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Orientalism, 30 years later

Department of English and Related Literature
University of York
1 November 2008

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Panel 1: Origins and Influences

Said before Said

Donna Landry (Kent)

I would like to trouble the waters regarding the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of Said’s own periodization with regard to representations of the East before 1798. I am going to suggest a certain prescience, as well as perspicacity, on Said’s part, that carries through into the predictive qualities of Orientalism, especially the staging of Orientalism as a discursive paradigm. Not even hostile reception of Said’s book as a ‘history of Orientalism’, by Robert Irwin, for example, has been able to gainsay the importance of Said’s discursive paradigm when it is set to work to expose post-1948 western policies towards the Middle East. And the paradigm works to some extent to expose, in pre-1800 writing, certain tendencies that emerge before the fact of British imperial might or colonial administrative experience. I will end with Said’s telling phrase ‘the wall of denials’ in relation to the shape of competing, and incommensurable, narratives that have undergone all too concrete materialisation in the ‘apartheid wall’ or ‘security fence’ currently defacing Israel/Palestine.

Donna Landry is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century at the University of Kent. Her publications include Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 (Palgrave, 2001).

American Orientalism in the Nineteenth Century

Rajeshwari Mishka Sinha (Cambridge)

In Said’s polemical book, American Orientalism appears to occur after World War II, and is discussed primarily in relation to post-war interests in the Middle-East. There was however, a robust tradition of Orientalism in nineteenth-century America. American Orientalism comprised philosophical, scholarly, and popular strands. The first is the best documented, being associated with widely recognised figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, and their colleagues in the Neo-Transcendentalist movement. The scholarly strand shared many traits with the European academic Orientalism Said describes, but shows distinct cultural elements. The popular strand of American Orientalism was closely related to the great surge of interest and activity relating to spiritualism, alternative religion and heterodox cults in America from about the mid-nineteenth century. American Orientalism included Hebrew, Arabic and Persian, however I will concentrate exclusively on Indian philosophy and philology and Sanskrit and Buddhist texts. While the philosophical and popular strands will be discussed as contextual material, I will focus on scholarly traditions and Sanskrit studies emerging in nineteenth century America, particularly in New England, within the paradigm of a self-consciously indigenous intellectual and academic tradition. I will follow the work of the philologists, Professors Edward Salisbury, William D. Whitney and C.R. Lanman, tracing the beginnings of Sanskrit studies and of the American Oriental Society, at Yale, to the apogee of Indian Philosophy at Harvard by the founding of the Harvard Oriental Series, and through these means explore the manner in which Orientalism is simultaneously inherited and re-made in different receiving cultures.

Rajeshwari Mishka Sinha is working towards a PhD in Oriental Studies at Cambridge. Her thesis is on the Cultural History of Sanskrit and Sanskrit translation in Europe and America: 1778 – 1938. Sinha has a BA in English, from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay (1997), and an M.Phil, English (Modern), from the University of Oxford (2001). She also spent one year at Emory University, Atlanta, studying English, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.

Confessions of a Dangerous Paradigm

Andrea Teti (Aberdeen)

Despite the widespread acknowledgement that Said was influenced by Foucault, virtually no effort has gone into analysing Orientalism from a Foucaultian perspective. This paper draws on Foucault’s analysis of confession in History of Sexuality to explore parallels between Confession and Orientalism. This perspective provides a better understanding of how Orientalist discourse helps articulate Western-Middle Eastern relations.

The paper argues, firstly, that the subject positions of the Occidental and Oriental in Orientalism parallel those of Confessor and Sinner in the discourse on Confession, and secondly that the cultural essentialism which marks Arabo-Islamic alterity as essentially and dangerously deviant closely mirrors the construction of sexuality as sin in Foucault’s analysis. This gives rise to ‘effects of power’ in Orientalism strongly reminiscent of Confession’s, thus helping to understand how Orientalism helps justify and apply discipline. This standpoint also suggests that Orientalism’s several disciplinary politics in the two apparently distinct areas of the West and in the Middle East must be understood as a single phenomenon. Specifically, this confessional relation give rise to a double politics of care, identifying/defining the risks to two ‘twinned’ populations –Arabo-Islamic and Western– as well as the measures to guard against such dangers. This in turn involves a double politics of failure: the nature of Arabo-Islamic alterity being unchangeable but also inextinguishable, it prevents itself –but also its would-be benefactors– from ever achieving their stated goal. This failure confirms the initial diagnosis, absolves the Confessor from any responsibility, and legitimises –indeed, requires– the application of ‘corrective’ discipline in the interest of the populations themselves. In this double politics of discipline, since alterity is Pathological, dissent within the ‘West’ itself becomes a target for the same dynamics of care-failure-discipline. Thus, far from contributing to their declared emancipatory goals, the characterisations of the Normal and of the Pathological which Orientalism is built upon undermine those very goals, and in doing so, paradoxically help reproduce the framework itself.

