Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics

The Oriental Other Within

Lisa Lau, Ana Cristina Mendes, Lisa Lau, Ana Cristina Mendes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136707919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Orientalism refers to the imitation of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West, and was devised in order to have authority over the Orient. The concept of Re-Orientalism maintains the divide between the Orient and the West. However, where Orientalism is based on how the West constructs the East, Re-Orientalism is grounded on how the cultural East comes to terms with an orientalised East.

This book explores various new forms, objects and modes of circulation that sustain this renovated form of Orientalism in South Asian culture. The contributors identify and engage with recent debates about postcolonial South Asian identity politics, discussing a range of different texts and films such as The White Tiger, Bride & Prejudice and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love.

Providing new theoretical insights from the areas of literature, film studies and cultural and discourse analysis, this book is an stimulating read for students and scholars interested in South Asian culture, postcolonial studies and identity politics.

1 Introducing re-Orientalism

A New Manifestation of Orientalism

Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Lau

Re-Orientalism: Theory, Practices and Ramifications

According to Edward Said’s Foucauldian take on imperial discourse, the cultural construct of Orientalism was the European imperialistic strategy of composing a positive image of the western Self while casting the ‘East’ as its negative alter ego, alluring and exotic, dangerous and mysterious, always the Other. As such, ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 2003: 1–2), emerging as an intricate part of western culture itself and as a way to face internal contradictions. Self-evidently, Orientalism still persists in both popular and institutional constructions of culture and identity, but has developed in a rather curious trajectory over the last few decades. One direction of particular interest has been identified and designated as ‘re-Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), where ‘Orientals’ are seen to be perpetrating Orientalisms no less than ‘non-Orientals’ and, moreover, perpetrating certain and selected types of Orientalisms. Where Said’s Orientalism is grounded in how the West constructs the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, re-Orientalism is based on how cultural producers with eastern affiliations come to terms with an orientalized East, whether by complying with perceived expectations of western readers, by playing (along) with them or by discarding them altogether. As a consequence, the present critical project aims to situate itself within the reconfiguration of modes of cultural analysis that observe, identify and comment the operations of new Orientalisms in the twenty-first century. Re-Orientalist discursive practices and rhetorical strategies are often sites of subversion where meanings are in constant flux. In this sense, re-Orientalism theory exposes the power of Orientalist discourse while underscoring its instability and mutability, and as such provides avenues for questioning the endurance of Orientalist practices today.

One purpose of this collection is to observe how re-Orientalism is deployed, made to circulate and perceived by cultural producers and consumers within the specific context of South Asian identity politics. The concept of re-Orientalism is applicable in a large number of Asian contexts; this volume case studies South Asia and South Asian diasporic cultural formations, illustrating the delicate negotiation of power and influence within the spaces of South Asian textual practices, specifically in literary works and through the media of film and television. This collection therefore places itself at the centre of a politics of power and representation; one which is not pitting the ‘West’ against the ‘East’,¹ but strives for a much more complex and nuanced understanding – an understanding that could not be confined within those discursive structures – of postcolonial cultural production and its engendering of re-Orientalist perspectives. In fact, this project is attentive to the implications of the heterogeneity embedded in categories such as the West and the East, given that, as Said influentially argued, ‘the ontological and epistemological distinction … between “the Orient” and … ”the Occident”’ (Said 2003: 2) resulted from a colonial discursive power structure devised for ‘dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 2003: 3).

