnessed Darwin's scientific evolutionism #to racially inflected political ideas about the purity of the German volk.' #like please tell me how this ISNT racial or orientalist #thanks #what you MEAN is that its considered 'ok' to the intended audience #that intended audience was... idk racist and orientalist?