Andrea Teti is a lecturer in International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses on Middle Eastern politics, poststructuralist theory, and the history of Social Science.

Panel 2: Orientalism Now

How Does an Arab Think? Orientalism and Israeli Society

Yonatan Mendel (Cambridge)

When analysing Israeli discourse, its attitudes toward the Palestinian Other and Israel’s political decision-making, one can argue that the relevant framework is nothing but the study of conflict, militarism and security-demands. Orientalism may seem irrelevant in such a discussion. However, in my paper I will argue that Orientalism indeed makes an effective tool for understanding Israeli discourse, knowledge-construction and political acts. Ignoring the notion of Orientalism prevents a full understanding of Israeli society, and could stem from the Orientalistic values that had penetrated into the Israeli-Arab conflict’s debate.

My paper will deal with two components of Orientalism. First, it will highlight how the process of producing socio-political knowledge about Arabs in Israel is Arab-free. The paper will examine the fields from which Arab citizens of Israel were excluded, emphasising these were the very spheres where ‘facts’ about Arab society were discussed and concluded. It will be argued that in Israel, knowledge about the Other was constructed not only by ignoring Arab citizens geographically or politically, but also personally. This assisted with the creation and preservation of a discourse which was and still is Jewish and Zionist only, and which immunises Jewish society from being challenged by different ideas that will force it to imagine the Arab differently.

The second component of Orientalism to be discussed is the consequences of this imagined knowledge on Israeli political life, and the way it serves Israeli political establishment. For example, the solid Israeli notions that the Palestinians are not ‘ready for peace’, that Israeli Arabs live in ‘Arab villages’ and never in cities, and that their main identity marker is the Hamula (extended family), served as the background for Israel’s discriminatory, unequal and also violent acts. These insights were duplicated and cloned, within the academia, media, political arena and school systems, and became the country’s common sense, through which it understands reality and upon which it reacts.

Yonatan Mendel is a PhD student at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. He is conducting his doctoral research in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies under the supervision of Prof. Yasir Suleiman. His research deals with Arabic language and security in Israeli society.

Cannibalizing Iraq: Topos of Neo-Orientalism

Moneera Al-Ghadeer (UW-Madison)

My paper, “Cannibalizing Iraq: Topos of Neo-Orientalism,” examines the radical transformation of the image of the foreign and the ethnic other after September 11^th, 200. How can we theorize Said’s Orientalism after 9/11? How does the new imperialist discourse evoke orientalism and appropriate its rhetoric? I will argue in my paper that the recent evocation of the foreign instigates explicit dread to the extent that the foreign is separated from any relation to the aesthetics of the sublime that arise in the height of European imperialism during the 19^th century and early 20^th century. Said most compellingly taught us about this appropriation, reconstruction, and invention of the orient in the European colonialist discourse. No one would deny that the American discourse on the Middle East rests heavily on the legacy of Orientalism and bears its burden but I will argue that while the Middle East replaces the European orient, it maintains its negative descriptions which are, then, reappropriated and trivialized to reemerge devoid of any ontological or epistemological signification. In this respect, the new orient or Middle East is only endowed with sheer negativity, threat, and terror; it is despotic, violent, chaotic, ancient, and has no splendor according to the rhetoric of American new imperialism. Contrary to the European orient, this new Middle East is stripped of its civilization, history, artistic value, monuments, etc. In this manner, the only conceivable form of foreignness or otherness is culturally and ethnically determined and ultimately is linked to essentialist foundations, figuring dark-skinned bodies in terms of terror.

