Orientalism and Literature 9781108499002, 9781108614672, 2019004122

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O R I EN T AL I SM A N D L IT E RA TU RE

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept’s evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism’s origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field, such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said’s Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (e.g. colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism. geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. He is the author/editor of: Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World (2017); Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film (2014); Writing Muslim Identity (2012); and Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008).

cambridge critical concepts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation and criticism. By addressing the origins, development and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates and specialists, as well as for those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy.

Published Titles Law and Literature Edited by Kieran Dolin University of Western Australia Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M. Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West-Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter Herman San Diego State University Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey P. Nash SOAS, University of London

Forthcoming Titles Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais, Goldsmiths, University of London, and David Weir, The Cooper Union

ORIENTALISM AND LITERATURE edited by GEOFFREY P. NASH SOAS, University of London

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499002 doi: 10.1017/9781108614672 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Nash, Geoffrey, editor. title: Orientalism and literature / edited by Geoffrey P. Nash. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2019004122 | isbn 9781108499002 (hardback : alk. paper) subjects: lcsh: Orientalism in literature. | Orientalism. classification: lcc pn56.3.o74 o746 2019 | ddc 809/.933585–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004122 isbn 978-1-108-49900-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

O R I EN T AL I SM A N D L IT E RA TU RE

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept’s evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism’s origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field, such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said’s Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (e.g. colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism. geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. He is the author/editor of: Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World (2017); Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film (2014); Writing Muslim Identity (2012); and Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008).

cambridge critical concepts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation and criticism. By addressing the origins, development and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates and specialists, as well as for those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy.

Published Titles Law and Literature Edited by Kieran Dolin University of Western Australia Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M. Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West-Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter Herman San Diego State University Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey P. Nash SOAS, University of London

Forthcoming Titles Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais, Goldsmiths, University of London, and David Weir, The Cooper Union

ORIENTALISM AND LITERATURE edited by GEOFFREY P. NASH SOAS, University of London

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499002 doi: 10.1017/9781108614672 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Nash, Geoffrey, editor. title: Orientalism and literature / edited by Geoffrey P. Nash. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2019004122 | isbn 9781108499002 (hardback : alk. paper) subjects: lcsh: Orientalism in literature. | Orientalism. classification: lcc pn56.3.o74 o746 2019 | ddc 809/.933585–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004122 isbn 978-1-108-49900-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

O R I EN T AL I SM A N D L IT E RA TU RE

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept’s evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism’s origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field, such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said’s Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (e.g. colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism. geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. He is the author/editor of: Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World (2017); Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film (2014); Writing Muslim Identity (2012); and Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008).

cambridge critical concepts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation and criticism. By addressing the origins, development and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates and specialists, as well as for those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy.

Published Titles Law and Literature Edited by Kieran Dolin University of Western Australia Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M. Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West-Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter Herman San Diego State University Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey P. Nash SOAS, University of London

Forthcoming Titles Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais, Goldsmiths, University of London, and David Weir, The Cooper Union

ORIENTALISM AND LITERATURE edited by GEOFFREY P. NASH SOAS, University of London

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499002 doi: 10.1017/9781108614672 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Nash, Geoffrey, editor. title: Orientalism and literature / edited by Geoffrey P. Nash. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2019004122 | isbn 9781108499002 (hardback : alk. paper) subjects: lcsh: Orientalism in literature. | Orientalism. classification: lcc pn56.3.o74 o746 2019 | ddc 809/.933585–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004122 isbn 978-1-108-49900-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

O R I EN T AL I SM A N D L IT E RA TU RE

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept’s evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism’s origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field, such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said’s Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (e.g. colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism. geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. He is the author/editor of: Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World (2017); Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film (2014); Writing Muslim Identity (2012); and Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008).

cambridge critical concepts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation and criticism. By addressing the origins, development and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates and specialists, as well as for those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy.

Published Titles Law and Literature Edited by Kieran Dolin University of Western Australia Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M. Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West-Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter Herman San Diego State University Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey P. Nash SOAS, University of London

Forthcoming Titles Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais, Goldsmiths, University of London, and David Weir, The Cooper Union

ORIENTALISM AND LITERATURE edited by GEOFFREY P. NASH SOAS, University of London

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499002 doi: 10.1017/9781108614672 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Nash, Geoffrey, editor. title: Orientalism and literature / edited by Geoffrey P. Nash. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2019004122 | isbn 9781108499002 (hardback : alk. paper) subjects: lcsh: Orientalism in literature. | Orientalism. classification: lcc pn56.3.o74 o746 2019 | ddc 809/.933585–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004122 isbn 978-1-108-49900-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments

page ix xiv

Introduction

1

Geoffrey P. Nash

part i origins

33

1 Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century

35

Suvir Kaul

2 The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale

50

James Watt

3 Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism

66

Saree Makdisi

4 The Victorians: Empire and the East

82

Sukanya Banerjee

5 Orientalism and Victorian Fiction

101

Daniel Bivona

6 Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites

117

Christopher Hutton

7 Orientalism and the Bible

133

Ivan Kalmar

part ii development

149

8 Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject Eleanor Byrne vii

151

Contents

viii

9 The Harem: Gendering Orientalism

166

Reina Lewis

10 Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing

185

Ali Behdad

11 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism

202

David Weir

12 Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures

219

Valerie Kennedy

13 Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism?

235

Andrew C. Long

part iii application

253

14 From Orientalism to Islamophobia

255

Mahmut Mutman

15 Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Recent Writing

269

Peter Morey

16 Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle Eastern American Writing

286

Carol W. N. Fadda

17 New Orientalism and the American Media: New York Cleopatra and Saudi “Giggly Black Ghosts”

306

Moneera Al-Ghadeer

18 On Orientalism’s Future(s)

323

Anouar Majid

19 “The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism

337

Patrick Williams

Further Reading Index

353 364

Contributors

sukanya banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her monograph, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (2010), was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize given by NVSA for Best First Book in Victorian Studies, 2012. She is co-editor of New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012); her essays have appeared in such journals as Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Prose Studies and Diaspora. ali behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1994), A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (2005) and Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (2016). He is also the coeditor of A Companion to Comparative Literature (2011) and Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (2013). daniel bivona teaches nineteenth-century British literature at Arizona State University. He has published a number of books and essays, including British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His most recent book is a collection coedited with Marlene Tromp entitled Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics (2016), and he is currently at work on a monograph on character, competition and cooperation in the Victorian age. eleanor byrne is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research and teaching cover postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary British and US literature, and queer theory. Recent work has included “Hanya Yanagihara’s Dark Archaeology of Anthropology” (Interventions, 2018) and “The ix

x

List of Contributors Globalised Garden: Jamaica Kincaid’s Postcolonial Gothic” (WAGADU: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, 2018). She was co-investigator on the British Academy-funded network Troubling Globalisation: Arts and Humanities Approaches (2016–2017). She is currently researching a monograph on tropical and ecogothic literature in the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Pacific.

carol w. n. fadda is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University. She is a recipient of an NEH summer grant, a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship and a Syracuse University Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, and her essays on gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma and transnational citizenship in Arab and Arab American literary texts have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. She is the author of Contemporary Arab American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Home and Belonging (2014) and serves as the editor of the Critical Arab American Studies book series at Syracuse University Press. moneera al-ghadeer was Visiting Professor at Columbia University (Fall and Spring 2015) and Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard University (Fall 2014). She was formerly Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2001–2010). She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published a number of articles and a book titled Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia (2009). christopher hutton is Chair Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. Publications include Linguistics and the Third Reich (1999), Race and the Third Reich (2005), Definition in Theory and Practice (with Roy Harris, 2007), Word Meaning and Legal Interpretation (2014) and Signs, Meaning and Experience (with Adrian Pablé, 2015). ivan kalmar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Kalmar’s work focuses on the image of Jews and Muslims in Western cultural history. He is the author of The Trotskys, Freuds, and Woody Allens (1993) and Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (2013) and coeditor of the volume Orientalism and the Jews (2004). He has recently guest-edited an issue of Patterns of Prejudice, dealing with Islamophobia in the east of the European Union. suvir kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics (2015), Eighteenth-Century British Literature and

List of Contributors

xi

Postcolonial Studies (2009), Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (2000) and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992). He has edited The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (2001) and coedited Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005). valerie kennedy teaches English and world literatures at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Her scholarly interests include Edward Said, Orientalism, postcolonial and travel writing, and Charles Dickens. Her publications include Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (2000), translated into Chinese complex characters, simplified Chinese, Korean and Arabic; “Orientalism” in the online Oxford Bibliography of Victorian Literature (2013); and “Orientalism in the Victorian Era” in the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia (2017). reina lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, UAL. Her books include Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (2015), Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (2004) and Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (1996). She is editor of Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (2013). She is a frequent media commentator, including for the New York Times, Le Monde, BBC television and radio, The Economist, The Guardian, The Times, Vogue Arabia, Businessoffashion .com, Fortune.com and the Huffington Post. She convenes the public talk series Faith & Fashion at the London College of Fashion. andrew c. long teaches writing, literature and media studies in the Claremont Colleges. He also taught at the American University of Beirut and in the City University of New York system, where he earned his PhD in comparative literature. He has published essays in Nineteenth Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, Banipal and Middle East Critique. He is the author of Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880 to 1930 (2014). anouar majid is Professor of English and founding director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Maine, USA. He is the author of five critically acclaimed books on Islam and the West and one novel. He also edits and writes for the online magazine Tingis.

xii

List of Contributors

saree makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. His most recent book is Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is also the author of Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (2014), Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (2010), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003) and Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is presently working on a study entitled London’s Modernities, on the mapping and unmapping of London from the nineteenth century to the present. peter morey is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He works on colonial and postcolonial literature with special reference to South Asia and its diaspora. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (2000), Rohinton Mistry (2004), Framing Muslims (2011) and Islamophobia and the Novel (2018). He has also coedited several volumes, written numerous articles and led two international research projects on Muslims and the West. mahmut mutman is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. He is the author of The Politics of Writing Islam: Voicing Difference (2013) as well as several articles on Orientalism, nationalism, Islamism and cultural theory published in Cultural Critique, Third Text, Rethinking Marxism, Postmodern Culture, Anthropological Theory, Parallax, Radical Philosophy and New Formations. geoffrey p. nash is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. Working in the field of British–Islamicate intercultural contact, his books include Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World (2017), Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film (2014), Writing Muslim Identity (2012), Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008) and From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926 (2005). james watt teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on a study of popular Orientalism in the Romantic period, provisionally titled The Comedy of Difference.

List of Contributors

xiii

david weir had a thirty-year career teaching literature, linguistics and cinema in New York City at The Cooper Union, where he was named Professor Emeritus in 2015. He has published books on Jean Vigo, James Joyce, William Blake, Orientalism, anarchism and decadence. He now lives in a Hudson Valley village in upstate New York. patrick williams is Emeritus Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, where he taught courses on postcolonial theory and culture, film, diaspora, and race and nation. His publications include Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (1993), Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (1996), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1999), Edward Said (2000) and Postcolonial African Cinema (2007). He is on the editorial boards of Theory, Culture and Society and Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Acknowledgments

I wish to extend my thanks to Ray Ryan, as the mover behind this volume, and to the contributors, whose skill, knowledge and effort it showcases. Thanks also to Mina, for her unending patience, and to those of my colleagues who have waited a long time for me to finish the project and move on and engage in new collaborations.

xiv

Introduction Geoffrey P. Nash

What is the relationship between Orientalism and literature, and how does it aid us in our reading? Orientalism and Literature sets out to interrogate a key critical concept in literary studies and has the aim of reviewing the evolution of the concept as it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Building upon existing scholarship, the aim is to give readers a comprehensive grasp of the origins and present contours of Orientalism and to point out future directions in this field. In the early eighteenth century the term designated scholarship on the East, as well as a style in the arts. Interest in the study of Oriental languages led to the establishment of Orientalism as a profession. Although it continued as a discipline for well over two centuries, its scope developed beyond its philological beginnings and its vaguely defined existence as a literary or artistic topic or style. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the academic credibility of Orientalism as an institutionalized discipline began to be contested, and, after Edward Said’s epoch-making volume Orientalism: Western Perceptions of the Orient (1978), the term underwent wholesale re-evaluation. From a literary studies perspective, the value of Said’s work is that it probes foundations of the relationship between the West and its other in the context of the creation of the modern world, as seen through the lens of culture and literature. Said focused on Orientalism in Britain and France, as well as in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century. He was criticized for neglecting the other European traditions of Orientalism – most notably the German, and to a lesser extent the Russian, while in his Introduction to Orientalism, Said also extended the list to Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and Swiss versions. His primary interest was in the most recent empires; subsequent scholarship has examined the other European traditions, as well as nineteenth-century American Orientalism. This volume, however, is not intended as a survey of Orientalism tout court, and of necessity the focus falls primarily on Orientalism in British and Anglophone literary history – although 1

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a French dimension, so vital to Said’s argument especially with respect to imaginative Orientalism, is retained in some chapters. The volume both surveys and references the more important perspectives on Orientalism and attempts explication of their varied arguments insofar as they pertain and add value to the reader’s understanding of Orientalism as a critical concept within literary studies. In this respect, it should also be useful as a pedagogical tool. It is constructed around four dimensions, which do not exclusively correlate with separate parts but are found to varying degrees throughout the different chapters. The first dimension is the relationship between Orientalism and literary studies. In terms of literary representation, Orientalism started out as a style, a taste, a stimulus of imaginative escape and fantasy. Said’s conception of Orientalism transformed the term into a critical concept that continues to inform our reading of literature. In his Introduction to Orientalism, whilst defining Orientalism as a style “based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident,’” Said continued to stress the significance of writing as discourse: “Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on. This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx.”1 Indeed it is vital for our purposes that in his investigation of the construction of Orientalist discourse Said neither follows Foucault’s focus on peripheral documents nor figures historians or social scientists; he instead concentrates primarily on literary texts. The second dimension this volume seeks to address is the methodological relationship between culture and power set out in Orientalism. “For students of literature and criticism, Orientalism offers a marvelous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and textuality” (p. 24). The innovatory and controversial core of Said’s work was the manner in which it asserted Orientalism’s complex connections with ideology, politics and power on the one hand and culture on the other. Alongside this went the insistence that, while it might purport to be a “combination of the empirical and the imaginative,” Orientalism as an idea about a geographical entity – the Orient – “derives to a great extent from the impulse not simply to describe [the Orient], but also to dominate and

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somehow to defend against it.”2 Rather than delineating a reality outside of itself, Orientalism constituted a discourse by means of which Western countries like Britain and France constructed their Other and in so doing projected their own identity. This process was “bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society and . . . anything but mere academic wool-gathering” (p. 332). Of vital importance for the student is to gain an understanding of the relationship between power and the creation of culture and how literature interfaces with this; how images of the East that purported to disclose its irrational, static and unchanging, female essence were predicated on the rationality and masculine dynamism of the Occident. The third dimension is the multidisciplinary context in which Orientalism has been viewed. A professor of comparative and English literature, Said brought an expertise in textual hermeneutics to his treatment of a subject that transcended the limits of literary studies as then construed. Orientalism shone new light on well-established areas of academic study, such as the historiography of British rule in India, the debate over the relationship of Ancient Greek civilization to North Africa and Asia, and the study of Buddhism and Hinduism. In the Afterword to the 1995 reprinting, Said saw his book as re-invigorating “study of Africanist and Indological discourses, the analyses of subaltern history, the reconfiguration of postcolonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism” (p. 340). Orientalism therefore helped effect an enlargement of literary studies beyond the formalistic and narrowly liberal humanistic axioms that had previously informed it. A fourth dimension to be considered is the scholarly reception and development of Said’s ideas. Intellectual contestation and critical engagement were an important part of the development of his concept of Orientalism as an expansive category, primary instances being the influence of Orientalism upon the creation of postcolonial studies and the affects that outside perspectives – for example feminist studies – have had on readings of Orientalism and its application to culture and literature. Numerous studies since its publication have exemplified, expanded or contested specific topic areas contained within Said’s book, alongside focusing on aspects they consider insufficiently developed by Said or in need of refinement, as well as ones that branch out into new regions. The first, second and third dimensions feature in Part I, Origins, which considers issues concerning the temporality of Orientalism, when it starts and what Said’s claims for its geographical and multidisciplinary scope are before moving on to consider the major genres and trends Orientalism

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inspired in the literary-critical field: the Oriental tale, eighteenth-century Orientalism, Romantic Orientalism, and Orientalism and empire. Part II, Development, recaptures specific aspects of Orientalism’s developments: its multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions with regard to postcolonialism, colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing, as well as the critical ideas which form the core of such interventions. Part III, Application, deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

Part I:

Origins

The Beginnings of Orientalism Said’s claims for the beginnings and the scope of Orientalism, ranging from the Greco-Persian Wars of antiquity to the present day, have of course invited a great deal of criticism. Actually, he proffers two alternative beginnings and spaces: premodern Orientalism, consisting of the classical world and the period from the Medieval to the Renaissance; and modern Orientalism, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1789. Employing a discourse perspective derived from Foucault, Said envisages an Occident/Orient binary according to which Orientalism “originated not in the eighteenth century or thereabouts, but in the period of Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’ The Persians, and Euripedes’ The Bacchae”; this “binary division was repeatedly reinforced by Roman geographers, historians and public figures (Herodotus, Alexander, Caesar), Medieval merchants, writers and crusaders . . . and Medieval Christian writers and polemicists (Dante, John of Segovia, Nicholas of Cusa).”3 In recent decades, postcolonial medievalists, in the process of disrupting and fragmenting “the clean and easy identity narratives that cultures tell themselves, offering divisions that stress difference, conflict and . . . ‘widely scattered contingencies’” and recovering the medieval from its characterization as “wholly other,” have been indebted to Said’s exposure of the colonialist power lurking behind the “seeming naturalness of ‘truth,’” at the same time as they have debated his “thesis that East and West have always been arranged along a binary axis, where the Orient exists only to the extent that it mirrors fantastically its colonizer.”4 Briefly, Lisa Lampert-Weissig summarizes the main issues

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postcolonial medievalists have with Orientalism’s binary treatment of the period as follows: a) cultural interchange existed (specifically in medieval Iberia, Sicily and the Crusader states) “that cannot be reduced to a onesided attempt by Western European thinkers to understand or control the East, as Said describes in modern Orientalism”; b) Said’s reading of Dante’s insertion into his Inferno of Muslim figures, preeminently the Prophet Muhammad, is “a reductive Orientalist view” that argues Dante could only understand them within a fixed Christian cosmology, whereas his views on Islam were “more complex and ambivalent”; c) the temporality of the Middle Ages in Orientalism is itself schematic and conflates “disparate premodern historical moments, end[ing] up figuring [the period] as a site of historical origin but also as a moment that exists before ‘the movement of history.’”5 In her recent study of medieval Orientalism, Idols of the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari confirms the significance of Said’s work but raises its periodization and how Orientalism might be historicized. Akbari points out that Said “elides the narrative of Roman imperial power” and ignores Europe’s decline over the spectrum of technological and cultural production during the medieval period, sinking into a position of inferiority vis-àvis an ascendant Islamic world. “For most of that period, the dominant power in the world was not the Christian West but rather the Islamic East, and European awareness of that inferiority played a crucial role in the development of Orientalism.”6 The overwhelming dominance of Orientalist discourse is therefore far more applicable to the inauguration of the modern global world and its emphasis on imperial power compared with the phase of antiquity and medievalism. Akbari, who is particularly exercised by Said’s employment of the phrase “imaginative geography” stimulated by Foucault’s habit of analyzing actual spaces, territories and sites, proposes that this term could fruitfully be applied to a wide variety of medieval texts, particularly maps, to the end of understanding how the imaginative geographies of Orient or Occident are established. Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century Said’s “monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as a discursive formation, transportable and translatable to any time and place,” has, according to Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic, presented eighteenthcentury scholars with similar problems to those raised by postcolonial medievalists. Said’s elision of periods prior to Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 have both perplexed and encouraged them “to take up the

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question of Orientalism.”7 For Said, the later eighteenth-century and Romantic periods advanced Europe’s scientific claim to extensive and organized knowledge about the “East.” Suvir Kaul contends that “by the eighteenth century, and in some cases, well before, the ways of seeing that we associate with colonialism and imperialism are convincingly in place.”8 If that is the case, the argument that Said’s emphasis falls upon one event and misses out some beside is an unbalanced one. Raymond Schwab’s Oriental Renaissance (1950), in some respects Orientalism’s analogue, comprehends the significance of European intervention in the East. It established the later eighteenth century as a new point of departure, starting with the philological breakthroughs by Anquetil-Dupperont in France and Sir William Jones and his contemporaries in British India, the latter coinciding with the spread of Britain’s political and economic power in the East. However, Schwab, who saw Orientalism as integral to the development of European literary and philosophical Romanticism, was optimistic about its crucial importance for, among other things, demonstrating how Western knowledge accessed the languages and literatures of the East and made it possible to build a notion of a world consisting of discrete cultures. Srinivas Avaramudan went so far as to suggest that under different circumstances Schwab’s contrapuntal reading (to Said’s) could easily have become mainstream.9 Avaramudan’s own expansive articulation of Enlightenment Orientalism places more stress on its “utopian aspirations” than on “materialist and political interest,” its urging towards “mutual understanding across different cultures” above domination of the other. In the seventeenth century, Philosophic universalism’s supplanting of Christianity gave credence to the view that “a transcultural, cosmopolitan, and Enlightenment-inflected Orientalism existed at least as an alternative strain before ‘Saidian’ Orientalism came about.”10 However, as Ros Ballaster notes: “Enthusiasm for the ancient Orient and its languages can be seen, as it is by Said, as a form of colonial power; European scholars promise to ‘return’ oriental cultures to a civilized classical heritage from which they have been estranged by centuries of barbaric and despotic rule.” In addition, “increased knowledge about oriental cultures and increased awareness about their differences came with increased contact and consumption of oriental goods at the end of the eighteenth century.”11 Orientalism’s contribution to eighteenth-century literature, according to Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic, has been to provide “an analytical frame to think about matters related to the construction of tropes, the transformation of Eastern texts as they traveled across countries and continents, the promotion and demotion of genres, the question of canon formation, the