Following the arguments of Said’s foundational theorization, one way of approaching re-Orientalism theory is to note that it concerns the ontological and epistemological force of a conglomeration of discursive practices on the subjects it demarcates. In this sense, although this volume was sparked off by widespread interest and responses to Lisa Lau’s 2009 essay ‘Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals’, the concept of re-Orientalism, even if under slightly different guises and in different terminologies, has been buffeted around for at least the last two or three decades. The most significant occurrence of this term (spelled alternatively as ‘reOrientalism’) dates back to Samir Amin’s, Giovanni Arrighi’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1999 counter-critique to ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998) by the economic historian and sociologist André Gunder Frank. In their responses titled ‘ReOrientalism’, Amin et al. dispute Gunder Frank’s defence of a ‘reOriented’, non-Eurocentric economic historiography and social theory. This critical controversy has even reached the pages of Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994: 4–5), but this volume proposes a usage of the term which differs somewhat from its previous similar employments. In fact, albeit employing a variety of terminologies, the concept of re-Orientalism has been in circulation in academia for at least the last three decades, termed as ‘ethno-orientalism’ (Carrier 1992), ‘self-orientalism’ (Dirlik 1996), ‘internal orientalism’ (Schein 1997) and ‘reverse Orientalism’ (Tony Mitchell 2004), to name a few. Indeed, the current promotion and profiteering of a fashionable alterity as a marketing strategy that repackages the Orient for global consumption has not failed to attract considerable critical attention. Spivak’s concept of ‘new orientalism’ in Outside in the Teaching Machine (Spivak 1993: 277), Elleke Boehmer’s assessment of ‘neo-Orientalism’ in the essay ‘Questions of Neo-Orientalism’ (1998) and Anis Shivani’s reading in the article ‘Indo-Anglian Fiction’ (2006) of a ‘new orientalism’ in recent Indian Writing in English (IWE) novels have laid the foundations for the development of re-Orientalist theory. These and other postcolonial critics have raised the issue of how some Orientals – South Asian-origin authors, for instance – are aggressively promoted in order to make a marketable commodity out of exoticizing the Orient or products from the Orient.

Even if the concept of re-Orientalism, with its various terminologies, has been under discussion for some time, the recent lively response to Lau’s article may signal that this is a concept ripe for further study. This project incorporates the historical understandings of re-Orientalism as well as extends its applicability and, perhaps more significantly, examines its ramifications and implications more thoroughly. Re-Orientalism theory investigates the process and workings of re-Orientalism in order to begin to address why it occurs: for instance, may Orientals, perceiving that there is a demand for low quality, exotically flavoured fare, deliberately pander to this demand and voluntarily self-Other so as to provide an unsustaining diet which will leave the consumer ever hungry, ever insatiate? Shivani (2006: 3) writes of how this new form of Orientalism violates the integrity of the literature, recycling and reinforcing the shallowest of stereotypes; may this be the empowering and subversive (whether intentionally so or otherwise) response of Orientals who deliberately design material for easy even if non-nourishing consumption, as a response to being applauded and lionized not for the intrinsic value of their art, but out of postcolonial guilt? The success of the aggressive promotion of IWE and South Asian-influenced film and media depends on collaboration between western powers and elite ‘Orientals’, a new re-Orientalizing partnership which upholds that internal consistency of Orientalism. Re-Orientalism theory focuses on the fall-out of particularized promotions of only very select aspects of the orient at the expense of a more holistic representation. Interestingly, this very fall-out often reveals the subtle re-negotiation of power, some degree of humbugging, the setting up of straw men, and other such ingenious strategies in the jockeying for advantageous positions.

Often deliberately provocative, re-Orientalism theory is crucial to the critique of postcolonial cultural production today, in particular given the increasing complexity of global cultural exchange. Re-Orientalism (or the resurfacing of new manifestations of Orientalism) provides a fertile conceptual territory for exploring the pressures and contradictions of postcolonial cultural production, and for testing and exploring the limits of cultural self-fashioning and subversion in a South Asian context. The concept of re-Orientalism offers a more complex understanding of the power dynamics involved in postcolonial cultural production and of the ways that producers (be they creative authors or academics) and texts critically engage with those dynamics. This collection is particularly attentive to this dimension of the debate, and approaches artists’ (at times self-conscious) willingness to engage in re-Orientalizing practices as, at least in part, a response to the pressures imposed by the global cultural marketplace. Contributors are particularly interested in the disruption and renegotiation of subversive representations within shifting notions of Orientalism and the resulting anxieties spelled out by postcolonial cultural producers.