I will contextualize my investigation with Said’s discussion in Orientalism and show its radical return after September 11^th. I will demonstrate how this emerging new orientalist discourse is dominated by cannibalistic imagery in the American media and political scene. Cannibalism is often linked to a continual devouring of the other whether on the political or cultural levels, projecting and ascribing archaic characterizations to what has been subjected to annihilation and destruction. I primarily address the conflict with the foreign through an analysis of media representation of the ethnically other while focusing on Abu Ghraib photos as a topos of carnification. The military report has revealed approximately 280 individual digital photos and 19 digital movies portraying scenes of torture. I address the following questions: Why did the foreign become marked with anxiety and devoid of aesthetic fascination after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the US wars thereafter? How do media networks represent this uncanny return to cannibalism and where does it originate? How does the anxiety of the foreign overlap with the desire to cannibalize masculinity in Abu Ghraib? To answer these questions, I will examine a number of sexually violent images, depicting Iraqi men in sado-masochistic and pornographic settings where torture, rape, sodomy, and masochistic behavior are portrayed or implicated. These images bear the mark of European colonialism while cannibalizing the rhetoric of Orientalism, engendering a spectacle saturated with contemptuous depictions of “the Arab mind” and its deviant attitude towards sexuality. One of the disquieting characteristics in such images is the acting out of the fantasy in which the other is perceived as primitive, ultimately recasting a more savage and more transgressive Iraqi while unraveling further sensations of estrangement and alienation. Indeed, what is left of Said’s Orientalism is far more evocative and propels a reconsideration of its current political and cultural implications.

Professor Moneera Al-Ghadeer received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkeley and now is an Associate Professor in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the international Affairs Program at Qatar University. Publications include Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry from Saudi Arabia, I. B. Tauris, Academic Series. Currently, Professor Al-Ghadeer is finishing her second book, The Anxiety of the Foreign.

The ‘War on Terror’ and the Backlash against Orientalism

Robert Spencer (Manchester)

Orientalism has been read by many postcolonial scholars as a work of epistemological scepticism: in other words, as a book that argues the impossibility of minds in one ‘culture’ gaining adequate and constructive knowledge of the lives lived in another. Yet what has been too rarely noted is the way in which the book is also consonant with Said’s quite different aspirations for interventionist scholarship and political universalism. Orientalism in fact makes clear the continuities between classical Orientalist scholarship and the erroneousness and injuriousness of contemporary American preconceptions about Islam and the Middle East, preconceptions that underpin the US’s political and military hegemony in the region. For Said the term ‘Orientalism’ names a durable system of misrepresentations that can be combated by scholarship that is so methodologically self-conscious and so meticulously attentive to the region that it studies that it succeeds in producing and propagating knowledge. Later works by Said such as Humanism and Democratic Criticism place the cultural understanding brought about by such scholarship at the service of a humanist ethic that strives for the advent of a global or cosmopolitan community.

My aim is to show how the current backlash against Orientalism constitutes firstly an attempt to discredit the radical pedagogical potential of postcolonial perspectives and secondly a proxy defence of the legitimacy of American power in the era of the so-called war on terror. I will show how recent works such as Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West and Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand, as well as less openly polemical texts such as David Martin Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid and Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, all criticise Orientalism and the academic field of postcolonial studies that it helped to found for what they see as a hypercritical account of Western power and culture. This paper offers an alternative reading of Orientalism. It avoids the dominant interpretation that is, ironically, shared by the new Orientalists and by many postcolonialists: Orientalism is read not as a sceptical or relativistic text but as a decidedly timely handbook on intellectual responsibility and cosmopolitan political action.

Robert Spencer has been Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester since 2006. His research interests include postcolonial and especially African fiction, postcolonial theory, and the work of Edward Said. He is currently working on a book which seeks to elaborate a method of ‘cosmopolitan criticism’ . Its aim is to show how, as a crucial aspect of their appeal and utility, postcolonial literary texts can inculcate the aptitudes of cosmopolitan citizenship.