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birth of the ‘English’ novel, gender, and the impact of other forces than empire, such as the book market, in determining Orientalist fashions.”12 In “Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century” (Chapter 1), Suvir Kaul interrogates how overseas commerce facilitating everyday consumption of material objects from the East, and the creation of a new class of non-aristocratic landed gentry, incited moral diatribes against consumption and luxury. So, “the link between a woman’s vanity, sexuality, and china is a recurrent trope in early eighteenth-century poetry.” At the same time, commerce with Asia enabled a widening view that made for economic and moral, social and spiritual comparisons, particularly with China. While retaining dominance in world trade, China’s image in the West was of a model of stability and governance; however, as this waned in the wake of Europe’s growing power in trading and colonial ventures, this image turned to dismissive contempt. Closer to home, envy of the wealth of the Ottoman empire and the absolute power of the Sultan was sharpened by a new emphasis: “Asia was home to slavish subjects, to peoples who had not yet ascended to political rationality or being, and hence the playground of despotic power.” Cosmopolitanism went alongside national chauvinism. Exploring the “possibilities of experience, imagination and literary innovation opened up by the ‘East,’” Kaul moves to Aravamudan’s expansionist reading of The Arabian Nights, and William Jones’ poetry, inspired by translations from Sanskrit and incorporating his admiration for Hindu divinities, and to the Orientalist style of painting developed by British artists in India. For example, Johan Zofany’s portrayals of Indians and British living alongside one another transpose the colonial elite from England into the landowning aristocracy of India. In Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings: “The antagonisms of colonialism are caused to dissolve into the serene platitudes of the conversation piece, and the British presence in, and authority over, Indian land is naturalized.” A similar if reverse process occurs at home, where the Chinese style in gardening is anglicized to become “the English garden.” In “The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale” (Chapter 2), James Watt writes of the reception of The Arabian Nights in terms of a broad “generic hybridity” of the Oriental tale with respect to its origins and classification, beginning with Galland’s first attempt at translation, the Indian “Fables of Pilpay,” comprising “a ceaseless movement of narrative” and incorporating the Orient-flavored stories and anecdotes published in Spectator, notably “Vision of Mirza.” Anglicized versions of Eastern tales and moral fables about the times coexisted alongside other forms of fiction; “playful fantastic possibilities of Oriental fiction” vied with emergent

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“national realism,” each “informed by an imaginary geography which assumes London to be the hub of global commerce.” Defoe’s Roxana acquires Oriental features, suggesting that, despite the taste for reality catered for in the eighteenth-century novel, that form too was porous to what Johnson called “the world of wonder.” Watt points out the multifaceted character of Oriental tales that “are concerned with the here and now and invoke the East as a way of thinking about the condition of Britain itself.” Allegories of the spread of the British empire were established within an Eastern narrative; the American War of independence was placed in an Eastern setting. The trope of Oriental despotism was invoked in order to urge safeguarding liberty at home and expose the dangers of corruption produced by wealth from the Indies. By the 1790s, Orientalism interposed in stories such as Robert Heron’s pseudo-Oriental Arabian Tales (1792), which depicted the “unchanging condition of women” and accentuated the “rhetoric of sexual despotism” while distancing themselves from the romance of the past. Accounting for the ongoing popularity of the Arabian Nights into the Romantic period, Watt sets a reading of Orientalism of the Saidian “will-to-empire” type against ones that figure the world of the Oriental Tale as “a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient” – Aravamudan’s phrase – and, in Ros Ballaster’s words, “an abandonment of the sense of self to an other in a space in which such activity is virtually free of risk.”13 Orientalism, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century Despite Orientalism’s apparent binaries, an important statement early in the work acknowledges a split within colonial discourse. Bart MooreGilbert paraphrased this as implying that “on the one hand . . . the West consciously defines the East as outside itself and radically different or Other; at the same time, the East is also apparently located intimately within the West as an integral, if generally unacknowledged, part of its own constitution and identity.”14 In other words, if “the European discourse . . . invented the Orient [it] just as surely invented itself.”15 Suvir Kaul has pointed out that “postcolonial scholars who study metropolitan national cultures . . . argue that the historical force of colonialist practices is also at work in the domestic political and economic consolidation of the nation.”16 In “Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism” (Chapter 3), Saree Makdisi conceptualizes the process by which “Occidentalism defined British imperial culture not only externally but also from within; it must be seen to be aligned with an Orientalist logic articulated by Cromer – and

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rightly identified by Said – that would in the long run be directed exclusively overseas. Occidentalism and Orientalism, in other words, are not opposites: they are two sides of the same coin, ultimately inseparable from one another.” Instead of Western civilization being grounded in terms of Enlightenment and scientific knowledge with the irrational and fanatical East as its antithesis, the “symbiotic relationship between Occidentalism and Orientalism” originating in the Romantic period saw a developing and modernizing West set against an internal opposite. In practice this meant “Orientaliz[ing] others at home – who were seen to be just as incompatible with this emergent new identity as their actual Asiatic counterparts.” From the 1790s these “Orientalist tropes were primarily deployed by anti-aristocratic radicals not to refer to actual Arabs or Indians (about whom they knew almost nothing and cared even less) but rather to refer primarily to either the privileged classes above them in the social hierarchy or those further down the social scale.” In practice the formulation Makdisi proposes “helps explain why all the way through the Romantic period the discourse of Orientalism was used at least as much with reference to the would-be West as it was with reference to the East.”17 In “Orientalist Structures and Restructures” (chapter 2 of Orientalism) the layered but complicit constituent parts of imperial governance, Orientalist scholarship and imaginative Orientalism assembled together provide a lens through which Said probes distinctive Victorian discourses belonging to the genres of novel and travel writing, philology and anthropology, through each of which run preconceptions of empire, race and secularized religion. “The Victorians: Empire and the East” (Chapter 4) begins with Thomas De Quincey’s opium addiction and a meeting with a Malay visitor that demonstrates the Englishman’s “deep familiarity with an Eastern commodity but [inability] to meaningfully engage with someone from the ‘East.’” Sukanya Banerjee uses De Quincy’s ignorance to frame an extended discussion of race and empire in the nineteenth century, which moves through the discovery and application of the Indo-Aryan category (via the Orientalist scholarship of Sir William Jones and Friedrich Max Müller) to an anthropological debate conducted between the Indian Dadabhai Naoroji and John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological Society. “These anthropological discussions,” Banerjee argues, “should be of interest to scholars of literary and cultural studies not just because they gave shape to Victorian discussions of race but also because Victorian literature often provides articulation of or catalyst for what was being tested or established as anthropological theory.” This statement is partly

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exemplified by her reading of Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone, where a liberal attitude toward empire is seen evenly to distribute guilt for theft of the stone between British and Indian characters before reassertion of an Orientalist view of fanatical and superstitious colonial subjects in the novel’s final scene. This denouement is aptly set alongside J. S. Mill’s denial of India’s readiness for self-rule and assertion of its need for continuing colonial government. In “Orientalism and Victorian Fiction” (Chapter 5), Daniel Bivona explores more imperialist fictional narratives with the aim of tracking “the gradual displacement of the focus of Oriental fiction from a fascination with Oriental object to European subject, its gradual movement from a preoccupation with what Disraeli called the ‘Great Asian Mystery’ to foregrounding what I am calling ‘The Great European Mystery.’” Choosing “mainly canonical fiction that has for its setting this constructed Muslim world,” Bivona tests the generic conventions of Orientalist fiction and its attendant tropes of race, sexuality and miscegenation. Beginning with the race/Oriental quest leitmotif in Disraeli’s fiction, focusing on Tancred and its impact on George Eliot’s portrayal of the eponymous Zionist hero in Daniel Deronda, he proceeds to scalpel racial and sexual ambiguity in Flora Annie Steel’s less well-known On the Face of the Waters and more miscegenation plotted into Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy.” Finally, in Conrad’s Lord Jim, further betrayal of Eastern women by white lovers leads to the conclusion that “while demystifying European claims to racial superiority [Lord Jim] also captures the centrality of racial mystique and sexual ambivalence that lay at the heart of the imperial enterprise.” Orientalism and the Bible Race tropes found in Victorian fiction, which almost invariably underwrote travelogues too (see Part II), might be said to have their origins in Biblical paradigms. Christopher Hutton points out in “Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites” (Chapter 6): “European conceptions of peoples and their lineages took as their point of departure the ‘Mosaic triad’ of the sons of Noah, namely Shem, Ham and Japhet.” Popularly, Europeans’ progenitor was Japhet, while Semites were descendants of Shem and Africans of Ham. Hutton notes that, although the Biblical model broke down in the eighteenth century owing to the perception that the genealogical approaches it helped foster were “unsystematic and fanciful,” the nomenclature persisted, albeit with the substitution of

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Indo-Germanic/Aryan for Japhetic. However, Hutton notes that William Jones, stalwart of the discovery of the “Aryan” texts that defined Schwab’s “Oriental Renaissance,” was still working within a Biblical paradigm, though he did not consider Japhet the ancestor of Europeans, nor did he employ the term Aryan. Hutton reviews the trail of race via the comparative linguistics paths of Ernest Renan and Max Müller, racial anthropology (already broached by Banerjee) and Darwinian theory. Charting the route to ascendancy of the Aryan paradigm via variant shades of German nationalism, he closes with the salutary truth: “This focus on Orientalism and Aryanism has obscured a key historical insight: Jews did not assimilate into European modernity. They were its cocreators, not an Oriental ‘other’ within it.” Urs App takes up a strong line in claiming “the role of colonialism (and generally of economic and political interests) in the birth of Orientalism dwindles to insignificance compared to the role of religion.”18 According to Bar-Yousef, in Orientalism Said missed out the specificity of the Orientalist encounter in the Holy Land.19 However, quite recently scholars have done much to repopulate the nineteenth-century landscape of Palestine and the wider Middle East, none more prominently than Ivan Kalmar, who has demonstrated how imperialist ideas were linked with Protestant evangelicalism and how the existing population – Jews and Arabs – were conflated and viewed as ghosts of the biblical original.20 Connections between race, religion and Orientalism are consolidated by Kalmar in “Orientalism and the Bible” (Chapter 7). Stressing “the central role of the Bible in Orientalism [that] has often been overlooked and sometimes actively denied,” he sets himself the major task of suggesting “some ways to begin to restore biblical concerns to their due place in the historiography of Orientalism.” Though he mentioned biblical scholars, Said barely probed the biblical dimension of Orientalism, choosing to avoid ascribing any significant religious provenance to it. While he endorsed the significance of the switch from a Bible-centered description of human origins to the vistas opened by the Persian and Sanskrit researches of Anquetil-Duperon and William Jones, Schwab forgot, however, that “the Indologists and Persianists of the long eighteenth century were, for the most part, fervent Christians.” Their intention in studying Oriental religions was “not to supplant the Bible but to affirm it as part of a universal religious truth.” Rather than spiritual rejuvenation, however, Said derived from the Oriental Renaissance a discourse of Western domination, which he found in Silvestre de Sacy and Edward Lane; but where Said was not interested in biblical philology they, or at least Lane, undoubtedly were.

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One of the main tenors of Kalmar’s chapter is to provide a commentary on Said’s omission of the significant role of biblical study in Orientalism, for evidence of which we have only to turn to the work of Ernest Renan. The second part of the chapter scrutinizes ways in which the Semitic and Aryan categorization, so influential for nineteenth-century European thought, underwrote Orientalist interpretations of Christianity. These narratives nonetheless do not undermine Said’s major thesis: while he and “much of the subsequent literature on Orientalism . . . may have missed the full force of the Orientalists’ concerns with the Bible, those concerns did not normally stand in opposition to Orientalism’s colonial agenda.”

Part II: Development In this part the development of Said’s work as a critical concept is considered, in particular how capable it is of elucidating and explaining literature’s adoption and employment of Orientalist discourses and tropes. At the point of theoretical capture, Said’s whole project was critically debated and questioned, and there is no space or need to account for all of the criticisms directed against Orientalism (especially since this is a future-oriented volume). However, intellectual contestation and critical engagement were an important part of the development of his concept of Orientalism as an expansive category. Diana Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass wrote of the “many Orientalisms that have populated the theoretical field,”21 and reservations have continued to surface, some around the idea that the “multiple meanings of ‘Orientalism’, as well as its various nuances across languages, [were] obscured in Said’s generalized model of Orientalist discourse.”22 Engagement with Said’s key critics, interpreters and interlocutors is therefore crucial, especially where they are connected with the reception and reformulation of his ideas. Where he had generalized about the operation of Orientalist discourses, could arguments be adduced to demonstrate a wrong emphasis, distortion or erroneous train of thought? For example, Said’s distinction of “latent” from “manifest” Orientalism is of particular importance to how literary works relate to Orientalist discourse. Latent Orientalism, an unchanging subliminal certainty about what the East was in essence, according to Said fed imaginative literary responses, notably the succession of early nineteenth-century French and British writers whose travel writings Said discusses. But how persuasive was this distinction? A major concern of Orientalism’s early critics was the apparently monolithic, closed construct that was Orientalist discourse as

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he derived it from Foucault; as Said applied it, there appeared almost no space for alternative discourses. Said’s conception of Orientalist discourse seemed to preclude space for the colonized subaltern and also for oppositional voices within imperial culture. The difficulty was marrying Gramsci’s insistence that subaltern groups could potentially overturn dominant power and Foucault’s less optimistic view. Along with this, the binary relationship between the Westerner and the Easterner left no scope for interaction; in fact, as constituted, this division between abstract entities – East/West, Occident/Orient – was judged inflexible and disallowing of the complexities of cultural exchange. At the same time as revisions of Orientalism began to appear in the critical work of the 1980s, refining his own work in Culture and Imperialism (1993) Said elaborated on aspects missing from Orientalism such as gender and colonial resistance. Addressing the charge that Orientalist discourse was a “monolith,” he probed the possibilities of postcolonial resistance – the “voyage in” (and “writing back”) of “Third World Writers” in the metropolitan center – while largely denying this valence to native writing of the colonial period.23 In the later work, Said raised the struggles of decolonization, praising especially the work of Aimé Césaire and Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o, but also reintroduced the imperial dimension in extended readings of canonical texts such as Kipling’s Kim and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and, for the first time, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Culture and Imperialism suggested Joseph Conrad’s position as an outsider enabled his understanding of how imperialism worked and appeared to exclude Conrad from the charge of racism on the grounds of being a modern writer who did not belong to the imperial world. The Colonial Subject, Sexuality, Gender This section probes some of the ways in which Said’s ideas were challenged, developed and revised, in the critical works of others as well as in his own. It begins with Homi Bhabha’s departure from Said’s version of colonial discourse, which inserted greater ambivalence and ambiguity into the colonizer’s relationship with the colonized. According to Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, Bhabha saw Said’s approach to colonial discourse as “too reliant on oversimplifying binaries such as East and West, colonizer and colonized, latent and manifest Orientalism . . . while Said discusses the differences and oppositions between colonizer and colonized, Bhabha often examines their points of similarity and considers, for example, the stereotype as the cardinal point of colonial subjectification for both of

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them.”24 Bhabha’s invention and application of terms and expressions, such as “colonial mimicry,” “sly civility,” “signs taken for wonders” and “hybridity,” draw the colonizer and the colonized into much more intimate relation than Said had allowed for, calling into question Orientalism’s putative monolithic separation of the Orientalist and Orientalist discourse from the object of this discourse, the voiceless Oriental. Although Bhabha’s interpretation of texts largely taken from colonial India has, like Said’s before him, been challenged for its occlusion of historical contexts – in Bhabha’s case, the product of his emphasis on postmodernist modes and his employment of psychoanalysis – such debates around the meanings of colonial discourse should be viewed as instances of Orientalism’s productive power.25 In “Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject” (Chapter 8), Eleanor Byrne reviews the space in which Homi Bhabha inserted new ways of reading colonial culture in the context of poststructuralist and postcolonialist ways of thinking. She notes in particular that Bhabha’s “reading of interactions between colonizers and colonized peoples resituated Said’s model of colonial discourse counterintuitively, as something that does not only facilitate the embedding of colonial systems of power . . . Bhabha develops Said’s particular models of discourse analysis in Orientalism, demonstrating that colonial discourse was not monolithic but internally riven . . . [Furthermore,] contrary to Said’s Orientalism, . . . colonial discourse is not ‘in control’ of its meanings . . . [It] only operates as the moment of being interpreted, where it ‘lands’, and as such there is always an element of reversal or compromise or interpretation.” Employing a number of the aforementioned categories from Bhabha’s work – and with further help from Robert Young and Susan Suleri – Byrne stages a reading of several key scenes from A Passage to India, in which menace, fetishism and the colonizers’ fear of their “own cultural ignorance” are each figured as constitutive of the “colonial nonsense” within the colonial encounter. The “monolithic” structure of Orientalism was further questioned by Lisa Lowe, who emphasized its unstable character as well as re-presenting the figure of Lady Wortley Montagu as feminist icon;26 and by those who addressed absent women’s voices – notably, Sara Mills, Billie Melman, Reina Lewis and Meyda Yeǧ enǧ olu, each of whom have combined Saidian analysis with feminist thought.27 Revisiting her earlier interventions, in “The Harem: Gendering Orientalism” (Chapter 9) Reina Lewis again takes up Said’s methodological encapsulation of Orientalism as a “study [of] the interrelations between society, history, and textuality”; she reviews

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feminist scholarship’s insertion of the harem and its corollary the veil into Said’s polemic. The survey is updated to view recent “articulations and understandings of gender, ethnicity, class, religion and sexuality,” as seen in new research on the place of eunuchs in segregated households that continued into the twentieth century and on the women-led Muslim fashion industry of the last two decades. In the early twentieth century, there was interplay between Western and Ottoman women, the former recording how “the shift away from the sequestered world of eunuchs and slaves into companionate nuclear family life came to mark personal modernity for the progressive Ottoman and regional elite.” During this period, women’s contributions to harem literature and travel literature “crossed disciplinary and media divides, with women artists illustrating (and sometimes writing their own) travel accounts.” Research also “repositioned the stereotype of the isolated harem as a familial and social domain in which women lived with multigenerational extended family members.” According to Mary Roberts, Western women’s visits to Ottoman harems, which resulted “sometimes [in] dressing each other up in each other’s outfits,” introduced Western women “into the visuality of the harem. This key element of women’s ethnographic reportage allowed them to depict themselves as object of the Ottoman women’s gaze.” Lewis notes: “Corrective attention to women’s fantasy resaturates harem with sexuality but does not reinscribe male heterosexuality as the definitional norm,” resulting in “complication of the nature of desire and object choice.” She concludes that “the harem, and the depiction of the Orientalized woman, and man, emerge as sources of potential viewer/reader pleasure far beyond the putative heterosexual male gaze.” Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing Issues relating to the harem were first raised in travelers’ accounts, but Billie Melman argued that “students of British travel writing have contested the Saidian paradigm and . . . pointed out that travellers’ representations were not homogenous but were inflected by gender, class and nationality,”28 the most notable exempla being Lady Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters. Nevertheless, there is no denying that study of travel writing received a major impulse from Orientalism, “the first work of contemporary criticism to take [it] as a major part of [Orientalism’s] corpus, seeing it as a body of work which offered particular insight into the operation of colonial discourses.”29 In “Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing” (Chapter 10), Ali Behdad states at the outset that “European travelers to the

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Middle East produced a substantial body of literature about the region, describing its geography, people, languages and cultures,” and that these writings “facilitated the rise of modern Orientalism both as an academic discipline and as a discourse of power.” His discussion is predicated on the Saidian notion that “European travelogues constructed the Middle East as a site of exoticism and thus participated in the production of Euroimperialist subjectivity.” Although Behdad allows for the charge frequently leveled against Orientalism – that it projected a monolithic view that left “little room for the possibility of difference among the various modes of representation” – he maintains that, as a “theoretical framework to study European travel writing by shifting the focus from textuality to historicity and from the aesthetic to the political,” it remains “indispensable if viewed as a complex and heterogeneous network of representations that transformed over time.” The French travelogues of the seventeenth century “created a rich body of knowledge through which emerging European colonial powers such as France considered their political and economic relations with the region.” In the same period the foundations of academic Orientalism were established, notably in the creation of chairs of Oriental languages in the Collège de France. Nevertheless, in contrast to later travelers of the eighteenth century who cultivated a spirit of scientific adventure, the writers of the seventeenth were amateurs in search of the exotic. While Behdad’s analysis of eighteenth-century travel writings foregrounds the emergent positivistic scientific view bent toward categorization that amounted to a “discourse of power,” he argues that the earlier writers “displayed the same kind of binary logic that located the Westerner in a position of cultural and political superiority . . . The Orient still remains Europe’s other, but otherness becomes an object of study and exploration.” In Volney and Savary, travel writing reached a new level, what Foucault termed the “threshold of scientificity,” which helped underwrite the official discourse of Orientalism employed by figures like Silvestre Sacy and Ernest Renan. Behdad also revisits the British context in his remarks on Burton, as well as the “late travelers,” represented here by Nerval, upon which his earlier revision of Said was constructed. Overall, then, Behdad’s reading substantially confirms the pioneering connection first made by Said between travel writing and Orientalism. Orientalism in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America While Said pointed out to his detractors that Orientalism had never been intended as a comprehensive historical work, there remain areas he did not

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fully take into account but which hold particular significance for some of the arguments he adduced there. For instance, while post-1950s United States’ input into the ideological construction of Orientalism plays a prominent role in the book, Said had little to say about the reception in nineteenth-century America of Asiatic influences beyond the Islamic Near East. Mishka Sinha has argued30 that, in centering on the United States’ post–World War Two replacement of Britain in the Middle East, Said omitted nineteenth-century American Orientalism and its connections with German transmission of Sanskrit. This view is given a different but complementary articulation in David Weir’s “Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism” (Chapter 11). Weir makes a strong case for Said’s omission of the appeal to the American imaginary of an Orient further east than the Arab and Iranian Islamicate world. Beginning with Franklin and Jefferson’s reconnoiter of classic Confucian Chinese texts, contrary to Said’s semantics – but employing his phrasing – Weir discerns in their political thinking an initiating stage that allowed for “a process of refining, reticulating and reconstructing knowledge, which is precisely what occurred over the next two centuries.” The next stage, “the early Unitarian phase,” centered on the incorporation, albeit inaccurately, of Far East religions into the transcendental philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau. This led to the founding of the American Oriental Society in 1842 and the appointment of a German-trained American philologist to teach Sankrit at Yale. Interest in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, first in a theological but later in an aesthetic dimension that engaged T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound – the latter in a Japanese context – stretched from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth. These engagements, alongside other manifestations such as Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and P. T. Barnum’s Oriental exhibitions, need to be offset against “shameful anti-immigration laws specifically targeting Asians” that suggest a disconnect between a taste for Oriental cultures and religions on the part of elite Americans and firsthand contact with Chinese “coolies” constructing railroads. Nonetheless, Weir succeeds in convincing us that these currents of interest in the East were genuinely founded and resulted, at least in the case of the Chinese and Japanese influences on Pound’s poetry, in “one of the most enduring examples of how Eastern tradition can supplement and validate American culture.” In T. S. Eliot’s poetry, too, a fusion of East and West is traced in the contribution of “Indic literature to Eliot’s wisdom voice.” In the post– Second World War period, Zen Buddhism enjoyed a vogue, and the lifting of immigration laws led to an influx of Asian immigrants, both factors that,

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Weir opines, are likely to impact further on notions of “them” and “us” in the United States. Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Postcolonial Critic Did the all-embracing sway of Orientalism prevent effective ways of resisting colonial power? Said’s work on Orientalism as a dominant discourse and the manner in which power was used to effect misrepresentation and to block other narratives seemed to imply this. In Culture and Imperialism, perhaps partly in response to criticism, Said celebrates the work of resistant entities such as the exiled “Third World” intellectual, but, while Said endorsed anticolonial writers of the postcolonial period, such as Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, and promoted the concept of the literary “voyage in” to the imperial metropolitan center, he is still credited by some with underestimating the scope of resistance during the colonial period.31 If he did not produce endorsements of canonical writers such as Kipling and Conrad, then Said at least presented apologias of their work on account of their “complexity.” However, Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures stages an important criticism of Said’s position as a proponent of radical deconstruction of power, questioning his role as a cosmopolitan public intellectual and also his advocacy of modernist authors, preeminently Joseph Conrad. In “Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures” (Chapter 12), Valerie Kennedy gives a valuable overview of the key role Said has played (albeit unwittingly) in establishing postcolonial studies, linking in particular his insights on resistance to the work of postcolonial critics and theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Mary Louise Pratt and Elleke Boehmer and scrutinizing his influence on postcolonial readings of canonical texts ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness to Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Nonetheless, Kennedy concedes that Orientalism “neglects resistance, homogenizes Orientalist discourse and ignores the role of women in both Orientalism and imperialism,” opining that “the neglect of resistance in Orientalism is related to Said’s espousal of Western humanism that takes white, middle-class, male-authored canonical texts and experiences as its central point of reference.” In her opinion, Culture and Imperialism retains a disproportionate focus on canonical works by European authors and “does not clearly distinguish between European and non-European resistance in the colonial period.” Having earlier drawn attention to Said’s writings on the Middle East and their insistence on the need for a Palestinian narrative of resistance, in the last section of her chapter

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Kennedy discusses Said’s ideas “of resistant history” in relation to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Ngu˜ gı˜’s Decolonizing the Mind and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. In “Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism?” (Chapter 13), Andrew C. Long engages in a close, detailed analysis of Said’s readings of Heart of Darkness and Camus’ L’Étranger. Beginning with Ahmad’s criticism of Said’s omission or misrepresentation of the work of “Third World” writers, Long proceeds to reprise Chinua Achebe’s crucial intervention in the Heart of Darkness debate and asks why Said did not join him in denouncing Conrad’s racism. He tracks Said’s positions in a number of articles, including “Conrad and Nietzsche,” in which for the first time Said links “the narrative form of Conrad’s fiction to Africa and empire.” In Culture and Imperialism, Said’s stance was to offer a “contrapuntal (with history)” reading of Heart of Darkness in which, perhaps, “the early aesthetic of distance and irony is the only way” to stop us from concluding “that the novella is racist propaganda.” Turning to Algeria and L’Étranger, Long notes Said’s enthusiastic engagement with the struggle for Algerian independence but also his detached reading of the novel’s Algerian landscape as “inseparable from his appeal to universal themes.” Setting Said’s criticism alongside that of his contemporaries, notably Lionel Trilling and Clement Greenberg, Long comes to the conclusion that “while Said recognizes the way racism and colonialism work in Camus’ text, . . . he does not condemn or denounce the writer.” Said’s criticism of canonical Western writers like Conrad and Camus, in other words, is brushed by the politically detached aestheticism found in the criticism of his time: “Said’s valuation of Joseph Conrad and many other cosmopolitan writers is rooted in what I call a Cold War cultural critique.” Does this then convict or absolve him of racism? Long’s answer – both “yes” and “no” – lays down as markers the terms “irony” and “formal aestheticism” that are interdicted in discussing both texts in the contemporary classroom, adjudging: “For postcolonialism, the problem, as with Ahmad’s reading of Said’s literary criticism, is that the denunciation of racist texts and writers only leads to a moralizing dead end, which is also, finally, an aestheticization of politics.”

