Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film

Beyond East and West

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel, Bernard Wilson, Sharmani Patricia Gabriel, Bernard Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Acknowledging the significance of Edward Said's Orientalism for contemporary discourse, the contributors to this volume deconstruct, rearrange, and challenge elements of his thesis, looking at the new conditions and opportunities offered by globalization.

What can a renewed or reconceptualized Orientalism teach us about the force and limits of our racial imaginary, specifically in relation to various national contexts? In what ways, for example, considering our greater cross-cultural interaction, have clichés and stereotypes undergone a metamorphosis in contemporary societies and cultures? Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality.

Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as for those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film.

1 Introduction

Resisting Orientalism

Bernard Wilson and Sharmani Patricia Gabriel

The influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), both in its specific theoretical applications to the geographies and cultures of Asia and North Africa and especially the region designated as the ‘Middle East’ (the ‘Islamic Orient’), and its salience more generally as a Western European (and American) system of thought and attitude that brought the non-Western ‘Other’ into representation ‘geographically, culturally, morally’ (Said 31), has been well documented and closely debated across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and especially in literature and literary theory, cultural studies, history, art history, anthropology, sociology, and politics. Said’s treatise on the uses to which Western ‘knowledge about and knowledge of Orientals, their race, character, culture, history, traditions, society, and possibilities’ (38) was put, and its underlying attributes of power and authority, shored up by the notion of objective universality, was instrumental in uncovering the ideological biases and imperatives that underpinned the Western discourse of cultural hegemony. It was this ‘way of coming to terms with the Orient’ (Said 1), based on an epistemological and ontological distinction made between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, Said contends, that provided legitimacy to European and American colonial and imperial ambitions and their ‘civilizing’ mission.

In the more than four decades since the publication of Said’s Orientalism, the world, both ‘East’ and ‘West’, has undergone vast transformations in political and economic ideologies and in the power relationships that stem from them, in the increasing influence of developing economies, creating in themselves new forms of colonialism, in the discourse of the ‘rise and rise of China’, in the perceived decline in traditional Western power sources, and in the ways in which information circulates across and within nations and cultures.

Written in the mid-1970s, during the period of the Cold War, and grounded in the political matrix of its time, with the Arab-Israeli conflict and tragedy of Palestinian dispossession unfolding in the background, the terms of struggle and ideas at stake in Said’s critical vision were future-oriented and prescient enough to encompass the geopolitical, institutional, and ideological changes that would sweep across the world.

Globalization is at the core of many of these changes, but is this to say that globalization, along with its genealogies of power, has destabilized Orientalism’s East-West oppositions? Or has globalization and its new power regime merely rearranged the unequal relations between East and West in newer and more insidious ways? And what exactly does the term constitute? At the turn of the century, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four aspects of globalization: economic trade, the movement of capital and investment, migration and the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas and knowledge beyond one’s national borders (2000).

Though any retrospective analysis of Orientalism reasonably takes into account the mutual interdependence of all of these areas, it is with the dissemination of knowledge, particularly cultural knowledge and how it is constructed and represented, with which this collection is principally concerned; and how (or indeed if) in connection with changes in power discourses and relationships, on political, cultural, religious, and ideological grounds, the dissemination of knowledge, and the modes of representation of cultures once considered to be indisputably Other has shifted.

Connected to this are changes in colonial structures and their reinterpretation in the new millennium and movements toward in Walter Mignolo’s terms, decoloniality as an alternative to a Eurocentric/Americancentric politics of knowledge, and the entrapment of ‘unipolar time conceptions [in] a universal time that is owned by a particular civilization’ (2017, 2–3). This decolonial approach to knowledge production, as Mignolo argues, frees our understanding of cultural relationships and geopolitical structures:

In a sense, it is an argument for globalization from below; at the same time, it is an argument for the geopolitically diversal—that is, one that conceives diversity as a (cosmopolitan) universal project. If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each other, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs.