Panel 3: Disciplinary Effects

“A Roomy Place Full of Possibility”: Orientalism and the Literary

Nicholas Harrison (King’s College London)

In Orientalism Said seems to show a soft spot for literary texts by canonical authors. For instance, after stating in general terms: 'a learned Orient inhibit[s] the pilgrim’s musings and private fantasies; its very antecedence places barriers between the contemporary traveller and his writing,' Said goes on: 'unless, as was the case with Nerval and Flaubert [...], Orientalist work is severed from the library and caught in the aesthetic project.' For some of Said's critics this kind of concession is quickly dismissed as an unfortunate side-effect of a privileged education, but it raises questions that I think deserve serious consideration: what defines the 'aesthetic project' for Said, and what place does it have in Orientalism? I will detail Said's hesitations and possible confusions on this point, but want to argue that critics cannot afford to view Said's (or their own) aesthetic commitments as simply contradictory of Orientalism's iconoclastic, historicizing thrust. I hope finally to show that Said had sound reasons to remain attached to the literary, and (yet) that there is a fundamental incommensurability between different discourses on the aesthetic that run not only through Orientalism but through much of the work in postcolonial studies that has come in its wake.

Nick Harrison is Professor of French Studies and Postcolonial Literature at King's College London. His publications include Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (Polity, 2003), and, as editor, The Idea of the Literary (Paragraph / Edinburgh, July 2005) and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, 40 Years On (Interventions / Routledge, November 2007).

Said and the Image

Nicholas Tromans (Kingston)

Neither in Orientalism nor Culture and Imperialism does Said have much to say about the image: ‘culture’, for this Professor of English and Comparative Literature, was essentially literary. But insofar as Said does notice images in Orientalism, we get the sense of their particular culpability in the formation of repressive cultural discourses. The Orientalist panoramic landscape, for example, is described as inherently conservative, setting aesthetic composition at odds with the possibility of change. This point regarding landscape prompts Said’s appearance in Martin Jay’s survey of philosophical iconophobia, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993).

In 1985-86, however, Said engaged intensely with the pictures of Palestinians taken, a few years earlier, by the left-wing Swiss photographer Jean Mohr: the result was their collaborative book After the Last Sky. In this text Said speaks of the photographs’ fragmentary nature allowing them to capture something of the reality of the condition of displacement. The terms in which this equation is made relate closely to those adopted by Linda Nochlin, author of The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994), but also of an earlier paper ‘The Imaginary Orient’ (1983) which applied Said’s thinking to nineteenth-century paintings in a hugely influential fashion. A new, or revived, co-ordination was being posited between diaspora, modernity and the image. Using this configuration as a starting point, this paper will seek to ask what Said’s legacy has been to the academic discipline of Art History. While Orientalism has been as much of a catalyst here as in other fields, Said’s admission of a Franco-American discourse of Modernism has arguably had a restrictive impact.

Nicholas Tromans is Senior Lecturer, Kingston University. He is the author of David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh University Press 2007); the curator and catalogue editor of The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (Tate Britain, etc., 2008-09); and the co-author of books accompanying three further exhibitions opening in 2008-09: on William Holman Hunt, Richard Dadd, and on British art’s engagement with Spain.

Said, Humanism and Disability: Participatory Citizenship and Radical Democratic Criticism

Stuart Murray (Leeds)

This paper takes as its cue a thread of Said’s thoughts on humanism and writing that was present throughout his career but finds special focus in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). In that volume he argues for a necessary relationship between humanism and critical practice, given that “there is, in fact, no contradiction at all between the practice of humanism and the practice of participatory citizenship” (22). Following this lead, the paper will examine Said’s thinking in terms of being a catalyst for an idea of ‘participatory citizenship’ in terms of representations of disabled lives and exceptionalities. Just as it seemed incongruous for a radical postcolonial critic to support the principles of cultural humanism when the ideology appears so bound up in the processes of colonial rule, so it might seem counter-intuitive for a disability studies perspective to embrace the concept, given the damage that has been done to those with disabilities by the working concept of ‘the human’. My argument is that what Said once theorised as ‘The Shadow of the West’ might also be conceived of in terms of other formations of such shadowing, and that his own thinking around the issues of representation, consumption and power can find fruitful resonance within arguments about disability that seek to rethink a radical idea of humanism to promote a democratic inclusion of difference.

Stuart Murray is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds. His research is divided between analyses of postcolonial cultural histories and that of the representations of disability. He is the author of Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s (1998), Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema (2008) and Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (2008); the editor of Not On Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism (1997); and the co-editor of New Zealand Filmmakers (2007) and Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster (2008). He will be co-editing a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on the topic of disability and postcoloniality.