Part III: Application Part III considers the purchase Said’s conceptualization of Orientalism has for our reading of literature in the twenty-first century. As will have been made clear from many of the chapters in this volume, despite being intermittently pronounced a discontinued product, Edward Said’s

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conceptualization of Orientalism continues to remain an important tool of analysis. His theory continues to hold appeal for literary critics, and he “remains firmly planted in the field of comparative literature and the Eurocentric texts that occupy its domain.”32 Twenty-first-century revisions of Said’s work have opened up possibilities both for extending and for reframing the scope of Orientalism’s application. Some criticism still relativizes Orientalism as a stage in postcolonial and postmodern thought while continuing to argue that Said’s binarism, incorporated in exaggerated forms into postcolonial writing, has fed into East/West confrontationalism.33 Nonetheless, the potential pliability of Said’s exploration of the term Orientalism has continued to be recognized in interpretations – even notionally hostile ones – over the last decade or more. To this might be added a broad interdisciplinary éclat that ranges from study of Islamic law to Orientalist painting, modern Chinese history and beyond.34 As Zachary Lockman has put it: “scholars involved in the study of colonial discourse increasingly came to refine their analyses and incorporate new elements into them, building on Said’s general approach but also rendering it more complex, nuanced and concrete in various ways.”35 In literary studies specifically, Orientalism has continued to feature in discussions concerning recodifications of the definition and scope of comparative and world literatures. Placing new conceptualizations of world literature in a humanist context, Debjani Ganguli proposes that “literary studies, and for that matter humanities as a whole today need to look beyond the postcolonial orthodoxies generated by Said’s Orientalism and parts of Cultural Imperialism that spoke about global impact of modern European colonialism.”36 A persuasive riposte to this frequently enounced attitude is mounted by Aamir Mufti, who, in his articulation of the scope and chronology of world literature, unapologetically valorizes as he underscores Orientalism’s significance for the discipline. In the opening sentence to an article published in Critical Inquiry in spring 2010, Mufti has within his sights a crucial omission from Pascale Casanova’s muchcited study of comparative literature, The World Republic of Letters: “In the current revival of the concept of world literature, something of considerable importance appears to be largely missing: the question of Orientalism.”37 According to Mufti, world literature does not supersede national literatures but arises at the same time as these began to be thought out. The Orientalist phase that was in full swing at the moment Goethe confirmed Weltliteratur as a concept coincided with the “initial charting of non-Western traditions of writing on the emerging map of the literary

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world.” Mufti is critiquing elision of the process whereby – largely thanks to the colonization of India – the categorization of languages and discovery of ancient canonical Sanskrit and Persian texts first made the concept of world literature viable. He goes on to argue that promotion of writers like Kateb Yacine, V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie as models of “the nonWestern writer,” formed by “the psychology of assimilation into metropolitan languages and cultures,” and privileging the cultural change they represent as “creolization and métissage,” misses the fact that the deep encounter between English and the other Western languages and the languages of the global periphery as media of literary expression did not take place for the first time in the postcolonial era, let alone in the supposedly transnational transactions of the period of high globalization but, especially, at the dawn of the modern era itself and fundamentally transformed both cultural formations involved in the encounter.38

Reapplying Orientalism: Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia Applications, or reapplications, of Orientalism have been a feature of the ongoing representation of Muslims within public, most notably media, discourse following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the subsequent “War on Terror.” In the discourse generated by members of the Bush administration and the American media to define and seek out the nation’s enemies, the perpetrators of the attacks, their accomplices and their supporters, Orientalist or Neo-Orientalist tropes were very much in evidence, resurfacing in the discourse justifying the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Earlier images of Islam employed in the Western media in response to the Iranian revolution, discussed by Said in Covering Islam (1981), gained currency during the Rushdie Affair at the end of the 1980s and after 9/11 morphed into a full-blown confluence of NeoOrientalism and Islamophobia. In “From Orientalism to Islamophobia” (Chapter 14), Mahmut Mutman argues that Edward Said’s observation, derived from the oil crisis of 1973 and the Iranian revolution that followed at the end of the decade, of a new “‘unrestrained and immediate image of Islam, functioning like a proper name’” can be read as the historical forerunner of today’s Islamophobia. Said discerned “a new conjuncture in the West’s hegemonic relationship with the Middle East” founded on the West’s security fears and loss of control, in which “the old Orientalist image of a distant despotic, primitive and static religion was imperceptibly recoded into a new technologically produced image of a violent, oppressive and fanatic

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religion that is dangerously too close to the West.” Mutman credits the Norwegian social anthropologist Dag Henrik Tuastad with isolating the construction of “Neo-Orientalism” by establishing the correlated images of “terrorism,” “Arab” and the “Muslim mind” through his study of neoconservative writing. Here violence is seen as “‘resulting from traits . . . embedded in local cultures’” and is encapsulated in the term “new barbarism” given currency by figures such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington and Daniel Pipes. What connects this new image of Islam, picked up in Said’s earlier reading, to later ones is the absence of any stated “causal link between the event it signified and Islam as a religion.” Neo-Orientalism eventually transforms into the term “Islamophobia” to be observed in the writing of native informants who, living in the West, and in the name of the Western concept of freedom, put together the “impartial,” “scientific” knowledge of the Middle East “expert.” Their “authentic,” “internal” knowledge contributes to a general consensus on the essentially repressive nature of Islam, in conformity with the predominant stereotypes in the Western media. Charting the loose ethico-political conceptualization of Islamophobia in five major ideas about Muslims (which are reductive and linked to “internal psychic needs”), Mutman goes on to probe its racist content in comparison to Negrophobia and anti-Semitism. He concludes by discussing Tiziana Terranova’s reworking of Said’s concern with the technological aspects of the new Orientalism, demonstrating “how this real mutation of Orientalism was introduced by a new technology of power which depended on publicity, communication management and opinionmaking and corresponded to a new mode of conflict, an information warfare.” In “Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Recent Writing” (Chapter 15), Peter Morey also traces a trajectory for a “revived Orientalism” back to Said’s analysis, pointing out that Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia are mobile and have a “political utility,” put to effect in the War on Terror when it was “necessary to create a ‘spectacle of fear’ around Muslims and Islam to bolster support for an illegal imperialist foreign policy.” The set of defining Neo-Orientalist tropes sustain a range of axioms concerning Muslims’ practice: violence, lying, polygamy and paedophilia, all apparently sustained by their religion. “Muslim culture” is reified and delimited, disallowing Muslims the opportunity to articulate ideas outside sanctioned topics and recognized narratives. “The West’s privilege to define the terms of any discourse about Muslims is . . . at the heart of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia as hegemonic discourses.” The assumptions supplied by these are built into a subgenre of popular

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novels and memoirs “by and about Muslim women and their experiences” that follow a frame story involving the “saving” of Muslim women from Islamic culture’s victimization. Recent wars – the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan – have been sanctioned and fought in their name. In his analysis of Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Morey presents a close reading of a text that “aspires to something more than journalistic status, employing fictive strategies to bolster claims that are anthropological in nature,” but concluding that “for all its apparent objectivity, The Bookseller of Kabul’s deployment of novelistic techniques takes it beyond the realms of normally accepted journalistic practice.” In spite of “Seierstad’s urge to tell the truth . . . a conflicted narrative . . . on one level replicates the cultural prejudices by which Muslim countries are homogenized and found wanting. Yet, at the same time . . . it exposes as much about the priorities and opportunism of Westerners as about those in Afghanistan for whom war has become a permanent state of mind.” Nonetheless, the book’s Orientalism “remains alive.” Orientalism in the United States: Migrant Writing and American Journalism A further line of thinking about how Orientalism is current and effective in the twenty-first century requires consideration of what is distinct about American Orientalism. Has Orientalism seeped into American discourse (not just Hollywood films)? Does this change from the post–Gulf War “New World Order” to the “War on Terror” and beyond? Carol W. N. Fadda, in “Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle-Eastern American Writing” (Chapter 16), proposes the term “anti-Arab racism” as a fitting descriptor for the way racism has motivated the United States’ essentialization of Arabs and Muslims in its post–Second World War exercise of imperial power and its military interventions in the Middle East. The geopolitical shifts resulting from the successive wars and upheavals in that region have been accompanied by “overwhelmingly negative mainstream representations of Middle Easterners, ones that are premised on the binary logics of Orientalist discourse.” Outlining the different phases of arrival of Middle East migrants in America, Fadda emphasizes how “a mainstream discourse . . . collapsed the distinctions among the identity markers Muslim, Arab and Middle Eastern, conceiving them as homogenous and threatening in their enactment of national, cultural, religious and political difference.” Writers of Middle Eastern ethnicity have, since the early twentieth century, faced choices as to how to respond

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to this crude binary of “an overarching national narrative” that constructs them in an undifferentiated way as the Other. Though their responses are far from being uniform, a discernible division exists between those who have been amenable to satisfying “a Western and Neo-Orientalist public appetite for stories that affirm the way in which it imagines and constructs the Muslim and Middle-Eastern Other” and others who, from the 1990s, displayed a “shift toward different forms of anti-Orientalist Arab American self-representation.” Among the latter group, Mohja Kahf, Suheir Hammad and other Arab American writers enact “the replacement of rigid Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist boundaries with fluid identity formations and transnational configurations of belonging.” In “New Orientalism and the American Media: New York Cleopatra and Saudi ‘Giggly Black Ghosts’” (Chapter 17), Moneera Al-Ghadeer sets out to “explore the digital assembly initiated by Saudi women and their microblogging attempt to destabilize two critical concepts that are important subjects of investigation for this volume – American Orientalism and new Orientalism in social media.” Her cue is the “invented Orient” Said presents at the start of Orientalism – “the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval” – the disappearance of which was announced by a French journalist witnessing the destruction of Beirut in the civil war of 1975–1976. “As we shall see, a similar fictional Orient persists in the representations of the American media, indicating not only that the West and the East are interdependent but that the fictionality of the Western view of ‘the Orient’ emerges from tragic events that command lamentation and appropriation.” Turning to the representation of Saudi women in the US press, Al-Ghadeer observes that “the Saudi woman has become a protagonist whose narrative has almost identical discursive characteristics to those found in media stories about Arab and Muslim women.” From her investigation of editorials, which range from September 11, 2001, to spring 2017, the representation appears little changed: “What characterizes most of these editorials are the inextricable links between Saudi women, oil, premodernization, the Arab Spring and Western moralism. These values become the yardstick against which Saudi women are asymmetrically measured . . . The attempted unveiling of Arab women, developed during the period of high imperialism and its Orientalist discourse, recurs time and again in recent writing and reporting about Saudi women.” Hence the encapsulation of Saudi women by a New York Times journalist visiting the kingdom as “‘giggly black ghosts’ . . . ‘enveloped in black.’” Al-Ghadeer’s subject, which is about the engagement of Saudi women in non-Western feminist activity and how this has shifted into cyberspace to “digital

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activism,” is underpinned by the question “Do the twentieth-century Orientalist images of Arab women migrate to cyberspace, and, if they do, are they presented and viewed differently there than they are in print media?” Her conclusion – that they do, and they are not – presents “a challenge not only to postcolonial and gender studies but also to our understanding of global communication and comparative cultural debates in general.” Marxism, Post-Marxism and (Post-)Orientalism Another area that is worth examining is the relationship between Said and those Marxist intellectual interlocutors who are related not only to Said’s borrowings but also to the intellectual breadth and veracity of Orientalism as a concept and phenomenon. A fuller exploration of the topic might probe such issues as: Is Orientalism an ideology or more? How does Said’s conception of power and culture differ from the kind presented by Marxist materialism? Did Said expand the cultural range of the concept? Although these questions are not addressed here, we confirm how, at least at an early stage, Said’s perspectives on Orientalism appear to have overlapped with Marxists’. His distinction and innovation lies (whether one agrees with him or not) where he departs from them. Anouar AbdelMalek’s seminal article “Orientalism in Crisis” and Maxime Rodinson’s work leading up to his Europe and the Mystique of Islam helped shape Said’s writings on the topic of Orientalism.39 Later, however, criticisms were leveled against Said from Marxist standpoints, beginning with Sadik al‘Azm’s response to Orientalism and his proposal of an “Orientalism in reverse.”40 Like al-‘Azm, who vehemently rejected Said’s charge that Marx had been suborned by Orientalist thinking about Asia, Gilbert Achcar has summed up Said’s debt to Abdel-Malik and Rodinson as thinkers who shared his anticolonial/anti-imperialist standpoint but who were “particularly irritated by [his] indiscriminate classification of Marx as an ‘Orientalist’ in the pejorative sense, in full disregard of the fact that most anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the twentieth century were inspired by Marx’s legacy.”41 (Al-‘Azm rejected Said’s portrayal of Marx in this way as a “travesty”; interestingly, he blames this partly on Said’s “excessive fascination with the verbal, textual and linguistic.”)42 Achar opines that having condemned Hegel’s sophisticated rehearsal of the clichés of Orientalism, Said’s own definition of the Orient and the West was, to say the least, essentialist in its view of culture43 and, we might add, guilty of mystification in its analysis of power. Such arguments amount to

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a Marxian view that Orientalism was, at base, a substitution of abstract verbal categories for Marxist diagnosis of colonialism fueled by economic and class exploitation, requiring for their removal revolutionary action. Aijaz Ahmad, as we have already observed, charged Said with having disabled anticolonial resistance as well as critiquing his stance as a postcolonial intellectual. He also argued that Said had helped “refurbish, in those aspects of Social Science which overlap with History, quite conservative, rightwing versions of a certain kind of indigenism under the label of authenticity and agency of the Third World historical subject.”44 This could be construed as constituting part of a larger argument which Ahmad conducted against “Third Worldism” and postcolonial theorists (notably Bhabha) “who believe not only that colonialism has more or less ended but who also subscribe to the idea of the end of Marxism, nationalism, collective historical subjects and revolutionary possibility as such.”45 In the last chapters of this volume, two theorists chart the trajectory Orientalism might take in the future, both with Marxist/post-Marxist frames in the background. One academic who has moved away from revision and partial endorsement of Edward Said is Anouar Majid. In “On Orientalism’s Future(s)” (Chapter 18), apparently relinquishing entirely his own former postcolonial stance and extending his criticisms of Islamism and Arab nationalism, Majid stages a wholesale denunciation of Orientalism for the encouragement it has extended to proponents of these movements. He also condemns those Western academics who either have endorsed Said or engage in recuperation of Islam as “unwitting collaborators of a religion that has stifled freedoms, delayed emancipation and inflicted incalculable damage on the Muslims who are trapped in Muslim-majority societies.” The “theory of protest” Muslims have derived from Said’s work has added to their “sense of helplessness and, what’s worse, allowed liberal and progressive scholars from both sides to come to their rescue, armed by a sophisticated language that allowed for little nuance and almost no genuine progressive critical thinking.” Contending that the West’s study of Islam “has enriched us immensely,” Majid argues that one effect of Said’s theory has been “the perpetuation of failure and its nagging consequences on the Muslim side, and the transformation of entire academic fields into hagiographic tributes to a forgotten Muslim past.” The problem now is “what to do with Said’s theory as we try to act on an unstable present and decipher the outlines of an elusive future.” The suggested solution for “those of us who want to see Muslims be more active participants in the making of a better civilization,

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not chronic complainers about the ills (real and imagined) that continue to befall them, [is] to shelve Said’s theory and move on to newer and bolder paradigms.” In “‘The Engine of Survival’: A Future for Orientalism” (Chapter 19), Patrick Williams joins debate with Majid, taking issue with Majid’s charge that Said has given ammunition to Muslim religio-cultural revanchism: At the risk of stating the very obvious, Orientalism was not written in support of Islam, nor to portray Muslims as victims, nor to encourage victim mentalities on the part of anyone. Said is not pro-Islam as such; he is anti-misrepresentation and anti-oppression, whatever the culture, community or religion being subjected to them. He is not putting forward a simplistic model of the (wicked) West endlessly oppressing the (downtrodden) East.

Muslims’ sense of victimization goes back long before Said and so “is not logically attributable to Said’s influence.” Moreover, Said “did not regard Orientalism as a theory as such, and ‘protest’ was not the aim.” As to the end of establishing the future utility or otherwise of Orientalism, Williams’ response is: “It has a guaranteed future in the context of Said’s oeuvre, its foundational analysis of modes of domination complemented by – among so many others – Culture and Imperialism’s focus on indigenous resistance and Covering Islam’s analysis of media coverage of Islamic religion and culture, carrying forward the range of Saidian concerns and contestations.” In an earlier work, Majid took Said to task for continuing to think along the lines of Western humanism.46 Williams’ chapter, however, ends by foregrounding Said’s humanism; if his “last words” on Orientalism appear in the preface to the 2003 reprinting, his last book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, which he completed before his death, “embodies the future of Orientalism, carrying its humanist impulse and analysis forward a quarter of a century.” For Hamid Dabashi, however, Said’s humanism was always an aberration – flagged up early on as a weak facet of Orientalism present due to his attempt to marry “assymetrically” the poststructuralism of Foucault with the humanist tradition of Auerbach and Western literature.47 Williams, who shows in the second paragraph of his chapter that he is well aware of this, would no doubt assign Dabashi’s book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror to the “scramble to critique Orientalism, to correct it or ‘go beyond’ it”. Dabashi, however, celebrates Said’s brilliance as a literature professor who was short on awareness of the sociology of knowledge but was the beneficiary of “Marx, Engels, Scheler and Mannheim [who] demonstrated the

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foundational production of the very a priori structure of thinking, at a deep epistemic level, before even a producer of knowledge has put pen to paper.”48 In a manner of speaking, the circle is squared. Majid, Williams and Dabashi each invoke Marx’s influence on Said in a broadly similar way. Each of them admits Orientalism’s power of address – their differences reside in the valence they attach to its message and the importance they ascribe to its legacy.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 2–3; original italics. Said divided Orientalism into three interlocking constituents: the study of the Orient as an academic discipline; a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and “the Occident”; and “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, making statements about it, describing it [and] ruling over it” (pp. 2–3). 2. Said, Afterword to the 1995 printing, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 331. 3. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 88. 4. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 3–4, p. 8. 5. See Lisa Lampert-Weissig, ed., Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 11–15. 6. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols of the East: European Representations of Islam 1100–1450 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 5, p. 9. 7. Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic, “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism,” Literary Compass 12:4 (2015): pp. 121–133, p. 121. 8. Suvir Kaul, Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 8. 9. Srinivas Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 11. 10. Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 3. 11. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 364. Jeffrey Cass re-enforces the paradox whereby “the project of Orientalism . . . begins in the late eighteenth century and represents the West’s simultaneous yearning for and love of Eastern exoticism at the same time that it conquers and subdues Eastern lands in order to control, manage, and contain them.” “Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices,” in Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices, eds. Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), pp. 25–45, p. 41.

