edward said's _orientalism_
i was trying to hold this back but it goes along with some of what kristin h. and naomi said. just today i had to give a presentation on _orientalism_ (a book by edward said) and it's about europe's colonization of the "orient".
i'm hardly an expert on the theory but here goes: for centuries, europeans traveling to the "orient" (as if everywhere from egypt to india to japan to everything else considered "east" were all one homogeneous culture) saw the orient through a western lens, defining everything in terms of european ideas instead of finding out what they were/meant to oriental peoples. (ex: some european "orientalists" saw islam as a failed attempt at christianity!) since the europeans colonized the orient, their (inaccurate) definitions and (mis)understandings of all things oriental were imposed on oriental peoples. i don't mean to say that muslims started to think their religion was supposed to be christianity but european values did influence oriental cultures. since the colonizers relied on all these binary terms (west/east, civilized/barbaric, white/brown, etc.) to define themselves as not the other, not the colonized (remember saussure?), it's not surprising--sad, but not surprising--that kartini may really have seen javanese people as big, dumb children and felt that her brown skin was less beautiful or less clean or whatever than the europeans' white skin.
if anyone has a better way of explaining this, adelante!