(2000b, 745)

‘Diversality’, in the decolonial terms outlined by Mignolo, and unlike the more homogeneous tenets of universalism, recognizes cultural difference and ‘otherness’ in various forms and does not elide them as a moral or cultural or intellectual weakness or inferiority (such as in the interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas and Ulrich Beck to name but two). Diversality, then, in its encounter with otherness, creates no space for racism and ethnocentrism. Thus, cultural interaction in this sense does not suggest sameness per se but fundamental points of connection, by working with and through difference and by reimagining cultural relationships and representations beyond the traditional Western dominance/Eastern subjugation dichotomy drawn upon in normative or received interpretations of Orientalism.

Challenges to the effectiveness of Said’s inceptive cultural model of Western knowledge production and its deep implication in the operations of power have been made from several quarters over the decades since its publication, initially on the grounds of historical inaccuracies and a convenient conflation of disciplines. Among these, Bernard Lewis was an immediate and vehement critic of Said’s analyses of East/West power dynamics (in this instance in Covering Islam [1981]) because of what he terms ‘[Said’s] disdain of facts’ (1982, 15). According to Lewis, Said’s tendency toward emotive prose over scientific specificity, and his opportunistic use of ‘Islam’ for purposes beyond its intended parameters had resulted in a rigorous academic discipline being abused for political purposes and ‘poisoned by the kind of intellectual pollution that in our time has made so many previously useful words unfit for use in rational discourse’ (1982, 3), an argument he expands upon in Islam and the West (1993). Other notable critics include Aijaz Ahmad, whose In Theory (1992) queried aspects of Said’s (and Fredric Jameson’s) thesis within a Marxist framework, arguing that through his homogeneous use of Western polemical texts Said reinforces the very systems he is attacking, and Robert Young, who observed that ‘if Said denies that there is any actual Orient which could provide a true account of the Orient represented by Orientalism, how can he claim in any sense that the representation is false?’ (1990, 130).

While it is not surprising that a book of this intellectual and ideological positioning would stimulate considerable debate, and even vitriol, what these critics have failed to take into account are the qualifications and clarifications about his purpose and methodology that Said was careful to lay out in his Introduction to the book. As Said asserts, his interest is not with the real Orient, but with the culture and ‘imaginative geography’ of the region pre-constituted as the ‘Orient’ and, more specifically, with the assumptions, biases, and other acts of exclusion by which the Orient as an idea and image of the West’s Other has been brought into representation in Western texts and institutions of learning. In short, he was interested in exploring the modes by which the East came to be ‘Orientalized’. Said’s concern, then, is with the Orient as a constructed concept. Indeed, the ‘real’ or ‘true’ Orient, if there was one, would exist outside of its textual representation and thus outside of the discursive construction of Orientalism as a field of knowledge. That is to say, Said’s larger purpose in Orientalism was to chart the constitution of power itself (primarily French and British and also American), and to explore its material effects, rather than to be concerned with a geographical East with its own corresponding empirical reality, ideas, cultures, history, and imagination of itself. Of central and consistent importance to Said was the relationship between Western power and knowledge, and the attributes of authority and cultural hegemony – and ‘the veridic discourse about the Orient’ (Said 14) – that the expediency of this power-knowledge nexus enabled.

To return to Mignolo, and more specifically his argument initially articulated in The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), in his rejection of the Western historiographical narrative of linear time in favour of a pluritopic hermeneutics in which the relationship of time and space and the site of production are reconsidered to include indigenous societies (in his case, with specific reference to those of Latin America), Mignolo’s work offers an alternative, lateral, approach. He asserts that postcolonial theorizing in the latter quarter of the twentieth century stems from the historical relocation and redistribution of societies into First, Second, and Third Worlds, and the subsequent collapse of those distinctions – theorizing which we would suggest remains readily evident in early Saidian self/other and colonial/postcolonial binaries that impose an ord...