Introduction

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12. Gallien and Jokic, “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism,” p. 121. 13. Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 8; Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, p. 14. 14. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), p. 44; Said’s statement in Orientalism was: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and underground self” (p. 3). 15. Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), p. 65. 16. Kaul, Eighteenth-Century British Literature, p. 3. 17. See Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 18. See Urs Alp, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. xii. 19. See Eitan Bar-Jousef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 20. In their introduction to Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), Ivan Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar argue for a broadening of Orientalism to include Jews, recognizing that they “as well as Muslims had been the target of orientalism” (p. xv). See also Ivan Kalmar, “Arabizing the Bible: Racial Supersessionism in Nineteenth Century Christian Art and Biblical Criticism,” in Orientalism Revisited, ed. Ian Netton (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 176–186. 21. Hoeveler and Cass, Interrogating Orientalism, p. 11. 22. Varisco, Reading Orientalism, p. 81. 23. One of the main arguments made by Aijaz Ahmad; see In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 24. Peter Childs and Patrick R. J. Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997), p. 122. 25. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993). For criticism of Bhabha, see Alex Callinicos, “Wonders Taken For Signs,” in PostAlity: Marxism and Postmodernism, eds. M. Zavarzadeh and D. Morton (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1995), pp. 98–112. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, quotes approvingly (p. 147) Abdul JanMohamed’s conclusion: Bhabha “circumvent[s] entirely the dense history of the material conflict between Europeans and natives . . . to focus on colonial discourse as if it existed in a vacuum.” See also Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (New York: Routledge, 2004). However, in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), Robert J. C. Young effectively applies hybridity in discussing racism and the desire of the colonizer for the colonized other. The work of Ann Laura Stoler extends this in her examinations of white-colonized miscegenation in colonial society: Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in

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26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

geoffrey p. nash Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1991); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996); Meyda Yeǧ enoǧ lu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Billie Melman, “The Middle East/Arabia: ‘The Cradle of Islam,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 105–121, p. 107. This approach is embodied in Ali Behdad’s seminal study of Middle East travel writing, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). See also Behdad’s “Orientalism,” in Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jennifer Speake, 3 vols. (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn), 2: pp. 888–891. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 8. Mishka Sinha, “Orienting America: Sansrit and Modern Scholarship in the United States,” in Debating Orientalism, eds. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard and David Attwell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 73–93. Moore-Gilbert (Postcolonial Theory, p. 51) proposed “the pessimistic Foucauldian in Said leads him at times to propose a model of colonial political relations in which all power lies with the colonizer.” Jeffrey Cass, “Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices,” in Hoeveler and Cass, Interrogating Orientalism, pp. 25–45, p. 27. This chapter is one of the more comprehensive and succinct surveys of the interdisciplinary scope of Orientalism. This is one of the arguments leveled against Said by Daniel Varisco in Reading Orientalism. These topics and a range of other areas related to Orientalism are included in François Pouillon and Jean-Claude Vatin, eds., After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations (Leiden: Brill, 2015). A collection of essays, many of which have Francophone origins, this includes pieces by the editors and Robert Irwin that are openly antagonistic to Said. Nonetheless, others, specifically two on Late Ottoman and Kemalist politics by Edhem Eldem and Emmanuel Szurek, follow the important seam of Ottoman Orientalism and apply new applications of “self-orientalizing,” “internal,” “mimetic,” and “vernacular” Orientalism. Other notable explorations of Saidian-influenced topics are Elena Andreeva, Russia and Iran in the Great Game: Travelogues and Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2007), and

Introduction

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

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Stephanie Cronin, ed., Iranian-Russian Encounters (London: Routledge, 2013). On Robert Irwin’s (and Martin Kramer and Ibn Warraq’s) attacks on Said, see Robert Spencer, “The ‘War on Terror’ and the Backlash against Orientalism,” in Debating Orientalism, eds. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard and David Attwell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 155–174. Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 207. Debjani Ganguli and Ned Curthoys, eds., Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), p. 179. Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature,” Critical Inquiry 36:3 (Spring 2010): pp. 458–493, p. 458. Mufti, “Orientalism,” pp. 460–461. More recently, Mufti has confirmed his view that Orientalism is “the genealogical origin of world literature” and challenges those behind its recent Eurocentric encodements for missing colonialism’s continuing imprint on non-Western literatures: “The historical experience of being colonized – that is, the transition to capitalism and bourgeois modernity under the conditions of colonial subjugation – introduces historical disruptions that cannot be subsumed in a narrative of continuous historical development, as is possible in metropolitan societies – hence the specific forms that the crisis of authenticity (the desire for a return and restoration to an origin) takes in postcolonial societies.” Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English: Orientalism and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 30, p. 47. Anouar Abdel-Malik, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes 44 (1963): pp. 104–12; repr. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 47–56; Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans. R. Veinus (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), originally published as La fascination de l’Islam (1980); see also Maxime Rodinson, “The Western Image and Western Studies of Islam,” in The Legacy of Islam, 2nd ed., eds. Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 9–62. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8 (1991): pp. 5–26; repr. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 217–238. Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (London: Saqi, 2013), p. 71. Achcar goes on to argue that al-‘Azm, Samir Amin and Aijaz Ahmad “all reproached [Said] for adhering to a construction of the West that postulates a continuity from Ancient Greece to the present-day United States, and for positing that true knowledge of the Orient is beyond the reach of Western minds, thus pandering to Oriental ethnocentrisms and their own mythical representations of their communities” (pp. 81–82). On a different issue, it might be argued that Said’s inclusion of Gramsci in Culture and Imperialism extends the role of culture beyond the base/superstructure model of classical Marxism. Moore-Gilbert pointed out in that work Said’s employment of the Marxist historiography of Eric Hobsbawm and V. G. Kiernan, and his praise

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42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

geoffrey p. nash of Raymond William’s work on culture, although he “chides [him] . . . for a failure to attend to issues of imperialism” (p. 71). Al-‘Azm, “Orientalism,” p. 226. Achar, Marxism, Orientalism, p. 76. Aijaz Ahmad, “Between Orientalism and Historicism,” Studies in History 7:1 (1991), sections 2–5; repr. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 286–297, p. 296. Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race & Class 36:3 (1995): pp. 1–20, pp. 9–10. Neil Lazarus endorses Ahmad’s argument: “It is clear that in Bhabha’s thinking ‘postcolonial’ has ceased to be a historical category. The term does not designate what it sounds like it designates: that is, the moment, or more generally the time, after colonialism” (original italics). Even in Said, in Culture and Imperialism, “we can already observe the tendency to cast imperialism as pre-eminently a political dispensation and to refer it, in civilizational terms, to ‘the west’, rather than to the specific dynamics of capitalist development.” Lazarus, “‘Third Worldism’ and the Political Imaginary of Postcolonial Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 324–339, p. 329, p. 333. See Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, p. 41. Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015), p. 97.

part 1

Origins

chapter 1

Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century Suvir Kaul

Orientalism was, and in modified ways continues to be, a capacious, supple and changing discursive system that enables Anglo-European writers to explain and to manage the encounters between themselves and the peoples of lands ranging from Turkey, Egypt, Persia and India to China and Japan. Since these peoples, their lives, their manufactures and their worldviews were so different from each other (as in fact were the different Westerners who engaged them), we must begin by recognizing that Orientalism is a discourse of singular power, one that manufactures an “Orient” even as it brings different peoples into view. Historically, Orientalism developed the capacity to enumerate (sometimes sympathetically or admiringly) cultural particularities even as it reshaped its observations into moral-political systems of classification that privilege Western self-definition. Further, it is important to note that Orientalism both draws its world-making power from, and in turn enables, the rise of modern European empires. Orientalism is not identical with the racist apologetics of high imperialism, but these coterminous languages of power do share many rhetorical features and styles of address (it is possible to argue that the former made possible the latter). One last detail: as a discursive system, Orientalism is far from being the product of disinterested intellectual enquiries into the religious practices, social systems or economic organization of “Oriental” peoples. Rather, its characteristic flourishes, its hyperbole and its repressions, can be traced back to the libidinal and affective energies, the irrational fears and desires, of Westerners as they came into contact with unfamiliar commodities, bodies and cultural forms.1 Commentators have endowed Orientalism with a long prehistory or genealogy: Edward Said finds Orientalist tropes in Herodotus’ historiography and his accounts of Alexander’s conquests. Others, narrowing their focus to scholarship, have pointed to theologians who studied Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac – the early languages of the Bible – as precursors.2 From antiquity onward, as armies moved in conquest across vast 35

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territories, as commercial routes developed across land and water, as stories traveled and mutated across languages, commentators sought to make sense of cultural and socioeconomic differences, and their curiosity was often respectful. However, whenever such cultural examination was precipitated by the violence of conquest and control, the discourses within which difference was catalogued and explained became partisan and selfserving; in effect they produced the difference they claimed only to perceive. Such writing played a formative role in cultural self-definition, particularly once systems of religious belief were ranged against each other. The need to confirm “Occidental” difference from “Oriental” lives often centered on the need to set Christians off from Muslims (and, as the example of Biblical scholarship suggests, from Jews, both those living in Europe and elsewhere).3 Then, in the early modern period, as the contact zones of European empires expanded, a putatively Christian Europe sought to demarcate its civilizational difference not just from monotheistic Jews or Muslims but also from belief systems practiced across Asia, particularly in India, China, Japan and the “Spice Islands” of the Moluccas. However, the long histories of travel and trade complicated this political and cultural need to catalogue difference. Indeed, the border-crossing powers of tales, ideas and intellectual traditions (including scientific knowledge, philosophical systems and aesthetics) worked against the grain of such polarized differentiation. Not that people and practices were the same everywhere, but there was no easy way to believe in the lesser status of others if you were drinking from vessels they had molded, or eating food made palatable by spices from their lands, or drinking teas they had grown, or wearing fabrics they had woven, or being entertained by stories that they had told about themselves, particularly as they involved fabulous wealth and power. By the eighteenth century, however, European Orientalism comes into visibility as an increasingly consolidated attitude, a mode of address and understanding that helps manage the percolation of the foreign into the domestic and shapes the responses of travelers, traders and colonists overseas. A variety of desires – commercial, sexual, intellectual – had clearly been activated by experiences in and fantasies about the “Orient.” Courts like those of the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Ming and Qing emperors, and the Edo and Tokugawa shogunate excited fear and covetousness, and over time, as European trading posts became the staging points for territorial acquisition, particularly in India, Orientalism morphed from a discourse of envy and wonder into one of political-bureaucratic, cultural and moral superiority. European “modernity” was increasingly contrasted with decaying traditionalism, and that

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divergence became both the excuse for and the explanation of military gains made by European colonists and traders. Over the next century and more, as European empires consolidated their control over vast territories, apologists for imperialism insisted upon the civilizational mandate behind, and the historical inevitability of, European rule over the lesser peoples of the earth. This chapter will focus on the British experience of “Oriental” things, ideas and peoples over the course of the eighteenth century in order to illustrate the widespread impact of such material and cultural phenomena on the making of British (and, by extension, western European) values and lifestyles. We can turn first to the growing presence of imported commodities, which followed from the expansion of the trading activities of the East India Company. The EIC’s success enabled wealthy Englishmen and -women to aspire to the fashionable lives enjoyed by their Portuguese, Dutch and French counterparts. The volume of imports was soon large enough to initiate a broader consumer culture. From the late seventeenth century onward, china and porcelain; lacquered goods from Japan; cotton fabrics from India; silk from China; and tea, coffee and sugar remade the lives of the rich as well as of the bourgeoisie.4 These goods flooded into homes but also into literary texts, where their presence in British lives is usually treated with some degree of cultural and moral suspicion, as evidence of conspicuous consumption that disturbs settled economic and social hierarchies. This, for instance, is Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, complaining about the fashionable ways of the wife of a successful merchant: A Dutchess wears not so much Gold and Lace; Then ’tis with Her an undisputed Case, The finest Petticoat must take the Place. Her Rooms, anew at ev’ry Christ’ning drest, Put down the Court, and vex the City-Guest. Grinning Malottos in true Ermin stare; The best Japan, and clearest China Ware Are but as common Delft and English Laquar there.5

The merchant’s wife dresses above her station, changes the decor in her rooms each year, surrounds herself with black servants wearing royal ermine and – this is the climax of this complaint – has as much Japanese lacquer-work and Chinese porcelain in her house as others have Dutch ceramics from Delft (“delftware”) or imitation lacquer-work (termed “japanning”) manufactured locally. When asked, the merchant claims his

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wealth is the result of his industry and financial acumen. This is the point at which satire turns into moral fable: all the merchant’s ventures overseas fail (he blames providence), and he flees to the country, leaving behind his wife and debts. The link between a woman’s vanity, sexuality and china is a recurrent trope in early eighteenth-century poetry. The male speaker in John Gay’s “To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China” (1725) is inflamed by desire for Laura, a woman who has eyes only for china: “China’s the passion of her soul; / A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl, / Can kindle wishes in her breast, / Inflame with joy, or break her rest” (ll. 7–10). Unable to gain her attention, the speaker muses that women are in fact a type of chinaware: “Are they not valu’d for their beauty, / Too fair, too fine for houshold duty?” (ll. 33–34). This seeming compliment is but a prelude to a more vindictive observation, one which sexualizes this analogy between women and porcelain: “How white, how polish’d is their skin, / And valu’d most when only seen! / She who before was highest priz’d, / Is for a crack or flaw despis’d” (ll. 37–40). The connection between collectibles and femininity is reiterated in the conclusion of the poem; now the speaker reminds Laura that unlike china, more valuable as it ages, she must seize the day: Love, Laura, love, while youth is warm, For each new winter breaks a charm; And woman’s not like China sold, But cheaper grows in growing old; Then quickly chuse the prudent part, Or else you break a faithful heart. (ll. 67–72)

These two examples make clear that imported Chinese wares (to take just one set of “Oriental” commodities) became an iconic marker of social life, of class behavior and of gender difference in Britain. Christian moralists had long castigated overconsumption, but that history alone does not adequately explain why imports such as cotton and silk fabrics, tea and coffee, now central to the cultivation and display of refined manners in domestic and public spaces, were both desired and suspect. As foreign material objects circulated into British lives, they crystallized awareness of both the benefits of and the costs and consequences of overseas trade. All of these materials were sourced from well-established trade networks in Asia, often in violent competition with other European or local merchants. The consumption of tobacco, sugar and rum was inescapably tainted by the horrors of the slave trade and of plantation slavery;6 while imports from Asia did not carry such an obvious moral burden, they did precipitate

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recurrent diatribes against consumption and luxury that suggest more than moral unease. They were, after all, sources of great pleasure, pleasure that had to be managed, particularly by deflecting its potential immorality onto avaricious women and uncultured social climbers. As Anne Finch’s complaint makes clear, there was also a widening awareness that overseas commerce was enriching a new class of nonaristocratic, non-landed gentry and granting port cities, particularly London, disproportionate importance in setting national agendas. Much was changing as this consumer culture developed. Imports clearly had the power to reshape normative ideas of selfhood and social order, not only as material objects but also because they were seen to embody some of the cultural and social values of the worlds from which they originated. Whether they came from China, India, the West Indies or elsewhere, they were part of a flood of prose that described those places and their peoples and invited Britons to think comparatively about social mores and beliefs. Robert Markley argues that “lure of trade to the Far East continued to dominate conceptions of international commerce”; he turns to the revised and enlarged volume of John Harris’ Navigantium atque Itinerantium Biblioteca (1745) to show that well “into the eighteenth century, atlases, geographies, collections, and compilations devoted far more space to Asia than to the Americas.”7 In the instance of chinoiserie, then, English responses were part of a broader series of meditations on China – in Chi-ming Yang’s fetching phrase, “the dual register of china and China” enables economic and moral, social and spiritual comparisons.8 As David Porter and other scholars have shown, there was much that was admired about China – the antiquity of its civilization, the orderliness of its administration, its commercial productivity – but also much that was feared, including its civilizational self-confidence, its wealth, its indifference to goods from the West, and its refusal to open up markets on terms favorable to Westerners.9 Yang reminds us of the work of recent economic historians who confirm that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “China was the predominant force of the early modern global economy” and that before the “socalled rise of the West, it already possessed what are generally considered the conditions of modernity: a developed state formation, advanced market system, government bureaucracy, and high standards of living relative to other parts of the world” (pp. 5–6). Seventeenth-century Dutch and Jesuit reports, however ambivalent they might have been about other elements of Chinese life, had made clear that, as Robert Batchelor puts it, China was “a populous, urbanized, commercial society with strong

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institutions devoted to the cultural replication of merit” and that “China had developed the most well-governed, mannered, and stable nation on earth, grounded upon … an ancient and good ‘constitution’.” Thus, Batchelor argues, both Old Whigs and post-1688 Tories imagined China less as a “commercial competitor” than as “an exemplary model of stability for an emerging commercial society like Britain.”10 China was also not an immediate political threat, which allowed observers some evaluative distance. The model of political and social continuity they projected onto China was particularly attractive for British commentators, for it offered epistemological comforts too. Porter shows that Edward Gibbon turned to China as “a place … where the myriad signs and symbols that constitute culture were reliably grounded in a fixed, originary source of meaning and therefore not subject to the corrupting vicissitudes of common language and history” (p. 6). Bureaucrat-scholars – mandarins – guaranteed civic virtues over great stretches of time, and lineages of rule protected against unsettling challenges to authority, making China exemplary for anyone worried about the rise and fall of empires. However, as European nations grew more successful in their trading and colonial ventures, Porter notes an overall shift in the European response to China, which “gradually evolved from one of reverential awe to one of increasingly dismissive contempt” (p. 7). The example of China shows how the “Orient” was admired and envied, but also provincialized, during this period; this complex of responses defines discourses of Orientalism before the events discussed in Said’s Orientalism. Said’s analysis, centered as it is in the nineteenth century, is also borne out – not wholly or identically of course, but substantially – by the evidence offered by earlier literary, philosophical and political writing. Eighteenth-century texts provide a resonant archive in which to study the multiple and overlapping material, cultural and ideological processes that we understand today as colonial discourse or the language of empire. In its variegated forms, Orientalism was a subset of this language, even when Britain was not in a position of superiority, as the instance of China makes clear.11 As Great Britain globalized itself in this century – it lost an empire to its west and gained another in the east – the contact zones of trade and colonialism demanded supple forms of representation, whose characteristic vocabularies define for us the interwoven strands of Orientalism. The European fascination with, and fear and envy of, Muslim empires like Turkey, Persia and Mughal India resulted in the development of another weighty and enduring form of Orientalist engagement, replete with characteristic rhetorical flourishes.12 Alain Grosrichard’s witty

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comment reminds us of the hyperbolic terms in which Ottoman rule, for instance, was imagined: “From the end of the seventeenth century and all through the eighteenth, a spectre was haunting Europe: the spectre of despotism.”13 As Grosrichard shows, a variety of European thinkers and travel writers turned away from their own feudal and imperial histories and contemporary practices, their gaze hypnotized by the wealth and supposedly absolute power of the Turkish sultan (as well as by the threat that Ottoman military and naval power represented). In their telling, despotism did not designate a mode of rule or political practice alone but named a cultural and social form, one that demarcated civilizational deficiencies: Asia was home to slavish subjects, to peoples who had not yet ascended to political rationality or being, and hence was the playground of despotic power. Further, speculation about the form and management of the seraglio or harem – spaces closed off to the male gaze – fueled fantasies of both manifold aberrant sexualities and the consolidation of power in the hands of the eunuch-administrators who ruled in the name of the Sultan.14 In effect, Grosrichard argues, writers like Montesquieu and Voltaire who turned to “the regimes of Asia” wished to “draw analogies with the actual state of monarchies” at home; for him, any such writing is in practice an “endoscopic fantasy” (p. 23). There were other modes of fantasy in circulation too that originated not in the European imagination but in the literatures and folktales of India, Persia and the Arab lands. European writers found in the Alf layla wa layla (Thousand and One Nights) a suggestive form of nested storytelling as well as a remarkably fecund collection of stories. As Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum argue, this story-cycle, first translated into French by Antoine Galland as Les mille et une nuits (1704–1717) and subsequently into a dozen European languages, “offered a particularly powerful vision of an Asiatic culture seemingly saturated with references to sensuality, extravagance, indulgence, violence, supernaturalism, and eroticism: the very things that the rising European powers were – for all their own obsessive interest in them – keen to disavow as elements in their own cultures as they sought to find ways to justify their conquest and rule over other peoples, particularly in Asia.”15 Makdisi and Nussbaum are clear about the importance of these traveling tales in fueling the European imagination: “English and French literature from the early to mid-eighteenth century onwards would not have taken the shape it did had it not been for the Nights” (p. 12). In England, the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage in England was, as Bridget Orr states, “in fact notable for its large number of serious dramas with exotic, mostly Asian subjects.”16 Orr also argues that adaptations from

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Galland’s Nights aided the efflorescence of Oriental “shows” exemplified in the popularity of pantomime, melodrama, burletta, spectacle and romance (p. 104). These shows continued to be popular even though theater critics belittled such performances and argued that they tarnished serious drama. Forms of storytelling such as the Oriental fable too found ready audiences and were crucial to the rise and cultural dominance of the novel.17 Recent critics have shown convincingly that the vastly influential “rise of the novel” thesis developed by Ian Watt worked to render parochial novelistic practices that were in fact much more cosmopolitan in their historical and formal origins as well as themes and concerns.18 In fact, Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that paying attention to such cosmopolitanism will allow us to distinguish a cultural possibility in Enlightenment thought whose curiosity and indeed “utopian aspirations” were blunted by the materialist and political requirements of empire. For him, the forms of early prose fiction in England or France suggest a different relation between them and their Orients. He writes that the very popular “Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias speculated about a largely imaginative East” and that this “imagination was experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist.” However, such “experimentation came to an end … partly out of generic exhaustion and partly as a result of a rising nationalist tide that combined self-contemplative narcissism with intense xenophobia.”19 Traveling tales were (or are) of course no guarantee against ethnocentric conclusions, but they do open up at least the possibility of thinking outside the narrow certainties of nationalist and domestic ideology. For another instance of the possibilities of experience, imagination and literary innovation opened up by the “East,” let us turn to the cultural work of British men abroad, particularly after 1757, when the merchants of the East India Company became the de facto rulers of territories in India. William Jones, an administrator and judge with the Company in Bengal, who was learned in languages both European and Indian, a remarkable linguist and philologist and a scholar of ancient India – in sum, an exemplary Orientalist – also wrote poetry. Jones had translated poems from Sanskrit and Persian, and his empathetic immersion into those poetic forms and figures is visible in his own writing. Nandini Das has noted that Jones attempted to “rejuvenate the tired imagery of eighteenth-century poetry with the help of the ‘poetry of the Eastern nations’”;20 Jones’ “A Hymn to Camdeo” (written in 1784) is a good instance. Jones found in Sanskrit celebrations of the powers of Kamdev, the Hindu god of love and eros, “new and peculiar beauties.” “A Hymn to Camdeo” is enlivened by

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such novel figures and images, but their beauties are not the only impact Sanskrit poetics had on Jones. His invocation of Camdeo moves the poet into states of being and feeling that disrupt all manner of confessional, experiential, cultural, racial and colonial divides. A senior official of the East India Company worships a Hindu divinity and models an exaltation of spirit: “I feel, I feel thy genial flame divine, / And hallow thee and kiss thy shrine” (ll. 9–10). His is the humility of abashed adoration: “‘Behold’ – My swimming eyes entranc’d I raise, / But oh! they shrink before th’ excessive blaze” (ll. 13–14), a humility that allows an English poem, written in a colonial situation, to become a performance of intercultural intoxication and identification, and thus, different from any English poetics. Words from Sanskrit individuate the poem: spring is Bessant, the flowers that adorn Camdeo’s arrows are Chumpa, Amer, Nagkesar, Kiticum and Bela; other gods like Krishen and Mahadeo are mentioned with an ease of cultural reference that makes them no different from the Greek or Roman deities that were staples of English neoclassicism. Nothing in Camdeo’s world is foreign to Jones; all is intimate and immediate, as is the poet’s request to Camdeo: “Thy mildest influence to thy bard impart, / To warm, but not consume, his heart” (ll. 79–80).21 As the East India Company consolidated its commercial and territorial gains, particularly after 1757, India became a lucrative destination not only for merchants and factors of the company but also for traveling artists. Tilly Kettle, George Willison, John Thomas Seton, Catherine Read, and the landscape artists William Hodges and Johan Zoffany (among others) spent time in India painting portraits of now-wealthy Englishmen and their families, paintings that featured their possessions and established their landowning status. Indian rulers and aristocrats also commissioned portraits.22 These paintings are a valued record of the development of an Orientalist style in English art, particularly since they too sought to record British and Indian lives within the formal conventions that had been developed to celebrate the lives and possessions of nobility at home. These painterly conventions shifted to accommodate the novelty of spaces (both interior and exterior), architecture, and religious and social rituals and in doing so broadened the scope of British art practice beyond the canvases of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. For instance, to look at Johan Zoffany’s Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match (ca. 1784–1788) is to find an Indian world teeming with people, in which thirteen Britons (or perhaps Europeans) join scores of Indians in a festive cockfight. While there is no question that Colonel Mordaunt is the center of the action, and the Europeans are the sahibs there, there is a compositional balance

