From Orientalism to Postcolonialism

Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Difference

Sucheta Mazumdar, Vasant Kaiwar, Thierry Labica

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135211974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book uses a historical and theoretical focus to examine the key of issues of the Enlightenment, Orientalism, concepts of identity and difference, and the contours of different modernities in relation to both local and global shaping forces, including the spread of capitalism.

The contributors present eight in-depth studies and a substantial theoretical introduction, utilizing primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Farsi, Chinese, not to mention English, French and German in the effort to engage materials and cultural perspectives from diverse regions. It provides a critical attempt to think through the potentialities and limitations of area-studies and 'civilizational' approaches to the production of knowledge about the modern world, and the often obscured relationship between the fragment and the whole, or the particular and universal. The book is an intervention in one of the most fundamental debates confronting the social science and humanities, namely how to understand global and local historical processes as interconnected developments affecting human actors.

From Orientalism to Postcolonialism will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies and Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies.

Part I
Geographies of Otherness

1
The Coordinates of Orientalism¹

Reflections on the Universal and the Particular

Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar

I. Preface

This chapter aims to move the concept of Orientalism beyond its familiar moorings in binary difference and argues further that Orientalism is neither simply an apparatus of power for managing the Orient,² nor merely dispersable through its descriptive manifestations into its component parts, be they cultural-academic Orientalism or political-administrative Orientalism.³ At its zenith Orientalism may have provided a range of instruments to aid colonial rule; in its more recent revivalist forms to aid Asian nation-states in their search for an essential characteristic differentiating them from their Western counterparts and from each other, a case of being more Oriental than the rest. But, a theoretical understanding requires going beyond these functional aspects of Orientalism to the source of the universal/particular antinomy, analyzed here as its third coordinate.⁴

The chapter that follows is divided into three parts: The first section will lay out the preconditions of Orientalism in the development of new kinds of metageography (space) and metahistory (time) that function as the space-time coordinates around which the scaffolding of Orientalism is built up, narrativized with the help of a range of academic disciplines and manifested in the cultural-academic and political-administrative fields. This section will also try to separate this phenomenon from any narrowly colonizing enterprise, though its purpose is not so revisionist as to suggest that the narratives could not be annexed to colonial rule. Section II will begin to address the issue of what the scaffolding was built around; the third coordinate constituted by a set of antinomies that underpin European universalism and everybody else’s particularisms and that constitute, as it were, the formal structure of Orientalism. The third coordinate also helps us see beyond the spuriously comparative exercises that are still widely thought to be the distinguishing characteristic of Orientalism. Section III will look at the way in which “Orientalism-in-Reverse,” emanating from the peripheries so to speak, accepted the coordinates of Orientalism – including the third – but attempted to rework them as part of the political underlabouring of anti-colonial nationalism. The results were frequently quite ironic, for as this chapter tries to show such efforts involved literally adopting European definitions of what constituted the specificity of each society. Non-Europe embraced these irreducible particularities and specificities while arguing that European universality was merely instrumental and oppressive to colonial subjects.

II. The Scaffolding of Orientalism

Mapping on a continental, or even global, scale is an important part of the construction of the scaffolding of Orientalism. The all-too familiar map developed by the Fleming cartographer Mercator (1512–94), was not centred on Jerusalem as in medieval Christian maps but placed Europe at the top-centre in 1569, inaugurating “the notion of Europe as central and the northern hemisphere as on top.”⁵ While the spaces of the northern latitudes in the Mercator maps consequently appeared much larger than those closer to the equator, in this map as in the seventeenth-century world maps of John Speed (1627) or that of Nicolo Lombardi (1623) dividing the world into the “Old” and the “New” hemispheres was more common and all still tended to portray Eurasia as one contiguous landmass.⁶ The tricky matter of where Asia began was resolved by imperial fiat: the Spanish crown continued to label the Americas “Indias Occidentales” and its Asian holdings in the Philippines as part of the Occidentales.⁷