The theory of re-Orientalism as used in this volume is in part based on three key and interrelated aspects of Said’s 1978 Orientalism theory, which it draws on, builds on, but also extends.

First, Said speaks of Orientalism as a way of coming to terms with the ‘Orient’ which is based on the special place of the Orient in European western tradition.

Re-Orientalism theory which focuses on the Orientals’ role in perpetrating Orientalism, notes that curiously, even when in an elite position or positions of power, this elite group of Orientals still reference the West as centre and place themselves as Other. They are not just being Othered any more by western powers, they are in the process of self-Othering. And of course not just literally themselves; they also in the process relegating other orientals they are regarded as representing, as Other. As becomes quite apparent in Lau’s and Tabish Khair’s chapters, re-Orientalism theory is fascinated by why, when given a position of power in which to self-define to some extent, there is the process of re-Orientalism ongoing at all, and explores workings of deliberate self-Othering these in various forms. It also speculates that it may well be the space, a postcolonial space in particular, which having originally normalized the processes of orientalism, may now in turn be normalizing the processes of re-Orientalism.

The critique of re-Orientalism is also intrigued by where – relative to the Centre/Self – re-Orientalists are choosing to position themselves, and whether these ‘peripheral’ positions may in fact be covert vantage points. Just as the Orientalism of British rule in India ‘sought to consolidate a traditional hierarchical society in India to legitimize [its] own position at the top of the hierarchy’ (Ghose 1998: 25), this volume speculates on the probability that re-Orientalists may be perpetrating Orientalisms to concretize their new-found (perhaps incessantly negotiated) positions at the top of the hierarchical order; an order, moreover, which in many cases is a direct legacy of the imperialist order. In a sense, the footwork of the re-Orientalists in self-positioning and re-positioning is what this volume wishes to place under scrutiny.

Second, Said pointed out that Orientalism is less to do with the Orient, and more to do with the West, meaning that how the West chooses to orientalize speaks more about the West than about the Orient.

In like manner, the serious questions which re-Orientalism theory seeks to raise consider the positionalities of re-Orientalists themselves and the directions in which they are driving their sets of Orientalisms. What does re-Orientalism reveal about these particular groups of Orientals? What, collectively, does it depict of these elite groups? What does it say about the way this comprador intelligentsia, with the power of representation, chooses to deconstruct and then reconstruct their Orient? Does it indicate perhaps a class dominance? This volume implicitly and explicitly notes that the re-Orientalists are motivated to no small degree by their tension-filled but continuing intimate relationship with their former colonizers, a relationship which may be closer and of more immediate significance to them than their relationship with their compatriots. (However, this volume does not wish to imply that South Asian-origin authors form a monolith, and the chapters here contained do in fact present a multitude of re-Orientalist strategies employed by various artists and producers of culture.)

Re-Orientalism also turns the spotlight on how, instead of turning the tables and normalizing the Self as may be expected, re-Orientalists instead faithfully keep to the tradition of Orientalism in maintaining the ‘world-as-exhibition’ (Timothy Mitchell 1998). Timothy Mitchell pointed out that making a spectacle of the East, producing the world-as-exhibition, was a technique of rendering supposedly imperial truths and claiming objectivity (Timothy Mitchell 1998: 461), and it could thus be extrapolated that continuing to serve up the East as spectacle may be a re-Orientalist technique of claiming cultural truth and authority in representation. Re-Orientalist theory explores the ways in which the East is rendered up as spectacle for consumption, and with which flavourings.

Third, Said has pointed out that Orientalism has a curious internal coherence in itself and in its ideas about the Orient; ‘the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it’, he remarks, ‘deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient’ (Said 2003: 5).

The workings of re-Orientalism, although found in a range of mediums across continents, as this volume demonstrates, show precisely that same curious internal consistency even when in the hands of such different agents. It does not show an exact replica of representations (that would suggest a conspiracy/collaboration and there is no suspicion of any such), but it does show a consistent narrative, almost a meta-narrative, of which re-Orientalism theory advocates being particularly wary. Re-Orientalism theory therefore always has to take into account the radical instability of representation, and never more so than when Orientals are perpetrating (new forms of) Orientalisms, and this in turn raises the thorny, problematic issues of accuracy and realism of representation or, in a nutshell, authenticity.