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between Europeans and Indians. What is more unusual is that Zoffany details differences in physiognomy and dress to allow the Indians not to be massified into a faceless crowd – he understands distinctions that will have been of social consequence. For Maya Jasanoff, the drama of this canvas stems from Zoffany’s immersion within the cosmopolitan world of Lucknow aristocrats and colonial officials, and its vitality derives from its “cross-cultural” style and substance; she suggests that in its “microscopic detailing, its flattened perspective and its narrative density,” this painting “is reminiscent of classic Mughal miniatures.”23 Zoffany (and Arthur William Devis) also painted “Anglo-Indian conversation pieces” – that is, paintings that portrayed officials of the East India Company as if they were landed gentry, “with organic and hereditary links to land.”24 Beth Fowkes Tobin writes that these paintings both augmented the social status of company officials, being “the perfect pictorial medium in which to figure themselves as an elite equivalent to the landed gentry back home” (pp. 94–95), and provided them “with a way to express and resolve on a visual level some of the tensions produced by living in a conquered land” (p. 93). Tobin reads Zoffany’s Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings (1783–1787) as a counterpoint to the large number of English eighteenth-century garden conversation paintings (or country house paintings) that represent the landowner’s family at ease in his property and thus “celebrate, commemorate, and legitimate a family’s exclusive possession of a landed estate” (p. 85). For Hastings to pose in the manner of a hereditary landowner is of course to dissemble, and his pose is a cultural affront to both landowning elites at home and to the labor of those Indians whose taxes made him astonishingly wealthy (and thus a model of the corrupt nabob). The antagonisms of colonialism are caused to dissolve into the serene platitudes of the conversation piece, and the British presence in, and authority over, Indian land is naturalized. Historically, representations such as this one played a role in legitimizing colonial dominance. However, as Tobin points out, paintings like Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings suggest both the ambitions of and the contradictions within forms of British authority in India. While these paintings are not usually discussed as part of the visual apparatus of Orientalism in this period, they certainly perform the same sort of material, documentary and ideological role. The impress of the Orient on English style is also visible in another example, a building built in the Indo-Saracenic style in Brighton (but with a splendidly eclectic prehistory). The Royal Pavilion was first built by George, Prince of Wales, in the 1780s, its interiors lavish with chinoiserie

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and Chinese furniture and wallpaper. Once king, George IV commissioned the architect John Nash to expand the pavilion buildings into a palace (a previous set of plans for the buildings and gardens by Humphrey Repton, also in a promiscuously Oriental style, were set aside), and from 1815 onwards Nash built a remarkably fanciful counterpoint to the Regency style then in vogue. If the exterior domes and cupolas and columns were in the Indo-Islamic mode, then the interiors were resplendent in Chinese and Mughal styles, the whole a startling confection of Orientalist design vocabularies. The Royal Pavilion and its grounds, though undoubtedly idiosyncratic, were not unique, for Chinese landscaping styles had transformed some English estates and gardens already. As Elizabeth Chang puts it, during “the eighteenth century, British gardening style depended on Chinese influence enough to be termed jardin anglo-chinoise by European observers.”25 The first account of the planned asymmetries and irregularities of Chinese landscaping had been provided by Sir William Temple in the essay “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” (1685), and some of these ideas helped English landscape gardeners (as well as public commentators like Joseph Addison) refine a style that refused the angularities and symmetries of French gardens. It is one of the notable ironies of cross-cultural contact that the “English” style of landscaping (and its inevitably nationalist difference from French models) germinated after its incorporation of Chinese design elements and philosophical ideas into its practices. Chinese motifs and designs also reshaped architectural form as well as transformed aesthetic values. David Porter has written about the overlapping domestication in England of Chinese and Gothic styles, both of which were “loosely informed by distant, quaintly exotic, and distinctly anti-classical models.”26 Porter points to William and John Halfpenny’s Chinese and Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented (1752) and Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754) as design books that interspersed “Gothic and Chinese fantasies,” and he goes on to quote an anonymous satirist as writing, “It has not escaped your notice how much of late we are improved in architecture; not merely by the adoption of what we call Chinese, nor by the restoration of what we call Gothic; but by a happy mixture of both” (p. 48). This sort of satiric censure is one measure of the centrality of the Chinese style to English aesthetics; another is to be found in the deployment of Chinese aesthetics in debates between English architects and designers. Sir William Chambers, Yue Zhuang tells us, worked with a surprising notion of Chinese gardens as consisting of “scenes of the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising, which he emphasized, were capable of exciting opposite and violent sensations.”27

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That is, Chambers found in Chinese landscaping the aesthetic qualities of the sublime as they had been theorized by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In doing so, Chambers developed a counter to the idealized naturalism of a gardener who epitomized Englishness, Lancelot “Capability” Brown.28 In attempting to chart the place of Orientalism in eighteenth-century England, this essay has ranged over disparate territories and histories of contact as well as examined different forms of representation and systems of thought. I have argued that even when they were in awe of the social and economic heft of the Ottomans, Persians, Mughals and other Indian rulers, or the Ming and Qing emperors, the Edo and Tokugawa shoguns, travelers and merchants produced reports that both celebrated and sought to diminish into inferiority these lands and their peoples. Precisely because there was no stopping the domestic transformations wrought by material and cultural imports from these lands, English imaginative writers and intellectuals developed supple vocabularies with which to manage these transformations, to read into them schemas of civilizational difference that reasserted Christian and European superiority. The “Orient” was the promise of riches; it was the challenge of weighty civilizations more wealthy than, and certainly more ancient than, any comparable “Occidental” society; it was all that which had to be documented and analyzed in order to master disparate social systems, religious beliefs and cultural practices. Such mastery was of course finally the product of military successes, territorial domination and the putting into place of the elaborate commercial and bureaucratic systems of colonial capitalism, but there is no gainsaying the power of the ideas and discursive system – Orientalism – that eventually legitimized the remaking of the globe.

Notes * Suggestions made by Chi-ming Yang and Ania Loomba were crucial to this essay; my gratitude. 1. This is, in sum, the lesson of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978). I will not discuss all that is enabling or restrictive in Said’s scholarship; others have debated those issues at great length. Said’s pioneering insights into the European imperial response to Muslim lives in Egypt and elsewhere enable us to understand the operations of Orientalism in territories (India, China, Japan) not considered by him.

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2. See for instance, Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). App defines “modern Orientalism” as the eighteenthcentury development of “the secular, institutionalized study of the Orient by specialists capable of understanding oriental languages and handling primarysource material” (p. xi). While this definition is narrow – specialized – enough for him to reject the links between colonialism and Orientalist thought and practice, I should note that other critics of Orientalism have demonstrated precisely such links in many of the travelogues and works of enlightenment philosophy analyzed more benignly by App. 3. For a provocative exploration of such ideas, see Daniel Boyarin, “Hybridity and Heresy: Apartheid Comparative Religion in Late Antiquity,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 339–358. See also Orientalism and the Jews, eds. Ivan Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005). 4. See John E. Wills, Jr, “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 133– 147. In Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002), Woodruff D. Smith offers a wide-ranging discussion of the links between imported goods and changing cultural norms of early modern Europe. 5. Anne Finch, “Man’s Injustice towards Providence” (1713), II. 11–18. 6. See Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender & British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 7. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 269. 8. Chi-ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2011), p. 6. 9. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 202. See also Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10. Robert Batchelor, “Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the British Nation through China,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 79–92, pp. 80–81. 11. To take just one literary instance of this lack of power, when in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735) Gulliver, pretending to be a Dutchman, visits Japan, he has to petition the Emperor to allow him to avoid trampling a crucifix, a ritual required of all Christian visitors to prove that they are not in Japan to proselytize. The Emperor lets him off but notes that no Dutchmen have had any scruples about performing the ceremony.

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12. This article focuses on eighteenth-century representations of various forms of Orientalism, but, as Gerald MacLean and others have pointed out, earlier English travelers and traders to Ottoman lands, even when they were fearful of Ottoman politics, were very taken with their wealth and their cultural achievements. Further, as MacLean argues, while “theological differences with Islam were important,” they were “nothing like the whole story,” which was more tolerant and variegated. Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. xiv. Not surprisingly, turquerie – a style primarily realized in clothing, headdresses, textiles and furnishings – also came into fashion among the wealthy. 13. Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998), p. 3; original emphasis. After Mehmet II took Byzantium in 1453, the Ottoman Empire was a threat to Christian European kingdoms for another three centuries and more. 14. Joseph Allen Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) explores the long history of male same-sex desires as they were articulated across these boundaries. As Boone puts it, the “essence of any Orientalizing erotics lies in the projection of desires deemed unacceptable or forbidden at home onto a foreign terrain” precisely “in order to reencounter those desires” (p. 5). 15. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 4. 16. Bridget Orr, “Galland, Georgian Theatre, and the Creation of Popular Orientalism,” in Makdisi and Nussbaum, eds. The Arabian Nights, pp. 103– 129, p. 105. 17. See Ros Ballaster, “Introduction,” in Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also her Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18. See, for instance, Margaret Ann Doody, The True History of the Novel (London: HarperCollins, 1997). See also Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 19. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 3–4. 20. Nandini Das, “‘[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets’: Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones (1746–1794),” Literature Compass 3:6 (2006): pp. 1235–1252, p. 1245. 21. I have written of these issues in “English Poetry in India: the Early Years,” in A History of Indian Poetry in English, ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 32–47. 22. See William Foster, “British Artists in India,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 98:4820 (1950): pp. 518–525. Europeans has reported on Indian

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28.

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(particularly Hindu) art and architecture from the fifteenth century; this history is meticulously detailed by Partha Mitter in Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Maya Jasanoff, “A Passage through India: Zoffany in Calcutta and Lucknow,” in Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, ed. Martin Postle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 125–39, p. 137 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Art and Letters 1760–1820 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 93. Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 18. David Porter, “From Chinese to Goth: Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation of Chinoiserie,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23:1 (1999): pp. 46–57, p. 48. William Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), quoted by Yue Zhuang, “‘Luxury’ and ‘the Surprising’ in Sir William Chamber’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772): Commercial Society and Burke’s SublimeEffect,” Transcultural Studies 2 (2013): pp. 45–76, p. 45. There are further ironies at work here, as we know that two Jesuit painters, Giuseppe Castiglione and Matteo Ripa, did have some aesthetic influence on the court of the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) and that Castiglione also helped design palaces and their gardens. Such intercultural exchanges were a muted, but ongoing, counterpoint to the Orientalist mobilizations considered here.

chapter 2

The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale James Watt

It is tempting to cite the so-called Grub Street edition of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, translated from Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits between ca. 1706 and 1721, as a primary point of origin for the amorphous genre of eighteenth-century prose fiction often referred to as “the Oriental tale.” The Arabian Nights is famously premised on the idea of an uncontainable narrative proliferation, as Princess Scheherazade tells story after story in order to save her life, and in the early eighteenth century it generated further story-cycles organized around frame narratives that conjure up analogous kinds of foundational scenario – Persian Tales (1714), Tartarian Tales (1716), Chinese Tales (1725) and Mogul Tales (1736), to name but a few. The Nights offered rich inspiration to a wide range of eighteenth-century writers, not least because it was itself a compendious textual composite, constituted by processes of interpolation and redaction as well as translation. Some of its best-known stories, including those of Aladdin and Ali Baba, may actually have been authored by Galland himself, and one aspect of the history of the Oriental tale in English that I will address in this chapter concerns the form’s initial reliance on, then increasing rejection (or occlusion) of, French cultural mediation. The Nights’ stories can variously be seen to “reveal the Orient” and to open “infinite possibilities of fantastic invention and fabrication,” as Marina Warner has argued, and in what follows I will focus in particular on the way in which the association of the form both with exotic customs and manners and with enchantment and magic allowed the Oriental tale to pull and be pulled in different directions across the period.1 The Arabian Nights is a key point of reference for this chapter, then, although it is also necessary to acknowledge the significance of prior texts that were transmitted from France to Britain and helped to stimulate other forms of literary Orientalism. Galland had started work on an edition of the tales of the ancient Indian sage Bidpai or Pilpay before he turned to Les mille et une nuits, and a French edition produced from a Persian text was 50

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then translated into English by Joseph Harris in 1699, with the full title “The fables of Pilpay, a famous Indian philosopher containing many useful rules for the conduct of humane life.” Pilpay’s animal fables appealed to readers already familiar with the storytelling of Aesop, and they also found a receptive audience because, delivered before the Indian king Dabschelim, they overlapped with works in the similarly established narrative tradition of the “mirror for princes.” Giovanni Marana’s eight-volume Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy at Paris (first translated from French in 1687) is an equally important text with a no less complex production history. Marana’s fictional spy Mahmut writes back to his Ottoman masters about his experiences of life in France during the reign of Louis XIV, and this persona of the detached and reflective observer, constantly comparing and contrasting, was later adapted by highly sophisticated works such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762). At the outset, therefore, it is important to emphasize that the “Oriental tale” is an imprecise classification encompassing a great deal of formal variety. The distinction that Martha Pike Conant made over a century ago between “imaginative,” “moralistic,” “philosophic” and “satiric” narratives, though schematic, provides an enduringly useful reminder of both the range and the ubiquity of fictions of the East in the eighteenth century.2 Recent criticism has focused more on the generic hybridity of the Oriental tale rather than on any such attempt to enumerate, and differentiate between, its variants, however: Ros Ballaster, for example, has suggested that even fable-type narratives with a morally reformist “design” on their audience still imaginatively absorb readers in the pleasures of story.3 Ballaster and others have additionally argued that the Oriental tale was hybrid at the level of its diffuse cultural origins too. Certainly at the start of the eighteenth century it was generally taken as a given that the ceaseless movement of narrative confounded any attempt to trace any particular story back to a specific source. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s persona Mr. Spectator often presents the affinity for fiction as a universal human attribute, and he implicitly accepts that fiction is inherently transnational, invoking a kind of general narrative repository that brings together stories attributed to Aesop, Homer, Ovid and the Old Testament, as well as the Arabian Nights and other subsequent collections of tales. Mr. Spectator’s omnivorous appetite for narrative is displayed in Spectator no. 85 when, after alluding to the “Mahometan” custom of examining any scrap of writing on the ground in case it “contain some

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Piece of their Alcoran,” he confesses to having “so much of the Mussulman in me, that I cannot forbear looking into every Printed Paper which comes in my way.”4 The Spectator (1711–1714) had an influential role in disseminating diverse “Eastern” fictions to a wider audience, and no. 578, for example, bears out the point made in the previous paragraph about the continuity between ostensibly different kinds of composition. Written by Eustace Budgell, it begins by alluding to Locke’s ideas on the concept of identity before then introducing “The Story of the Prince Fadlallah” from the Frenchman François Pétis de la Croix’s The Thousand and One Days: Persian Tales. In this abridged version of the story, the Prince comes under the influence of a “Dervis” who uses the powers of reanimation he has acquired in order to transform the Prince into a doe (which he then tries to kill), before himself taking Fadlallah’s place. Though the Prince regains his identity and kills the Dervis after a lengthy contest between the two shapeshifting adversaries, his wife Zemroude is so afflicted by her “innocent Adultery” with the Dervis that she dies from grief; the Prince is so griefstricken, in turn, that he retires from the world.5 Since the narrative follows the Persian Tales’ story so closely and comes without editorial commentary, it makes possible a form of readerly immersion that is potentially at odds with Budgell’s framing of the tale as a footnote to Locke. Elsewhere, however, Mr. Spectator presents such embedded narratives as illustrative of a larger point, so that in Spectator no. 94, for example, an account of Lockean ideas of time is glossed with reference to the Koran and then to “a very pretty story in the Turkish Tales” (translated from French in 1708).6 Spectator no. 195 refers to “The Story of the Grecian King and the Physician Douban” from the Arabian Nights but detaches it from the tales with which it is interwoven and reduces it to a single paragraph, so that it becomes simply an anecdote about a Sultan who is cured by his doctor without realizing it. Mr. Spectator presents “The Vision of Mirzah” (in Spectator no. 159) as founded upon one of “several Oriental Manuscripts” that he picked up “at Grand Cairo,” in a mimicry of Galland’s scholarly fieldwork, but this pastiche of an Eastern tale again provides a means to an end – a generally applicable truth about the human condition – rather than a dream that is absorbing or diverting in itself.7 If “The Vision of Mirzah” is the best known of all the numerous short tales to appear in eighteenth-century periodicals, Spectator no. 343 may represent Addison’s most creative engagement with the possibilities of the form while at the same time anticipating the subsequent “Anglicization” of Eastern narrative previously referred to. Via the Spectator Club member Will Honeycomb, this paper introduces the story of how Jack Freelove

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protested against his mistress’s neglect of him by writing to her in the voice of her pet monkey Pugg. Claiming that he had, centuries prior, been an “Indian Brachman,” Freelove as Pugg tells of how a demon granted him the power to live in different animal forms and then details his incarnations as man and beast both in India and Britain before reminding his addressee of the beau who was “carried off by a Cold” while serenading her six years previously. “Not long after my shifting that unlucky Body,” he adds, “I found my self upon a Hill in Æthiopia, where I lived in my present Grotesque Shape, till I was caught by a Servant of the English Factory, and sent over into Great Britain.”8 This tale is energized by the idea of metamorphosis (which, Will Honeycomb says, “the Eastern parts of the World [believe] in to this Day”), but, as is demonstrated both by Freelove/ Pugg’s reference to an “English Factory” and by his aside about the “Fleet of English Ships” that he encountered while embodied as a “flying-fish,” it also situates the transnational circulation of fiction in the context of a system of world trade that is centered on London.9 Even as it provides its audience with a position of amused distance on Will Honeycomb’s flighty notion that “there might be a great deal said for the Transmigration of Souls,” Addison’s paper invites readers to appreciate its own familiarization, on “English” terms, of an “Eastern” doctrine and literary trope.10 Other early eighteenth-century fictions are similarly informed by an imaginary geography that assumes London to be the hub of global commerce where the resources of the world are freely available. While the name of Daniel Defoe’s heroine Roxana calls up a culturally specific history by alluding to the slave-turned-empress wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, Defoe’s 1724 novel also allegorizes the domestication of a more generalized exotic otherness, via the “Turkish” forms of dress and dance with which Roxana becomes acquainted in Paris and with which – albeit at subsequent cost – she distinguishes herself during her residence in St. James’s; elsewhere the novel presents “the Indies” not so much as an actual locale than as a source of seemingly guaranteed riches. Turkey in the 1720s’ fiction of Penelope Aubin, meanwhile, is an alien and potentially threatening domain associated with danger rather than alluring promise: “The Turks and Moors have been ever famous for … Cruelties,” her preface to captivity narrative The Noble Slaves (1722) states, “and therefore when we Christians fall into the Hands of … Mahometans, we must expect to be treated as those heroick Persons, who are the Subject of [this] Book.”11 Other near-contemporary works take the idea of “Eastern” despotism as a given but use this primarily as a lens through which to address domestic political arrangements. Following Montesquieu’s Persian Letters,

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George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England (1735), for example, has its narrator Selim invoke his familiarity with despotic rule in order to identify the dangerous eloquence of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole as one of the “principal Evils … making Way for arbitrary Power.”12 Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736) is another anti-Walpole work, structured around the contest between its title character and the enchanter Ochihatou (prime minister of the neighboring Hypotosa), who attempts to seduce her. While it is steeped in Country Party rhetoric, this is a hybrid text that also incorporates diverse aspects of a composite, post-Galland literary Orientalism: it is at once a political satire, a romance and a footnoted spy narrative in a Chinese register, said on its title page to be “retranslated into English by the son of a Mandarin … in London.” Eovaai offers a considerable surplus beyond its satiric transitivity, therefore, and for Srinivas Aravamudan it is thus exemplary of the broader cultural phenomenon that he terms “Enlightenment Orientalism.” Aravamudan, after Said, accepts that later imperial conquest “turned Orientalism malefic,” but he also emphasizes that much of the Orientalist fiction of the eighteenth century was playfully reflexive and premised on relativizing comparison.13 A generic miscellany of works (“pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias”) circulated Easts of the imagination that were “nine parts invented and one part referential,” he argues, and in these experimental fictions “the self was under critique as much as any ‘other.’”14 For Aravamudan, “Enlightenment Orientalism” initially flourished at a remove from the emergent novel but also came to be challenged by it, as the success of works by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding established a new paradigm for prose fiction. Richardson certainly remained indebted to older forms of storytelling (his heroine Pamela, for example, can be seen to display the narratorial eloquence associated with Scheherazade), but, as many critics have argued, his work, together with Fielding’s, helped to inaugurate a “national realism,” which in turn served to marginalize the heterogeneous literary forms against which it defined itself.15 The contemporary sense of the 1740s as a moment of literary-historical transition is captured by Francis Coventry’s approving description of the difference of Joseph Andrews (1742) from some of the fictions that preceded it: “For crystal Palaces and winged Horses, we find homely cots and ambling nags, and instead of impossibility, what we experience every day.”16 Samuel Johnson in Rambler no. 4 (1750) similarly – though perhaps more equivocally – acknowledged a shift in cultural assumptions governing the production and reception of prose fiction: “The works of fiction, with