These new mappings of the world, marking a “discontinuity of the classical tradition in all its forms” has been labelled “Occidentalism” by Mignolo, the discursive formation “inventing Americas and redefining Europe” which he identifies as a precursor to the centering of Europe.⁸ At the same time, however, the people of the “Orient” continued to provide pre-knowledge of the people of the Americas. Columbus, of course, thought he had reached Cipango (Japan) when he landed in Hispaniola and left the lasting legacy of his confusion between the Indians of America and the Indians of India in the namings that have since been standardized. Narratives of empire and civilizational missions conflated differences of others. Juan Ginés de Sepúlvada (1494–1573) defender of the Spanish empire’s right of conquest argued that Native Americans were just like the Turks, “inculti” and “inhumani,” whose public customs so violated natural law that they were “barbarous and inhuman” and hence had to be colonized.⁹ William Robertson (1721–93), a Scottish historian and stadialist like his contemporary Adam Smith discussed below, formulated his history in evolutionary hierarchies of savagery, barbarism and civilization. In his widely-read History of America (1777), Robertson found that the “savages” of the Mississippi and on the banks of the Danube were quite comparable, and that the “character and occupations of the hunter in American must be little different from those of an Asiatic who depends for subsistence on the chase.”¹⁰ As late as 1776, Georges Buffon (1707–88), many brilliant insights notwithstanding, theorized that the Americas were inferior to Europe in every way.¹¹ All others in America, such as the “savages of Canada,” the “Greenlanders” and the “Exquimaux Indians” were quite similar to the Laplanders and the Tartars, a “degenerate species” with no religion, morality and decency while the ancestors of the Europeans were produced in the “officina gentium” of the Nordic denizens of the northern nations.¹²

But while the Americas continued to be mapped, colonized and the indigenous peoples exterminated through war and disease, attention to mapping the separation of “Europe” from “Asia” became a new project in parts of the continent. Unlike the world of the Americas that could be invented as “novus,” and thereby clearly separate, maps of the major continent of Eurasia already existed, which made the enterprise of marking difference with Asia more complicated. The map of “L’Europe” (1700) by the famous French royal geographer Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726), in his noted “Map of Continents,” took pains to distinguish with baroque detail the separations of “Moscovie Europe”, “Moscovie Asiatique,” and “Turquie Europe”, “Turquie Asiatique.” But this map was not to general satisfaction for it reiterated the medieval vision of a smallish European landmass starting westwards of the Don, and depicted Hungary as “enveloped in the estates of the Turk.”¹³ Ultimately, the most successful effort to map Europe as a separate continent, that became the standard, emerged out of Russia, aggressively engaged in state building as a “European” nation in the early eighteenth century. Russia, long “ruled by nomadic peoples who were clearly not European, beyond the formal limits of Romanized ‘civilization’ …and stubbornly an oriental despotism,”¹⁴ was to be recast as “Europe” by Peter the Great’s westernization projects. By relocating the imperial capital to the Baltic front, mandating that the aristocracy wear silk and speak French and so on, Peter gave Russia “the manners of Europe,” as Montesquieu remarked approvingly. Maps were produced to mark this new location. Philip Johann von Strahlenberg (1676– 1747), geographer and captured Swedish military officer, exiled to Siberia after Russia’s victorious war against Sweden, helped formulate for the Russian court what was to become the established map of Europe. von Strahlenberg aimed to resolve the “uncertainty” of the boundaries between Europe and Asia “so that they will remain determined forever.”¹⁵ The “continent” of Europe was now separated from the “continent” of Asia with the boundary being drawn at the mountain-chain of the Urals, abandoning the convention that a continent by definition was a land-mass surrounded by water. Lewis and Wigen are undoubtedly right in insisting this new type of mapping suggested a remodeled architecture of continents based on meta-geographical concepts that were “a set of spatial structures through which people order[ed] their knowledge of the world.”¹⁶ It is unclear, however, precisely what knowledge of Europe and Asia was embodied in these maps: differences without a distinction or something more?

The answer to this begins to emerge from other quarters. Montesquieu (1689–1755) was one of the first intellectuals outside Russia to draw on the work of von Strahlenberg systematically to articulate social theories on the absolute separation of Asia from Europe and make it the core of his “fourfold continental scheme.”¹⁷ Drawing the border of Europe at the Volga and reiterating medieval geographic determinism, Montesquieu claimed in his famous De l’esprit des lois (1748) that all forms of social and political outcomes were traceable to climatic influences.¹⁸ Chapter XIV of the book, “Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate,” includes many references to the impact of the climate on the...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary Asia Series
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Geographies of Otherness
• Part II Spectres of the Revolution and the Orientalist Turn
• Part III The Dialectic of Capital and Community-Authenticity
• Index