In one notable way however, re-Orientalism does depart from Orientalist tradition: in Orientalism, the voice of the narrator, the writer, the gazer, is often presented as objective and universal (as opposed to subjective and individual), the identity of the observer not revealed because not pertinent.

The representation of the orient, in its attempt to be detached and objective, would seek to eliminate from the picture the presence of the European observer … To establish the objectness of the Orient, as a picturereality containing no sign of the increasingly pervasive European presence, required that the presence itself, ideally, become invisible.

(Mitchell 1998: 470)

For Orientalists, power lay in being able to see and represent without being seen in turn or having to declare themselves. Interestingly, it is the opposite for re-Orientalists, who utilize positionality to prove eligibility as representative and validity of testimony and authority. Their claimed status is almost that of ‘witness’, which is a far less empowered position than that of Orientalists who saw no reason to justify themselves; which implies perhaps they perceived no higher authority which would necessitate justifications, unlike re-Orientalists. Once again, the position of the re-Orientalists seems to imply the (uneasy) awareness of a critical (perhaps western imperial) Other looking over their shoulders.

Our use of the ‘re-Orientalism’ concept does not intend to erase the question of essentialism. This question is indeed crucial to re-Orientalism in the attempt to inquire critically into how Orientalism has been re-inscribed into the cultural imaginary, in particular, by South Asians themselves. Moreover, re-Orientalism theory critiques the continued attempt to hold the Orient as a completely separate entity, as separately Oriental, as essentially Oriental,

the notion of the real, such a system of truth, continues to convince us. The case of Orientalism shows us, moreover, how this supposed distinction between a realm of representation and an external reality corresponds to another apparent division of the world, into the West and the non-West.

(Mitchell, 1998: 472)

The question is then the extent to which re-Orientalists are prey to this paradigm, and the extent to which they have been able to transcend it, even if only partially. Mitchell argues that Orientalism is not just a nineteenth-century phenomenon, nor even just an aspect of colonial domination, but an entire method or order ‘essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world’ (Mitchell 1998: 472), which if true, would imply that re-Orientalism is in fact the natural heir to Orientalism.

Re-Orientalism theory also critiques the relationship between East and West where the West continues to visit the East as tourist and in touristic mode, i.e. with a lack of engagement or, at least, engaging only at superficial levels, and where well-positioned members of the East act as tourist guides rather than flatly refuse to trade in such terms. So, although attentive to the implications of the heterogeneity embedded in categories such as ‘the West’, ‘the East’, ‘South Asian authors’, ‘western readers’ and ‘Orientals’, the ‘strategic use of positivist essentalism’ is, as Spivak observes (Landry and MacLean 1996: 205), sometimes unavoidable. But with this keen awareness in mind, we will be treading very carefully as we juggle such encompassing terms, and taking as much care as we can not to arbitrarily flatten the contours of cultural, social and class diversity.

It is not our intention to argue simplistically that there is an i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introducing re-Orientalism: A New Manifestation of Orientalism
• 2. Re-Orientalism in Contemporary Indian Writing in English
• 3. On the Entrepreneurial Ethos in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
• 4. ‘Tomorrow’s Brother’: Contesting Orientalisms in Gopal Baratham’s A Candle or the Sun
• 5. Pulp Frictions
• 6. Re-Orientalism is on TV: From Salman Rushdie’s The Aliens Show to The Kumars at No. 42
• 7. Foreign Fantasies and Genres in Bride & Prejudice: Jane Austen re-Orientalizes British Bollywood
• 8. More than Meets the Eye: Two Kinds of re-Orientalism in Naseeruddin Shah’s what if?
• 9. Re-Orientalisms: Meditations on Exoticism and Transcendence, Otherness and the Self
• Index