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which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which really are to be found in conversing with mankind.”17 Johnson repudiated “the help of wonder” in this essay, and in his own fiction he often adopted the form of the moral fable or “apologue,” as in Rambler no. 120 (1751), for example, in which Almamoulin, the inheritor of his merchant father’s vast fortune, is instructed by a sage as to the proper use of riches. Rambler no. 204 and no. 205 (1752) tell the story of Seged, “Lord of Ethiopia,” who imagines what it might be to “live without a wish unsatisfied” before gradually coming to appreciate “the uncertainty of human schemes” and offering his narrative as proof to future generations “that no man hereafter may presume to say, ‘this day shall be a day of happiness.’”18 Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) begins as if it were such a fable by addressing “Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope.”19 What makes it different from Johnson’s previous works, however, is that it offers no stable position of critical or moral authority and instead undercuts the process of enquiry that it initiates. The Prince seeks a constructive occupation and knowledge of the world beyond the confines of the Happy Valley, but the only insight that he gains is that the restlessness that drives him is actually an inescapable facet of the human condition; the Prince’s tutor Imlac has to confront the same essential truth, conceding that “teachers of morality live like men” and that his nominal independence leaves him drifting through life rather than making him any better qualified to advise others.20 Whereas Voltaire’s Candide (1759), sometimes read as a companion to Rasselas, finishes with the title character’s entreaty that “we must cultivate our garden,” Rasselas offers no such call to purposive action, its final chapter announcing itself as a “conclusion, in which nothing is concluded.”21 One index of the importance of Johnson’s tale is the number of works which directly or indirectly responded to it. Shortly after its publication, Oliver Goldsmith wrote a rejoinder, “The Proceedings of Providence Vindicated” (1759), while another of Johnson’s friends, John Hawkesworth, wrote Almoran and Hamet (1761), apparently “intended as a rival to Rasselas.”22 Almoran and Hamet was dedicated to the new monarch George III, and it likewise situates itself in the “mirror for princes” tradition, although its narrative of the division of the Persian monarchy between two brothers – adapted by Samuel Jackson Pratt in his play The Fair Circassian (1781) – would take on new implications during

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Britain’s war with its American colonies. Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad (1767) is a more complex work than Hawkesworth’s, in part because, while it is structured as a moral fable, with the Persian Sultan Schemzeddin finally telling the title character “never to suppose that riches can ensure happiness,” Schemzeddin himself is responsible for orchestrating the preceding – rather ethically dubious – trial of his friend to determine whether he is qualified to serve as his “first minister.”23 Sheridan’s tale calls upon “the help of wonder” as a “genius” provides Nourjahad with the opportunity to indulge his instincts, and, in a reversal of the customary dynamic of prince and counsellor, it is the Sultan who assumes the role of sage adviser in order to bring about the reform of his friend. While Hawkesworth and Sheridan in different ways engaged with Johnson’s idiosyncratic version of a “mirror for princes” narrative, others seized on the wider contemporary resonance of Rasselas, published during the “year of victories” at the height of the Seven Years’ War. In its tale of the Prince’s often bewildered experience of life outside the Happy Valley, Rasselas can be seen to allegorize Britons’ apprehension of their extended geographical horizons, as they found themselves, in Linda Colley’s words, “captivated by, but also adrift and at odds in a vast empire and a new political world which few of them properly understood”; the Prince’s desire to rule “a little kingdom” of his own encompasses inchoate visions of empire, we are told, because “he could never fix the limits of his dominion, and was always adding to his subjects.”24 Orientalist allegories of the 1760s were sometimes more explicit than this, implicating individuals in the manner of anti-Walpole satire of the 1730s: Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), for example, tells of events in ancient Japan as they are imparted to the London haberdasher Nathaniel Peacock by an omniscient “atom” that lived in the bodies of the key political actors of the time. Numerous works followed Johnson’s more broadly allusive example, however, by considering the predicament of generically “Eastern” societies whose exposure to the wider world presented parallels with the condition of modern Britain. The “Concluding Tale” in The Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern Taste (1764), for example, describes what happened to the Egyptian province of “Gojam” (a variant on the “Gotham” of Wilkite poet Charles Churchill) when its happy “union of martial and commercial honours” began to be compromised by luxury and other vices imported from “the servile race of SELIM.”25 This familiar construction of Ottoman despotism might be regarded as “Orientalist” in a Saidian sense, but, rather than offer an alibi for empire, it instead performs

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a cautionary role, warning about the corruption of native liberty inevitably following “too servile a compliance with the king’s pleasure.”26 John Shebbeare’s The History of the Excellence and Decline of the Constitution, Religion, Laws, Manners and Genius of the Sumatrans (1760) uses a distant domain to tell a very different story about the safeguarding of British liberty on the accession of George III. If the alternative yet parallel societies of Shebbeare’s Sumatra and Smollett’s Japan clearly served competing political agendas, however, the Far East, especially China, could also be represented in intransitive, non-allegorical terms at this time. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World is a particularly interesting text to consider here, because, while its imaginary Chinese informant, the philosopher Lien Chi Altangi, complains of being exoticized by people unthinkingly attached to bogus notions of “Chinese” authenticity, it also (in the words of David Porter) “delights … in [its] own narrative rendering of the chinoiserie aesthetic.”27 A hack writer encountered by Altangi confidently declares that “Eastern tales should always be sonorous, lofty, musical, and unmeaning,” and he goes on to provide an entertainingly extravagant example of his own composition in “the true eastern taste,” beginning with a reference to one “Eben-ben-bolo, who was the son of Ban, … born on the foggy summits of Benderabassi.”28 Even as it elsewhere satirizes metropolitan ignorance, therefore, The Citizen of the World intermittently displays what Aravamudan describes as “a cultivated irresponsibility towards the cultural referent.”29 At the same time too, though, Goldsmith’s work incorporates brief allegorical narratives such as “The Rise and Declension of the Kingdom of Lao,” which tells a familiar story about the domestically destabilizing effects of colonial conquest. Although the playfully fantastical possibilities of Orientalist fiction would continue to be explored by others, such as Horace Walpole in his Hieroglyphic Tales (published in 1785 but written between 1766 and 1772), the period of reckoning with the scale of territorial acquisition consequent upon the Seven Years’ War might be seen as another significant transitional phase in the development of the eighteenth-century Oriental tale. This is the case partly because the form proved to be hospitable to imaginative engagement with the political momentousness of the present, as previously discussed, and partly because it increasingly registered new kinds of more specific awareness of “the East” that began to circulate as the East India Company established sovereign power in Bengal. In his An Account of the War in India (1761), for example, Richard Owen Cambridge referred to “the great reputation which the nation and so many individuals have acquired in the East Indies.”30 He

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noted that those accustomed to Eastern fictions “full of wonder and novelty” would already be primed to receive the no-less-improbable story of how “a handful of Europeans” had been able to dominate “a multitude of Asiatics,” but he also provided readers with further guidance, in the form of a “Glossary of Persic and Indian Names,” so as to help mediate what was – for himself as well as his audience – a hitherto unknown reality.31 James Ridley’s Tales of the Genii (1764) may be the first work to acknowledge Britain’s empire in the East in “Eastern” narrative. While the nine purportedly Persian tales in the collection are stylistically derivative and ostensibly apolitical, they are prefaced by a frame tale which places their transmission in the larger context of relations between Britain and India, as the fictional ambassador Sir Charles Morell describes meeting the enlightened Muslim Horam, who subsequently travels to Britain to further his education; Horam’s charge that “Traffic is the prophet of the Europeans, and Wealth is their Alla” shadows the narrator’s closing account of how “the gaudy Trappings of the East” might serve Christian truth.32 A decade later, it would still be possible for the Irish novelist Charles Johnstone, in his The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), to describe the fictionalized kingdom of “Byrsa” and its empire and to repudiate as “pedantry” any fuller substantiation of “the manners of the times and countries, in which [its] various scenes … are laid.”33 Johnstone’s The Pilgrim; or, A Picture of Life (1775), however, introduces a Chinese philosopher writing home about his experiences in Britain, and its adaptation of the genre of informant narrative means that its attention to detail is very different. Although it names India as “Mogulstan,” as if it were a fictional realm, The Pilgrim refers to a more specific kind of “East” than The History of Arsaces, as is especially evident from the stories – for example, regarding the Black Hole of Calcutta – that are told by the Britons returning from the subcontinent whom its narrator encounters in the course of his own sea voyage from China.34 In The History of Arsaces, the reader is told about how the colonies founded by the Byrsans “felt their own strength” and asserted their independence before going on to “[carry] themselves like states allied upon equal terms, rather than subjects.”35 While this work uses a loosely Oriental setting to allegorize Britain’s dispute with its American colonists, over the next decade or so generalizing constructions of “the East” would often serve a more specific ideological function, helping at once to stabilize the meaning of “British liberty” and to suggest that it was untarnished by the disastrous American war. The period during and after this conflict constitutes a further key moment in the history of the Oriental tale, as Eastern

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fictions increasingly came to be mediated via revisionist claims about the truth of Eastern customs and manners, now defined especially in terms of the oppression of women. In The History of Women (1779), for example, William Alexander argued that unspecified “eastern tales and romances” had in the past provided readers with a misleadingly benign sense of relations between the sexes, whereas in fact men in the East “keep in the cruellest subjection, the beings they seem to adore, and while they appear to humble themselves at their feet, are actually the jailors who confine, and the tyrants who enslave them.”36 More explicitly than Alexander, James Beattie (in his 1783 essay “On Fable and Romance”) rewrote the Arabian Nights’ frame tale, in which Scheherazade finally reforms Schahriar, by describing an Eastern prince who commands his “Grand Visir” to tell stories merely “to kill the time” and by contrasting the unchanging condition of women in the East with the mixed sociability that pertained in Britain.37 Robert Heron was similarly emphatic about the realities of Oriental despotism in his preface to a newly translated collection of pseudo-Oriental Arabian Tales (1792), where he included the “cooping up” of “Beauties … by scores, or perhaps hundreds, in a Haram, all for the amusement of one man” among the “strange and singular” cultural practices instantiated by the tales.38 Heron’s preface may of course have been ignored by readers eager to devour a new series of stories (one of which, “Maugraby the Magician,” helped to inspire Robert Southey’s verse romance Thalaba the Destroyer [1801]). Despite many instances of such demystifying commentary, numerous popular works testified to the way in which the Arabian Nights, especially, had become deeply embedded in British culture by the end of the eighteenth century: the prolific dramatist John O’Keeffe, for example, produced plays including The Dead Alive (1780), which draws on “The Story of the Sleeper Awakened,” Aladdin (1788) and The Little HunchBack; or, a Frolic in Bagdad (1789). A work such as Robert Bage’s novel The Fair Syrian (1787) may nonetheless be seen to underscore its difference from previous Orientalist fictions, both by accentuating the rhetoric of sexual despotism and by distancing itself from the romance conventions of the past. In her retrospect on her early life in the Levant with her merchant father, its heroine, Honoria Warren, describes the sexual danger that she faced in “Asia,” appealing to a common knowledge of “the idea of property … that is visible in the regards of [all] the Orientals.”39 She sometimes plays this topic for laughs, as when she refers to the “lock-up houses” established in the era of “that horrid bear, Mahomet.”40 Later on, Honoria mocks an English gentleman who attempts to seduce her in an “Eastern”

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style, responding to his “cold and lifeless” overtures with her own version of how to praise female beauty in such an idiom: “‘Her eyes were large and black, like the eyes of the heifer of Yerak – their lustre surpassed the gems of Golconda – Her cheeks were the full blown rose of Damascus – Her teeth, the cypresses of Diarbekir – Her hair was black as the raven’s plumes … ’”41 Bage has his heroine display her enjoyment of Orientalist flights of fancy here, but this is predicated on her sophisticated awareness of the gulf between fantasy and reality. The most remarkable eighteenth-century tale in English, William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), displays a similar self-consciousness about the conventions of Orientalist representation. Beckford’s work indicates its contemporaneity through its culturally specific detail, as is evident from its introduction of Vathek as a historical figure, “ninth Caliph of the race of the Abassides,” and from its extensive apparatus of scholarly endnotes, compiled by Beckford’s friend Samuel Henley. From the outset, however, Vathek also signals its idiosyncracy, as when it hyperbolizes the legend of the Caliph’s gaze: “when he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired.”42 Although it is structured as a kind of fable which finally punishes its protagonist for his “insatiable curiosity,” the temptation of Vathek by the enigmatic Giaour is described in obtrusively excessive and tonally ambiguous terms, perhaps most obviously when the Caliph accedes to the Giaour’s demand for “the blood of fifty children.”43 The homoeroticism of the text is especially overt here as Vathek gradually undresses himself while sacrificing naked boys to the salivating Giaour, in order to gain access to the latter’s “portal of ebony.”44 Beckford’s tale ends with a reference to how the effeminate Gulchenrouz, a rival to the Caliph, “passed whole ages in undisturbed tranquillity, and in the pure happiness of childhood,” and Hester Lynch Thrale (who thought Vathek “a mad Book … by a mad author”) saw the tale’s “luscious Descriptions” of Gulchenrouz as another unseemly display of Beckford’s “favourite Propensity.”45 Beckford initially wrote Vathek in French, as if harking back to the creative license of an earlier moment in the history of literary Orientalism, and, by apparently celebrating the hedonism of the Caliph as well as the childhood irresponsibility of Gulchenrouz, he cultivated, in Donna Landry’s words, an “estrangement from Englishness.”46 The production and reception of Vathek offer a useful

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perspective on the range of possibilities that the Oriental tale continued to provide at the end of the eighteenth century. Whereas Beckford’s “editor” Samuel Henley saw the purpose of his endnotes as being “to illustrate the costume” of the work (“otherwise a very considerable part of its merit must be lost to 999 readers of a thousand”), the appeal of fictions of the East for Beckford and others rested precisely in their detachment from any social reality.47 If translated tales could be read by some as a source of evidence about Eastern customs and manners, for many readers in the Romantic period and beyond the Arabian Nights in particular still offered (in Aravamudan’s phrase) “a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient.”48 Coleridge claimed that he “became a dreamer” after his father burnt his copy of the Nights to put an end to his reading of the tales, and he later celebrated the “pure imagination” evident in the story of “The Merchant and the Genie,” where the genie charges the merchant with having casually discarded a date-shell that put out the eye of his son.49 This was a tale of pure imagination for Coleridge precisely because it did not seek to explain – or refer to anything beyond – itself. Just as Zobeide demands of the men that come to visit her and her sisters in “The Story of the Three Calendars” that they “put no questions to us about the reason of any thing [they] may happen to see,” so in many of the Nights’ tales readers are asked to suspend disbelief and accept, if not necessarily accept as true, the fabulous enchantments and incredible scenarios with which they are entertained.50 In the case of Vathek, however, even as it was assimilated as a product of the unaccountable domain of “imagination,” faithful to “the peculiar character of the Arabian tale,” contemporaries also seized upon the allegorical resonance of its story of an Arabian caliph being tempted by the promise of riches from the East.51 Vathek’s narrative of imperial decadence in an Arabian milieu helped Robert Southey to conceive of the “eastwards” displacement of his revolutionary sympathies in Thalaba the Destroyer.52 This allegorical turn in Romantic Orientalist poetry was a turn away from the example of writers such as William Ouseley and Isaac D’Israeli who, inspired by Sir William Jones, sought to recover Arabian and Persian verse romances that captured elemental human feelings in “universal” narratives of love and loss. Southey’s epics were themselves subsequently reworked by Thomas Moore in Lalla Rookh (1817), a long poem that allegorizes revolution and rebellion in Ireland in two of its constituent tales but

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also – especially in its frame narrative describing the eventual marriage of the titular princess – adopts a luxurious and splendidly “ornamental” idiom that many regarded as pleasing in its own right. Moore’s enormously popular poem itself divided readers, nonetheless, because while some praised it for offering “poetical ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’” and a “renewal of the delicious moments of our childhood, when we first read those wondrous and golden tales,” others saw it as dishonestly occluding the mundane reality of life in the East.53 In a similar manner to William Alexander fifty years earlier, the British Review’s critic, for example, cautioned that in those “countries” where “amatory poets” celebrate female beauty in song, “women are merchandize, and men are their proprietors, [and] the reward of beauty is imprisonment for life.”54 To return to Warner’s argument that the Arabian Nights’ stories can be seen to “reveal the Orient” and to stimulate “fantastic invention and fabrication,” then, the history of the eighteenth-century Oriental tale in English may best be understood as an ongoing process of contestation in which different creative possibilities were accentuated and different modes of reading were exercised. Against a broadly Saidian analysis of literary Orientalist fantasy as the expression of a will-to-empire, recent criticism has focused especially on the significance of the kind of “delicious moments” cited above, suggesting that imaginative “transport” might further entail, in Ros Ballaster’s words, an “abandonment of the sense of self to an other in a space in which such activity is virtually free of risk.”55 This attempt to recover the potentially transformative experience of reading the Arabian Nights and other fictions of the East has helped to redirect attention to a rich and diverse field of writing that was once dismissed as little more than a literary sideshow. From the start of our period onward, however, as I hope to have shown, some of the most interesting works under the umbrella heading of the “Oriental tale” can be seen to reject the “wonder” referred to by the writer in the Monthly Review, often because they are concerned with the here and now and invoke the East as a way of thinking about the condition of Britain itself. As is evident in the idea that Lalla Rookh offered a “renewal” of past pleasures, moreover, appeals to the East as a realm of the imagination were often couched in self-consciously nostalgic terms, as if to acknowledge that “dreaming with the Orient” may have provided a release from social responsibility and the cares of the world as much as a horizon-expanding encounter with otherness. Leigh Hunt’s 1834 essay “Genii and Fairies of the East, the Arabian Nights, &c.,” with which I will conclude, nicely captures this point when it distinguishes

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between “the Araby and Persia of books” and “the Araby and Persia of the geographer,” where the former – “the magic land of the child [and] the ineffaceable recollection of the man” – is said to be paradoxically “more real” than the latter, “dull to the dull, and governed by the foolish.”56

Notes 1. Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), p. 24. 2. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), p. xxvi. 3. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1: pp. 360–361. 5. Addison and Steele, Spectator 4: p. 579. 6. Addison and Steele, Spectator 1: p. 400. 7. Addison and Steele, Spectator 2: p. 121. 8. Addison and Steele, Spectator 3: p. 276. 9. Addison and Steele, Spectator 3: p. 273, III: p. 275. 10. Addison and Steele, Spectator 3: p. 273. 11. Penelope Aubin, The Noble Slaves: Or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies, Who Were Shipwreck’d (London: E. Bell and others, 1722), p. x. 12. George Lyttelton, Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan, 2nd ed. (London: J. Millan, 1735), p. 142. 13. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 11. 14. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 4, p. 3. 15. Srinivas Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory,” Novel 33 (1999): pp. 5–31, p. 26. 16. Francis Coventry, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr Fielding” (1751), cited in William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 33. 17. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969): p. 19. 18. Johnson, Rambler, V: p. 296, p. 297, p. 300, p. 305. 19. Samuel Johnson, “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,” in Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16 (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 7. 20. Johnson, Rasselas, p. 74. 21. Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 99; Johnson, Rasselas, p. 175.

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22. Thomas Percy, letter to William Shenstone, cited in introduction to Johnson, Rasselas, p. lvii. 23. Frances Sheridan, The History of Nourjahad (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), p. 240, p. 3. 24. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 103; Johnson, Rasselas, p. 176. 25. The Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern-Taste (Dublin: James Hoey Jr., 1764), p. 279. 26. The Orientalist, p. 280. 27. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 139. 28. Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 2: p. 145. 29. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 100. 30. Richard Owen Cambridge, An Account of the War in India … (London: T. Jefferys, 1761), preface, p. iv. 31. Cambridge, preface, p. v; introduction, p. iv. 32. James Ridley, Tales of the Genii: Or, The Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of Asmar, 2 vols. (London: J. Wilkie, 1764), 2: p. xxii, p. 401. 33. Charles Johnstone, The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket, 1774), 1: p. viii. 34. Charles Johnstone, The Pilgrim: Or, a Picture of Life, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1775), 1: p. 7. 35. Johnstone, Arsaces, I: p. 140. 36. William Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1779), 1: p. 195. 37. James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1783), p. 509. 38. Arabian Tales: Being a Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute and others, 1792), 1: p. vii. 39. Robert Bage, The Fair Syrian, 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979 [1787]), 2: p. 85. 40. Bage, Syrian II: p. 36. 41. Bage, Syrian II: p. 248. 42. William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2013), p. 3. 43. Beckford, Vathek, p. 19, p. 20. 44. Beckford, Vathek, p. 19. 45. Beckford, Vathek, p. 94, and Thraliana: the Diary of Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Katherine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 2: p. 799. 46. Donna Landry, “William Beckford’s Vathek and the Uses of Oriental Reenactment,” in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, eds. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 167.

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47. Lewis Melville, Life and Letters of William Beckford (London: William Heinemann, 1910), p. 130. 48. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 8. 49. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, October 9, 1797, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1: p. 347; Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 1: pp. 272–273. 50. Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1995), p. 74. 51. Monthly Review 76 (May 1786): p. 450. 52. Tim Fulford, introduction to Thalaba the Destroyer, in Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793–1810, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 3: p. vii. 53. Monthly Review 83 (May–August 1817): p. 180; and Asiatic Journal 4 (July– December 1817): p. 457. 54. British Review 10 (1817): pp. 34–35. 55. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, p. 14. 56. Leigh Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, vols. 1–2 1834–35 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1: p. 233.

chapter 3

Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism Saree Makdisi

“From the point of view of governing him rather than from that of scientific research into how he comes to be what he is, I content myself with noting the fact that somehow or other the Oriental generally acts, speaks and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European,” declares Lord Cromer in Modern Egypt. “Consider the mental and moral attributes, the customs, art, architecture, language, dress and tastes of the darkskinned eastern as compared with the fair-skinned Western,” he adds. “It will be found that on every point they are the poles asunder.”1 The ease with which Cromer develops this sharp distinction between “us” and “them,” Occident and Orient, is evidence of the cultural and political construction that Edward Said identifies as Orientalism.2 And there is no doubt that such contrasts were developed, with enormous and enduring efficacy, especially – in the specific way that Cromer formulates it – from the late nineteenth century onward, and one can of course find similar constructs earlier in the nineteenth century and in the eighteenth. The problem with these formulations in these earlier moments, however, was that the Western “us” being designated, and the concomitant claim to “our” space that was being established alongside it, were hardly as stable and clear as Cromer would claim to find them by the turn of the twentieth century when he was writing Modern Egypt. For in those earlier moments, many of the would-be “us,” even if lightskinned, were also Orientalized, and much of what ought to be “our” space, including territories right in the heart of the imperial capital, were also Orientalized. The addendum to Said’s argument that I am proposing here, then, is not that the Orient/Occident opposition wasn’t made, nor that it wasn’t as stark as he claimed it was – because it was. Rather, what I want to suggest is that, until much later than we normally imagine, there was no possibility of making the East/West opposition simply on the large geographical scale that Cromer (or, later and more critically of course, Said) has in mind, because it was also taking place on a much smaller scale all over England itself. In other words, not all of England, let alone all of 66

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Europe – and hence not all Englishmen or all Europeans – could be clearly identified as Occidental at the time when the East/West binary was first being developed in a systematic way in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus, despite the explosion of interest in the Orient during the Romantic period, and indeed right through the first half of the nineteenth century at the very least, it would have been impossible to fit all of England and all English people into an Occident imagined and configured as the opposite of the Orient.3 This was so not merely because – as scholars have often noted4 – people from across Britain’s Asiatic empire were physically present in London and indeed (as De Quincey’s Lake District encounter with the Malay wanderer in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remind us) throughout England, but because England was already seen to be contaminated by its own indigenous territories and populations, however fair-skinned they may have been, that quite suddenly came to be Orientalized in the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth. In order for the stark binary opposition expressed by Cromer to work on a geographically large scale, then, spaces and populations internal to England (and similar processes took place or are still taking place in other European countries) had to be reconfigured in order for them to emerge as clearly Western as opposed to a geographically distant East. Thus, an internal Occidentalism, and an internal process of Occidentalization, had to take place alongside and in relation to an Orientalism and Orientalization that would ultimately be directed beyond England’s borders, even though – for much of the Romantic period and into the nineteenth century – it was at least as interested in internal peoples and spaces as it was in properly foreign ones. These internal processes were connected to broader social, economic, political and cultural transformations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the emergence of a concept of what we would today recognize as Westernness: a concept that of course draws on the legacy of similar oppositions, such as those between civilization and barbarism or Christendom and Islam, and so on – though this time the opposition came to be articulated in temporal and historical terms in relation to the broader discourses and processes of modernization. Thus this emergent notion of a West was not opposed to the East solely on moral grounds, for example (though those were also always there of course), but because it came to be seen as more advanced, more developed, further along the linear path of modernization – all of which were new concepts at the time.5 These processes of separation started taking place in a systematic

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way in the Romantic period, when it came to seem desirable, from a certain point of view, to begin to locate and demarcate a socially, politically and culturally empowered Occidental territory and people. My claim here is that the process of Occidentalism defined British imperial culture not only externally but also from within; it must be seen to be aligned with an Orientalist logic articulated by Cromer – and rightly identified by Said – that would in the long run be directed exclusively overseas. Occidentalism and Orientalism, in other words, are not opposites: they are two sides of the same coin, ultimately inseparable from one another. The symbiotic relationship between Occidentalism and Orientalism helps explain why all the way through the Romantic period the discourse of Orientalism was used at least as much with reference to the would-be West as it was with reference to the East. For at the dawn of Romanticism in the 1790s, Orientalist tropes were primarily deployed by anti-aristocratic radicals not to refer to actual Arabs or Indians (about whom they knew almost nothing and cared even less) but rather to refer primarily to either the privileged classes above them in the social hierarchy or those further down the social scale. From this middle-class viewpoint, both the higher and the lower orders were increasingly seen to be “not us” due to their apparent infection with a kind of Oriental contamination – or at least association.6 Thus the language of Orientalism was consistently used to separate a supposedly virtuous middle class from both those above them (“the proud and polished, the debauched, effeminate, and luxurious,” as John Thelwall of the radical London Corresponding Society identified them)7 and those below them (those, according to Tom Paine, who “are rather the followers of the camp than of the standard of liberty, and have yet to be instructed how to reverence it”).8 The political stakes of this specifically Romantic form of Orientalism stem from its location in a transitional moment between two otherwise quite distinct modes of Orientalism. For we can see in the Romantic period both the final traces of an earlier eighteenth-century configuration and the first signs of a much more hostile new order – the one that would find expression in Macaulay’s writing and ultimately in Cromer’s assessment of the Orient in Modern Egypt. Whereas the older formation that was starting to disintegrate by the 1790s was not invested in the transformation of the East, and had little to say about the West (and certainly not as such), the new formation emerging at the same time was driven by the perceived need to differentiate and improve the West by making it specifically Western as opposed to Eastern; we might even say that one of its primary concerns as it

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began to emerge was the de-Orientalization of a still only putatively emergent West. Thus the late eighteenth-century version of British Orientalism that helped prepare the way for Romanticism was itself different from the forms of Orientalism that had preceded it earlier in the century. By the 1770s and 1780s, Orientalism was increasingly preoccupied with the business (literally) of knowing the Oriental for the purposes of imperial government and the forms of commerce with which the latter was involved. In other words, it was unabashedly instrumental and expedient, bound up with the exigencies of colonial administration. “Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest,” wrote Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, in the preface to the first English translation (1785) of the Bhagavad-Gita, “is useful to the state.”9 The forms of Orientalism that had gone before – above all the Arabian Nights and its countless derivations or imitations – seemed almost innocuous by comparison, concerned as they were with entertainment and amusement and sometimes moral instruction of their readers. It was indeed inevitable that the stakes of Orientalism would change as British rule over India was deepened and expanded and cultural interests would be more heavily invested in Britain’s imperial project in the East. By the 1770s, the new form of Orientalism was developing as a by-product of the policy instituted by Warren Hastings to govern the possessions of the East India Company in local languages (or at least those of the local learned elites). The Company started using Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit in their administration of India, which required, of course, the acquisition of those languages and the greater understanding of their cultures as the British tried, in Hastings’ own estimation, to “adapt our Regulations to the Manners and Understanding of the People, and Exigencies of the Country.”10 Thus from then on it was for the purposes of intelligence, government and command – not simply entertainment – that Oriental texts started to be investigated, translated and circulated. Hastings himself encouraged the translation of classic texts into English and a wider process of cultural adaptation that would allow Britons to study Indian languages in order to master the culture from within. Javed Majeed has argued that the urge “to draw ‘orient knowledge from its fountains pure’” was applied both to the process of legal codification and to the process of generating imaginative works and works of fiction.11 It was at this moment that the British started developing a much more robust and elaborate apparatus of knowledge, including treatises, dictionaries, grammars and translations of ever more Oriental works, both

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scholarly and literary. “Seen as a corpus, these texts signal the invasion of an epistemological space occupied by a great number of Indian scholars, intellectuals, teachers, scribes, priests, lawyers, officials, merchants, and bankers, whose knowledge as well as they themselves were to be converted into instruments of colonial rule,” Bernard Cohn argues. “They were now to become part of the army of babus, clerks, interpreters, sub-inspectors, munshis, pandits, qazis, vakils, schoolmasters, amins, sharistadars, tahsildars, deshmukhs, darogahs, and mamlatdars who, under the scrutiny and supervision of the white sahibs, ran the everyday affairs of the Raj.” Thus, Cohn concludes, “the conquest of India was the conquest of knowledge.”12 At the same time, of course, this conquest of knowledge had both deliberate and unintentional by-products, including the inspiration of a whole generation of British (and indeed European) writers and artists. Sir William Jones, who was a judge in the East India Company, was explicit in his insistence that European writers would gain immeasurably from their exposure to the new Oriental knowledge. According to Jones, the East is “the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions of men”;13 it also offers a source of literary inspiration to Europeans. “I must request,” Jones writes in the conclusion to one of his essays on the poetry of the Eastern nations, that in bestowing these praises on the writings of Asia, I may not be thought to derogate from the merit of the Greek and Latin poems, which have been justly admired in every age; yet I cannot but think that our European poetry has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables: and it has been my endeavour for several years to inculcate this truth, that, if the principal writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed with the usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our great seminaries of learning, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be opened for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind; and we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes; and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain and future poets might imitate.14

What Jones proposed, then, was to establish a cultural and literary parallel to the extraction of material wealth from the East and to transfer

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both sets of treasures safely back to Britain. Once there, this developing interest in and knowledge of the East flourished in all kinds of ways, and it was quickly appropriated in early Romanticism, not simply for the purposes of further knowledge of the Other but also for the beginning of a new process of cultural and political self-definition in opposition to this wonderfully exotic Other. Although it may have been inspired by contact with other cultures, then, this emergent process of self-definition quickly grew into a project that had little to do with the cultural others who had inspired the urge to find self-awareness in the first place. The process of knowing more about the Other came to require, that is, not only knowing what made the Other different but also what made “us” who “we” are, what provided the identity of the self. The exploration of cultural difference urged on by people like Hastings and Jones thus led to a quest for a clearer sense of the identity of the Western self from which the cultural difference of the East marked such a departure. In defining and elaborating the Orient as a field of study, in other words, writers from what was suddenly becoming identifiable as the West had to clear the space for the emergence of an Occident against which the Orient’s difference could be surveyed. This entailed, and in the 1790s quickly led to, a new, modern sense of national and racial subjectivity, an empowered sense of self that was defined not merely against Asiatic others but also against many Orientalized others at home – who were seen to be just as incompatible with this emergent new identity as their actual Asiatic counterparts. Thus the sense of self – both individual and collective, as a racial or civilizational formation – that emerged in the Romantic period was comprehensively entangled with an Orientalist discourse. References to the Orient saturate Romantic-period writing, and not only in terms of external exoticism (as in Byron’s Turkish tales for example) but also, consistently, in domains that ought on the face of it to have nothing to do with the East at all. This is because the Orient became integrated into almost every attempt to articulate a modern sense of selfhood in the period. The collective sense of subjectivity presupposed on “our” ability to govern ourselves as individuals was consistently premised on a distinction from, and superiority over, a claimed Eastern lack of self, or, more precisely, the supposed inability of Orientals to govern themselves, either at the level of the individual or as a collective. Thus a running contrast emerged, from the 1790s onward, between a supposedly manly, forceful, productive, honest and virtuous (because self-regulating) Western self and an effeminate or feminine (the difference seemed immaterial), luxuriating, lazy and indulgent Eastern other who was seen to be incapable of self-regulation.

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The distinction between Occident and Orient thus came to center on the difference between a self-regulating form of subjectivity and a form of identity not capable of self-regulation. And as this sense of difference developed through the period, a concern with the “actual” Orient (of course there is no such thing as such – the Orient is a construct of imaginative geography, as Said himself points out) in many cases seemed to recede as the obsession with its opposite, the self-regulating West, grew. The Romantic-period obsession with the self, whether the sense of self associated with the subject of a sublime vista (think of Wordsworth and the view of Snowdon in The Prelude) or the sense of self connected to the struggle for democracy and self-representation at a political level, was invariably articulated in terms of a claim to Occidental superiority. It was Occidentalist, in other words, because of its concern with the self, and simultaneously Orientalist because of the way in which this sense of self was predicated on – and articulated in opposition to – the imaginary construction of an Other. For the Orient would be invoked above all as an imaginary site on which to project all those political and ideological modes of existence – idleness, femininity, luxury, religious enthusiasm, violence – that were seen to be the opposites of the form of identity and selfhood associated with the West and, at that, with a specifically bourgeois notion of Western identity. Some concrete examples will help establish this claim. When the intellectuals associated with the radical movement for democratic rights in Britain wanted to defame their aristocratic opponents in order to delegitimize their arguments, they did so by Orientalizing them. Thus the real enemy of the radical cause was conflated with an imaginary enemy, and the faults of the former were expressed in terms of the supposed racial and civilizational flaws of the latter. Quite systematically, in other words, radical intellectuals not only elaborated the Orient as the locus of degeneration and corruption (because Orientals lacked self-control, the argument went, they were inevitably degenerate and corrupt); they also projected the alleged attributes of Oriental culture on the British (and more generally European) aristocracy. I’ve written elsewhere about this move in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman,15 but that text is worth returning to here precisely because although at face value – as an argument on behalf of women’s rights in England – it ought to have nothing whatsoever to do with the East, it is quite saturated with references to the Orient. In Vindication, Wollstonecraft dismisses “that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the

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sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel.” She refuses to “polish” her style and insists that, since she hopes “rather to persuade by the force of my arguments than to dazzle by the elegance of my language,” she will not waste her time “in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings.” She declares that she will do her best “to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversations.”16 In case a reader might miss the subtext here, Wollstonecraft makes it clear in the opening sentences of her book that her strident rhetorical position is articulated against the “style of Mahometanism.”17 Really there ought to be no surprises here. Wollstonecraft was hardly the only writer by the end of the eighteenth century to suggest that the Orient was the source of that flowery diction, that dazzling (but bewildering and entrapping) elegance, that weak, effeminate language, those “pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue,” which “vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth,” that “deluge of false sentiments and overstretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart,” which “render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action.”18 What was at stake in her denunciation of the East, however, was not simply her gratuitous disdain for a culture about which she (like most English writers) knew next to nothing but rather, on the contrary, her concern for the articulation and development of its putative opposite, an Occidental culture premised on all the opposite values: candor as opposed to pretty superlatives; unadorned truth as opposed to glib sweetness; rational capacity as opposed to overstretched feelings; natural emotions as opposed to false sentiments – and in general manly rational virtue as opposed to unmanly hysteria. What Wollstonecraft aims to articulate, in other words, is an objective, forceful, masculine (a term she frequently defends and applies to women) discourse of rights; a discourse that can be recognized as Western without naming it as such because it is so clearly articulated over and against its very-muchnamed Eastern opposite. For all her mentions of “seraglios” and the “arts of seduction” connected to them, however, and for all her false insinuations that according to Islamic belief women have no souls, it is clear that the primary targets of Wollstonecraft’s animus for the East are actually not Easterners themselves but rather the debauched aristocracy of Europe, whom Wollstonecraft chastises precisely by Orientalizing them. For the members of the upper class in England, according to Wollstonecraft, live, much like fictional

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Oriental potentates, a life of unnatural dissipation, moral enfeeblement and supine effeminacy, because of their unlicensed and unregulated submission to sensual passions and drives, their indulgence of pleasures at the expense of hard, sober work. “The education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened by the practice of those duties which dignify the human character,” Wollstonecraft argues. “Weak, artificial beings raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!”19 The rich, in other words, are essentially Oriental in all their key attributes; they require Occidentalization if they are to be redeemed at all. European women in particular have been reduced to playthings in a seraglio fantasy, she argues; redeeming them involves Westernizing them, teaching them – and erstwhile Western men for that matter – to be honest, forthright, candid, virtuous and absolutely the masters and repressors of their bodily desires (the very desires that Orientals and unreformed European aristocrats alike love to indulge in their various palaces and pleasure domes). As with the discourse of Orientalism in general, such a link between the European aristocracy and the East was hardly unique to Wollstonecraft. Montesquieu had already made this connection, and other Enlightenment writers had developed it. But this connection would explode (rhetorically) in the 1790s. Exactly such a move underlies Tom Paine’s attack on Burke in Rights of Man. Paine argues that Burke “is not affected by the reality of the distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination,” that he “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” And in so doing, Paine is able to reconfigure his opponent as a fawning servant of kings and priests, for whom “shew and magnificence” constitute a kind of substitute reality, an imaginative world to be accessed via flying sentryboxes, just as in the Arabian Nights. “Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself,” Paine writes, Burke “degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him. His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon.”20 Paine says he refuses “to follow Mr. Burke through a pathless wilderness of rhapsodies, and a sort of descant upon governments, in which he asserts whatever he pleases, on the presumption of its being believed, without offering evidence or reasons for so doing.” Paine insists that “before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts, principles, or data, to reason from must be established, admitted, or

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denied” (pp. 64–65) and that Burke’s flowery, imaginative and hence pseudo-Oriental discourse is not compatible with such reasoning. Paine, like Wollstonecraft, insists that the real problem with those “polished manners” that “render vice more dangerous, by concealing its deformity under gay ornamental drapery” is not merely a matter of morality. Substituting the “plumage” for the “dying bird,” the “showy resemblance” for the “reality of distress,” the “tragedy-victim dying in show” for the “real victim of misery,” a pretend reality (of “art,” “show” and “tragedy”) for genuine reality (the reality of “facts, principles, and data”) takes one away from objective facts – the terrain appropriate to the Occident – and leaves one in a miasma of false excesses: the domain of the Orient. The allure of vice rendered “more dangerous, by concealing its deformity under gay ornamental drapery” doesn’t just seduce and mislead the would-be Western observer: it allows him to be “purloined” from himself, Paine argues; in other words, to lose his very capacity for individuality. Showy style, elaborate forms of writing, excessive figuration, inflated phraseology – in short, the essential elements not just of Burke’s Reflections as read by Paine and Wollstonecraft but above all of Oriental and pseudo-Oriental style, the ultimate “pathless wilderness of rhapsodies” – are bad not just because they prevent us from engaging with “facts, principles, and data”; they are bad because they prevent genuine selfknowledge, self-awareness and self-control. Art is to be distinguished from reality by the same mechanisms that allow us to distinguish excess from simplicity, idleness from vigor, unfounded assertion from reasoned argument, the artificial from the natural, the useless from the useful, the unmanly from the manly and hence, ultimately, the East from the West: our others from our selves. For Romantic-era radicals such as Paine and Wollstonecraft, the contours of individual freedom must be defined by voluntary self-regulation, self-limitation, self-denial – a rejection of figurative and verbal, as well as bodily and sensual, excess – rather than by externally enforced regulation, limitation and denial. While the radicals’ lengthy excurses on style, and in particular their refusal of “polish” and “art” in the name of natural simplicity and forthright “manly” honesty, are meant to express their rejection of the politics of feudalism and aristocracy as represented by Burke, they are actually articulated as a systematic repudiation of the excess, luxury and idleness of the East. Their critique of the ancien régime represented by Burke, in other words, takes the shape of an attack on Oriental style and a celebration instead of a newly found Western style, enabling the constitution of a self-regulating sovereign Occidental subject.

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This line of thought was only emergent in the 1790s; its proponents were, after all, radicals and revolutionaries, many of whom (like Thelwall) were tried for treason, and some of whom (like Paine) were actually sentenced for their transgressions. Fast-forward a few decades, however, and we can see these once-radical ideas settling down into respectable institutionalization, especially as Britain’s long struggle for democracy passed its first major hurdle with the Reform Act of 1832. So it is no coincidence that, almost word for word, exactly the same arguments that people like Paine or Wollstonecraft leveled against Burke in the 1790s would be reiterated – knowingly or otherwise – by thinkers such as Thomas Macaulay in the 1830s. Consider Macaulay’s devastating review of Robert Southey’s Colloquies, in which he compares the Poet Laureate to Burke’s irrational excesses and finds him even more excessive. For while Burke “chose his side like a fanatic, and defended it like a philosopher,” and while he could “defend the wildest course by arguments more plausible than those by which common men support opinions which they have adopted after the fullest deliberation,” reason in the mind of Southey, according to Macaulay, has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour does not always prove a fact, that a single fact when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than “scoundrel” and “blockhead.”

For, Macaulay concludes, drawing on what was by the 1830s the full spectrum of Orientalist thought, it would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political instruction. The utmost that can be expected from any political system promulgated by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere daydream, a poetical creation, like the Domdaniel cavern, the Swerga, or Padalon [references to Southey’s own Oriental epics], and indeed it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those gorgeous visions. Like them, it has something of invention, grandeur, and brilliancy. But, like them, it is

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grotesque and extravagant, and perpetually violates even that conventional probability which is essential to the effect of works of art.21

It should come as no surprise, then, that – having Orientalized it – Macaulay should find Southey’s work intellectually and aesthetically barren (“wholly destitute of information and amusement”), since that was also his assessment of Oriental culture in his famous (or infamous) Minute on Indian Education, which he wrote only shortly after writing his review of Southey. He argues in that document that India’s vernacular languages “contain neither literary nor scientific information” and that the sum total of historical information contained in even the learned languages of India (Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit) “is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.” This too should hardly come as a surprise, since, according to the Minute, those learned languages express “medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier, – Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, – History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long, – and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”22 Southey’s Orientalization is not merely inseparable from what Macaulay claims are his intellectual and philosophical faults: it expresses those faults exactly. Southey is Orientalized to the extent that he is wrong, misguided, deluded, irrational, inaccurate and extravagant; and he is wrong, misguided, deluded, irrational, inaccurate and extravagant precisely to the extent that he is Orientalized. But there is another vital piece to the puzzle of Orientalism and Occidentalism by the time we get to the demise of Romanticism in the 1830s, which really is what Macaulay’s devastation of Southey represents in so many ways. For Southey is also, by the 1830s, a fish out of water in England in Macaulay’s estimation: not only because of his Oriental affiliations but also because he stubbornly clings to modes of thought, obstinate traditions and customs that had long since been rendered obsolete in England itself. For, according to Macaulay, progress must unfold in England as much as in India; indeed, that England was further along the spectrum of progress was precisely what rendered it superior to India. Emotionally clinging to worn-out traditions in the face of rational progress, which is Macaulay’s main accusation against Southey, is a telltale sign of Oriental weakness. Not only is the Poet Laureate utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood and guilty of those peculiarly Oriental sins of believing without reason and hating without provocation; he is also guilty of substituting images for realities – yet another Oriental

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trait. “Government is to Mr. Southey one of the fine arts,” Macaulay writes. “He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and what he calls his opinions are in fact merely his tastes.” Thus, he concludes, “Mr. Southey’s political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as a matter of science, but as a matter of taste and feeling.” For Macaulay, of course, progress is made possible precisely by allowing science and discipline to override not only taste and feeling but also long-established customs, stubborn prejudices and outmoded practices – in England as much as in India. England had to be made Western, in other words, just as Occidental modernization must also now be brought to India itself. To acknowledge this is to embrace the Occidental imperative; to resist it, as Macaulay says Southey does, is to remain trapped in Oriental delusion. This deployment of the East not merely as a kind of entertaining fantasy alternative to the West but as the antagonistic basis for the articulation of a distinctly Occidental mode of subjectivity – with which a Burke or a Southey clearly are not compatible – must be read in relation to a shift in actual imperial policy with which it was bound up, for Macaulay represents the climax of a shift that had started to take place in the 1790s. We have already seen how earlier colonial administrators such as Hastings and Jones were interested in the East at least in part because of its refreshing difference from Europe, hence the policies of the Hastings administration which emphasized translating and reading Asiatic literature in order to learn from it. With the demise of Warren Hastings following his trial on a charge of high crimes and misdemeanors, a series of reforms in the British administration of India were carried out, beginning in 1793, accelerating after 1813 (the date when missionaries were first officially allowed to work in India) and reaching full pitch only by the 1830s. One of the most committed advocates of this new approach to imperial policy was Charles Grant, who took a position exactly opposed to that of William Jones. Whereas Jones had insisted that the Orient was “the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius,” for Grant it was a scene of sensory excess and intellectual and moral degradation. “We cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindostan,” Grant wrote as early as 1792, “a race of men lamentably degenerate and base; retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the

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effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices.”23 Grant would go on to advocate the moral improvement of the natives, beginning with their conversion to Christianity, and his advocacy was one of the driving forces behind opening India to missionaries after the reforms of 1813. Just note, however, how Grant’s denunciation of Indians’ degeneration, their enfeebled state, their lack of morality, their disregard for reason, their submission to licentious passions and drives, their total ignorance of discipline and hard work, and their general state of vice and corruption aligns so cleanly not only with Macaulay’s assessment of Southey but also with Wollstonecraft’s condemnation of European aristocrats on precisely the same grounds three or four decades earlier. In the overlap between Grant, Wollstonecraft and Macaulay we can recognize the extent to which, as I suggested earlier, Occidentalism and Orientalism are not opposites, as they are sometimes taken to be, but rather operate on a continuum. The same civilizing process needed to be carried out in both England and its colonial possessions, including India; in England in order to purge the last traces of Oriental contamination from what was supposed to be an Occidental space; and in the colonial world in order to begin the challenging process of converting Oriental “vice and misery” into the universal culture of Occidental modernity. And yet it must be said that it is one thing to use an Orientalist discourse to depict an Other out there in the East but quite another – if Englishmen like Southey can also be Orientalized – to locate the putative West against which that East is being dialectically counterposed. Where was this West, if both the degenerate aristocracy and the teeming multitudes in England were infected with Oriental traits (indulgence, passion, rage, emotion, enthusiasm, lack of self-control, etc.)? Marking the Other is relatively easy, in other words; but designating the “we” who fit into the collective (in this case Western) self is not so easy. And finding a territory that is “ours” in that sense – in the sense in which everyone “here” is one of “us” as opposed to one of “them” – is more difficult still. Thus the “we” being designated here is not the nationalist “we” of the sort captured in the work of, say, Benedict Anderson or Linda Colley but rather a racial or a civilizational one, even though discussions of these much narrower notions of national identity have dominated eighteenth-century and Romantic studies for some time now.24 The “we” that I am talking about actually at certain moments excludes large segments of the nation – patricians and plebeians both – while it could readily be extended to those beyond the nation (to those in America and France, for example). It is in fact a “we,” this sense of affiliation with a West, that much of the recent work on

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nationalism has not sufficiently taken into account; it overlaps with the sense of the nation in some instances and transcends it in others. One reason it has not been taken into account is that it was, at the time, assumed rather than explicitly named as such: for all the exploding proliferation of frankly Orientalist discourses in this period, it is difficult, if not impossible, to locate an explicitly Occidentalist discourse. It was clear, then, that there was an East, out there somewhere; but its dialectical twin, the West, was not so readily named and geographically designated – at least not then. It was still very much in the process of formation and consolidation. What one finds in portrayals of the interior of England in the years around 1800, then, is an unstable mixture of racial types, corresponding to different degrees of access to Westernization. What distinguishes the putative metropolitan center from the outer reaches of the empire at this stage is that, whereas the development and deployment of a racial language to depict overseas Others – for example the Orientalization of the Orient – is, and would remain until the twentieth century and after, more or less comprehensive and all-encompassing, 25 the deployment of the same language in the domestic interior of England in the decades around 1800 is uneven and actually being dismantled as “civilization” and Occidentalism are spread: “they” out there in India or Africa or Arabia may be all the same, but “we” are not all yet really “we” in 1800. What distinguishes foreign from domestic space, in other words, is partly a matter of degree: “they” are completely Oriental; “we” are at least partly Western – and we are working on civilizing – recoding, implicitly reclassifying as “Western” or “Occidental” – the rest of our countrymen, or at least those of them who can be redeemed. It is in this sense that the process of Occidentalism relates to that of Orientalism: it is about locating and clearing a space for a white, Western self who could one day be more effectively counterposed to the Orient out there as, in Cromer’s words, the poles asunder.

Notes 1. Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 2: p. 144, p. 164. 2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979). 3. This is an argument that I develop at length in Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), from which many of the strands of argument developed in this essay are also derived. 4. See, e.g., Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 70–71.

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5. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 6. See Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 214–259. 7. John Thelwall, “Rights of Britons” (1795), repr. in The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995), p. 473. 8. Tom Paine, Rights of Man (1792; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 58–59. 9. Warren Hastings, “Introductory Letter,” in The Bhagavad-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, trans. by Charles Wilkins (London: C. Nourse, 1785). 10. Warren Hastings, Letter to East India Company Court of Directors, November 3, 1772, quoted in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 26. 11. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 52. 12. Cohn, Colonialism, p. 21. 13. Sir William Jones, “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society, for Enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, Literature, of Asia, By the President,” in The Works of Sir William Jones in Thirteen Volumes (Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1977), 3: p. 2. 14. Jones, “Discourse,” pp. 359–360. 15. See Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 204–259. 16. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) pp. 82–83. 17. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 82, p. 80. 18. See, e.g., Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 83. 19. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 8. 20. See Paine, Rights of Man, p. 51. 21. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies,” Edinburgh Review 50 (January 1830): pp. 528–565. 22. Thomas Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education.” 23. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving it, Written chiefly in the Year 1792 (London: 1797), p. 71. 24. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 25. “You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government,” claimed Lord Balfour, author of the notorious eponymous Declaration of 1917; “conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government.” Cited in Said, Orientalism, pp. 32–33.

chapter 4

The Victorians: Empire and the East Sukanya Banerjee

In his well-known memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey seeks to disprove popular perceptions about the effects of opium. As he observes: “It is not so much affirmed as taken for granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it does, or can produce intoxication.”1 Taking issue with this assumption, De Quincey states: “Now reader, assure yourself, meo periculo, that no quantity of opium ever did, or could intoxicate.”2 Instead, according to De Quincey, it is wine that “disorders the mental faculties.”3 What is significant about these statements is not so much the information they convey about the somnolent qualities of opium vis-à-vis wine as the confidence and authority with which De Quincey writes them. He evidently writes from experience and familiarity with opium. He writes with the conviction of someone who knows of what he writes: “now reader, assure yourself …” Indeed, given the autobiographical thrust of Confessions, which details De Quincey’s lifelong addiction to opium, he does seem uniquely qualified to dispense advice on opium. He of all people seems best suited to judge the relative merits as it were of “Turkish opium” and “East Indian opium.”4 It comes as some surprise, then, that De Quincey is flummoxed by the arrival of a Malay at his door. There is no obvious connection, of course, between a native of the Malay Peninsula and opium (be it Turkish or EastIndian) except that De Quincey groups them all – object and subject, commodity and person – under the appellation of the “Orient.” Upon recovering from his initial shock at seeing the Malay, he attempts to strike up a conversation with the Malay (in Greek) and then hands him a bolt of opium as a parting gift because he is certain that the Malay would certainly know what to do with the opium: “To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be familiar.”5 De Quincey also sees it fit to quote some lines from the Iliad to his visitor because, of all the languages that he (De Quincey) knew, “Greek, in point of latitude came geographically nearest to an Oriental one.”6 De Quincey’s depiction of his exchange with the Malay emblematizes, I suggest, several salient features of the nineteenth-century staging of the 82

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“Orient.” For one, there is the familiar adumbration of the “Orient” as an undifferentiated geographical swath encompassing, amongst other regions, Turkey (where some of the opium comes from) as well as the archipelagic realms of Southeast Asia (where the Malay presumably comes from). The imprint of “otherness” on an undifferentiated geographic mass is of course not a characteristic feature of the British nineteenth-century orientalism alone.7 But what makes this discursive production of an Oriental geospace in the nineteenth century doubly significant is that it was historically accompanied by highly specific and involved British engagements with the territories in question, both for purposes of political control and expansion of trade interests.8 With reference to opium, for instance, by the end of the eighteenth century, the English East India Company was growing opium in the Indian provinces of Bengal and Bihar and exporting it to China by way of correcting the trade imbalance (in which the British were buying Chinese goods and had nothing of interest to offer the Chinese and could therefore only pay with silver, which caused a massive drain on the economy). In the few decades before the publication of Confessions, in fact, the British were trying to establish the shortest trade route between Calcutta and Canton for the speedy shipment of opium. Establishing political influence over the Malay peninsula was critical in this regard, for the Malay peninsula could serve not only as a conduit between India and China but also as a base for making forays into the Southeast Asian trading market.9 De Quincey’s bewilderment at how to interact with the Malay at a personal level therefore contrasts sharply with the entangled political and commercial relations between Britain and the Malay archipelago at the political and commercial level. Interestingly, De Quincey states that he spoke with the Malay in Greek because he did not have a Malay dictionary or “Adelung’s Mithridates” with him.10 In other words, De Quincey is aware of the scholarship undertaken by philologists, amongst others, who sought to provide a systemized body of knowledge about the East. But his rendition of the Malay, by contrast, operates primarily along the plane of the fantastic and unreal. Not only does De Quincey describe the Malay improbably gulping down the entire bolt of opium that he offers to him, but in later chapters the Malay also features in his tortured dreams. The memory of the Malay triggers a series of dreams in which De Quincey is transported into “Asiatic scenes” that signal “a sense of eternity and infinity that dr[i]ve me into an oppression as of madness.”11 The haunted and frantic tone underlying the description of the dreams

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contrasts sharply with the authorial control and self-assurance that De Quincey had displayed earlier when extolling the benefits of opium. De Quincey’s deep familiarity with an “Eastern” commodity – opium – runs up, then, against his inability to meaningfully engage with someone from the “East.” It is this dialectical relation – between the “Oriental” commodity and the individual, between Britain’s expanding political and public engagement with the “East” and a disavowal of that relation at the level of the private or domestic, and, finally, between the sheer quantity of academic and bureaucratic knowledge about the East and a relative unknowingness of its lived reality – that courses through British nineteenth-century literature, marking the Victorian attitude toward empire and the “East.” This dialectical relation variously produces, I suggest, a lacuna or paralysis in representing the East (as in De Quincey’s case) or, as the century progresses (and as I will outline), a marked ambivalence or uncertainty that is also coterminous with an aggressive schema of racial classification and difference. In studying the full import of this dialectical relation, however, it is also important to consider the term “Orientalism” in its more variegated sense. This is to say, it is important to consider how Orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth century reinscribes (and sometimes also undercuts) what we, in the post-Saidian moment, are all-too-well-trained to detect as “orientalist” By “Orientalist scholarship,” I refer here to the body of knowledge produced on the orient by philologists, linguists, historians and philosophers, among others. In delineating the discursive effects of orientalism Said powerfully points to the effect of these knowledge-making enterprises in marking (and making) the eighteenth-century French and British colonial endeavor (particularly in the Middle East). Following Said, we understand orientalism to produce an authorizing discourse of “otherness” that not only casts the orient as subordinate to the West but also situates it outside the realm of history.12 The discursive effects of this representational strategy cannot be gainsaid. Yet, literary and cultural analysis too often draws an unbroken line between scholarship undertaken by Orientalists over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its orientalist effects. As a consequence, the specificities of Orientalist scholarship are overlooked or already spoken for when, in fact, a closer scrutiny of their shifting contours reveals a far more knotted sense of the imperial terrain. Thomas Trautmann draws a valuable distinction between orientalism, as Said describes it, and the work of nineteenth-century Orientalists, who, with respect to British India, for instance, advocated the study of vernacular languages in opposition to the Anglicists and Evangelicals campaigning for English (who would be orientalist in the Saidian sense).13

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This is hardly to argue for the fact that Orientalist scholarship – what Trautmann focuses on – is innocent of the orientalist effects that Said ascribes to it. Far from it. Rather, it is to redirect attention to the valences of Orientalist scholarship over the nineteenth century. I am particularly interested in doing so because Orientalist scholars over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as William Jones and Friedrich Max Müller, respectively, focused quite heavily on language and linguistic similarity by way of tracing various kinds of affiliation across racial and ethnic groups. They limned, for instance, a common Indo-Aryan lineage on the basis of the proximity between Sanskrit and other European language systems. Such findings, however, ran counter to a rigidly classificatory – and non-affiliational – schemata of racial difference that began to take shape over the century in ways that marked the “East” along settled notions of difference, thereby producing and justifying strategies of imperial rule that belied cherished ideals of British liberalism that were otherwise vaunted as the moral guarantor of the nineteenthcentury imperial project.14 Significantly, much of the discussion on racial difference – at least in the mid-century – was conducted in venues provided by newly professionalized disciplines, such as anthropology. These anthropological discussions should be of interest to scholars of literary and cultural studies not just because they give shape to Victorian discussions of race but also because Victorian literature often provided an articulation of or catalyst for what was being tested or established as anthropological theory.15 Analyzing any process of knowledge formation requires us to pursue a multidisciplinary perspective anyway, but, given the status of anthropology as an emergent disciplinary field in the mid-Victorian period, it is particularly apropos to place its findings alongside our reading of literary texts of the period. What we find coursing through both kinds of material is an engagement with O/orientalism (in both senses of the term, as I have described) that helps account for the liberal attitude to empire – one that can be described (if benignly) in terms of an ambivalence – as well as its limits. In what follows, therefore, I highlight certain characteristics of Victorian literature – formal and thematic – that exemplify what I describe as the liberal ambivalence. In tracing the logic of difference and reinscription that sustains this ambivalence, I conclude with a detailed reading of an intellectual exchange that took place in 1866 under the aegis of the Ethnological Society, London, namely Dadabhai Naoroji’s address to the society, titled “Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’s Paper on the European and Asiatic Races.” Naoroji’s lecture was in response to a paper, “On the Physical and

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Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man,” that had been presented earlier by John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological Society. Studying this exchange, I suggest, affords a more granular view of the interplay of orientalist assumptions in the nineteenth century. Besides helping account for the crystallization of certain orientalist attitudes both in literature and other cognate venues, the exchange also shines a light on Naoroji (an Indian politician and academic who lived in England for much of his life) as a colonial interlocutor, a figure who barely gains recognition within the discursive framework of orientalism or even in Said’s exhaustive exegesis of it. By including Naoroji within the discussion, my aim is to go above and beyond the frame of what an orientalist system of representation proffers. This is to say, by tracing Naoroji’s negotiation with the precepts of contemporary Orientalist scholarship, it is also to include him – given his political status as a British subject – within the appellation of “Victorian,” a term whose geoethnic limits would otherwise seem to preclude such a labeling in ways that can only be considered orientalist in both conception and effect.

Empire, “orientalism,” and Liberal Ambivalence In Culture and Imperialism, Said contends that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain’s imbrication with empire manifests itself most visibly in the literary structure of its novels.16 To be sure, colonial objects, peoples and monies regularly intrude into the pages of Victorian novels (as indeed did the Malay in De Quincey’s confessional memoir). But more than an extraneous or incidental presence, the empire (formal and informal) very often accounts for the very plot structure of the novel. Therefore, we have novels, such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), in which the traffic with the colonies (the Caribbean and India, respectively) plays an overt role in the development of the plot. We also have the mid-century “industrial novels,” such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), that explicitly deal with the social inequities fostered by industrialization within nineteenth-century Britain but that look to the colonies (Canada in Mary Barton and an unnamed colonial location in Hard Times) by way of resolving tensions in the plot. The empire, in other words, is ubiquitous in Victorian literary production. Britain’s imperial outposts in the “East” – howsoever broadly imagined – play a particularly instrumental role in the development of the bildungsroman, a popular genre given the period’s emphasis on individual

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growth, professionalization and self-development. After all, as Benjamin Disraeli pointed out in Tancred (in what Said appends as an epigraph to Orientalism): “The East is a career.” Not only did the East provide a ready avenue for young men from the burgeoning middle class, but it also afforded a valuable route for female self-development and professionalization.17 Postcolonial scholarship, in fact, has taken the Victorian novel to task for the highly uneven relation that it charts between the development of the subject position of the Englishwoman vis-à-vis her colonial/Eastern counterpart.18 It bears mentioning that the Victorian novel does not do much overall by way of enhancing the subject position of colonial subjects, a point I will come to later. But what I do want to point to for now is how, when the “East” becomes the point of reference, an awareness of the realities of imperial ambition often intersects with growing anthropological scrutiny as well as a liberal guilt to produce a particularly charged representation that vacillates between familiarity and unknowing, veering between a realist portrayal and one of unfathomable excess. This is as true of Victorian novels as it is of travelogues, adventure tales or missionary narratives over the course of the century. Therefore, even as De Quincey’s Confessions is, strictly speaking, not a Victorian text inasmuch as it was published sixteen years before Victoria ascended the throne, it nonetheless relays – howsoever presciently – the ambivalence and uncertainty that provides the undertone for Victorian depictions of empire. Nowhere is the ambivalence of Victorian imperialism more evident than in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868). Serialized a year after the passage of the Second Reform Act, which expanded the franchise in England and Wales, the novel works through “domestic anxieties” as well as imperial tensions, underlining how a study of what constitutes an “orientalist” mode of representation can hardly ignore the internal fractures rivening Victorian society. The novel famously opens with a Prologue that is set in India; the opening scene relays the storming of Seringapatam, the capital of the native state of Mysore, by English soldiers. During the raid, the English forces plunder the palace of the local ruler, Tipu Sultan, who had until then stubbornly held out against the British. The triumph over Tipu in Seringapatam (he was killed in this operation) was cause for celebration amongst the British, and the Prologue captures the celebratory mood running high among the English soldiers in Tipu’s palace. While the events surrounding the capture of Seringapatam rely on historical accounts, Collins overlays this historical retelling with a fictive plot. The narrator of the Prologue, who is part of this English expedition, is skeptical of the actions of the jubilant English soldiers, including those of

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his cousin, John Herncastle, who slays an Indian guardsman in order to take possession of a fabled Indian diamond, the Moonstone. The gem, which originally adorned an Indian deity in the temple city of Somnath, had made its way to Tipu’s palace through a complicated history that already involved military conquest and theft on the part of various local Indian armies. Herncastle’s theft of the Moonstone from the dying hands of a guardsman protecting the jewel therefore only adds further to this already-checkered history. But in the narrator’s eyes, it implicitly takes away from a sense of English probity and decorum.19 The narrator renounces all connection with Herncastle, who, for his part, has the Moonstone transported to England, where he bequeaths it to his niece, Rachel Verinder. As it happens, the Moonstone is stolen (again) from Rachel’s bedroom on the night of her twenty-first birthday. From this point on, the novel devolves into a detective story (in fact, Inspector Cuff, the detective assigned to investigate the theft, is usually credited with being the one of the first detectives in English literature). The fact that it is a detective plotline, one that subjects everyone to doubt and interrogation, that drives a story with a strong “colonial” element is significant because a detective plotline preempts any easy assumptions about culpability and wrongdoing.20 From an early point, the needle of suspicion falls upon three Indians who mysteriously arrive in England and are rumored to be Brahmin priests sworn to protect the sacred diamond even at the cost of their lives. Apparently, they had followed the diamond to Tipu’s palace as well and had journeyed to England, determined to restore the gem it to its rightful place, the shrine in Somnath. Given their mysterious appearance in the English countryside soon after the diamond’s disappearance from Rachel’s bedroom, it is assumed that they are the ones responsible for the disappearance of the diamond. But the detective plot counters what would be a colonialist (orientalist?) framing – “colonialist” inasmuch as the Indians are depicted in terms of their untrustworthiness (they appear disguised as jugglers, which does nothing to shore up their credibility) and fanaticism (they would retrieve the diamond even at the cost of their lives). Rather, detective protocol redirects attention away from the Indians, focusing it on the English characters as well. In fact, the detective plot gains momentum only because the reader is presented with a plethora of motives – on the part of the English characters – for stealing the diamond. What emerges, therefore, is a deeply fractured sense of “Englishness,” one that is riven apart by class and gender inequities. Such a view puts paid to an observation made by a central character in the novel, that it is the accursed diamond – and the interlopers that it

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introduces upon the English scene (the Indian jugglers) – that undermines what is an otherwise wholesome and settled English domestic order premised on assumptions of rationality, justice and propriety (p. 38). Rather, as it turns out, the Moonstone serves more as a catalyst that exposes the flawed premise of an Englishness idealized along those lines. Among other things, it becomes clear that the diamond had been stolen from Rachel’s bedroom by none other than her fiancé, Godfrey Ablewhite. Although several characters in the novel hail Ablewhite as a paragon of virtue, the novel shines a light on his morally dubious dealings, which in turn bespeak acute class and gender tensions besetting English society.21 Given that the novel explicitly absolves the Indians from any wrongdoing and that, within its narrative frame, the diamond is actually stolen on two occasions by Englishmen – Herncastle and Ablewhite – one could surmise that The Moonstone presents an indictment of British colonial ventures.22 It is important to register this self-indictment. At one level, the indictment underlines a prevalent unease about colonial actions, an unease that had already manifested itself a few years earlier during the controversy surrounding Governor Eyre’s imposition of martial law in Jamaica in 1865 in the aftermath of the uprising at Morant Bay.23 At another level, it adds an introspective and self-incriminatory undertone to the novel, opening up a more composite – and even contingent – sense of Victorian Englishness. This alternate presentation of Englishness as it were is significant inasmuch as it deflects from any monolithic sense of a colonizing order, an overriding perception that the Victorians may well have tried to foster and that subsequent critical formulations often tend to overlay on the colonial equation as well.24 In that respect, the fissured English backdrop of the novel relays the cultural context through which, historically, transimperial solidarities were forged along alliances of labor and gender over the course of the century, alliances that often belied orientalist assumptions of “otherness” but never completely eschewed some of its ethnocentric assumptions.25 In fact, even as The Moonstone affords glimpses of what can be termed as a liberal ambivalence toward empire, it is worth noting the highly orientalist framing of its final scene. Transporting us to the temple in the holy city of Somnath, India, the novel ends with a description of the deity that is now resplendent with the diamond that has made its way back to its rightful place. Order, it seems, has been restored. But one cannot help but think of another kind of order that is also restored by the end of the novel. If The Moonstone allowed for introspection and critique of Victorian attitudes toward its Eastern colonial possessions, then the conclusion of the

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novel does not do much to displace familiar tropes for representing the East. Seemingly satisfied with the fact that the Moonstone has made its way back to “its wild native land” (p. 482), the novel ends with a panoramic view of multitudinous Indians thronging the shrine in rapt adoration of the deity: “tens of thousands of human creatures, all dressed in white, stretching down the sides of the hill, overflowing into the plain” (p. 481). Nothing much, it seems, has changed from De Quincey’s orientalist dreams, which led him to comment nearly fifty years previously: “South Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most teeming with human life.”26 But even as the tenor of both those statements is the same, it is important to contextualize The Moonstone’s ending because it is indicative of what was actually a shift – rather than continuation – in the nineteenth-century political and cultural attitude toward empire and the East. Aggregated into an undifferentiated mass, the Indians, as The Moonstone ultimately has us believe, can only be cast in terms of an extraordinary – almost fanatical – religious outpouring that obviates any question of judicial or political claim-making (on the part of the Indians) that the theft of the diamond from Tipu’s palace may have occasioned. The liberal ambivalence of the novel, in other words, is held in check by a refusal or inability to view colonial subjects (here, Indians) in anything but their political nonage. This is a characteristically paradoxical feature of Victorian liberalism that otherwise placed great faith in reform and improvement, objectives that underwrote its “civilizing mission,” especially in dependencies such as India.27 But by 1861, liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill noted that, while there were colonial dependencies “whose population is in a sufficiently advanced state to be fitted for representative government,” there were others “which have not attained that state, and which, if held at all, must be governed by the dominant country.”28 The consequence of pronouncements such as these varied from the withholding of rights of self-determination from colonial subjects to justification of acts of violence. What is significant for our purposes is to note the extent to which various axes of representation – literary, anthropological – played a critical role in sustaining this liberal paradox, a point that remains understudied in Uday Mehta’s otherwise influential thesis on Victorian liberal attitudes toward empire. The point to bear in mind about The Moonstone in this context is that, even as it views the Indians as driven only by religious superstition, the novel is written well after the Indian Uprising of 1857, the so-called Indian Mutiny, in which Indian soldiers of the British regiments had rebelled

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against their officers. The native discontent against the British stemmed from social, economic and political factors and resonated amongst various sections of the populace in India.29 While the rebellion was underway, Charles Dickens reacted to the news of the events with some agitation: The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not in the least regarding them as if they lived in the Strand, London, or at Camden Town) should be to proclaim to them […] that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the cruelties rested.30

The events of the uprising were to haunt the Victorian imaginary for at least the next several decades, as evidenced by the veritable industry of “mutiny literature” that it inspired.31 Even as the novels mostly focus on the events of the Mutiny, what remains largely overlooked in this substantive corpus, much of which was written well after the uprising had been quelled, is the new political status granted to Indians in the aftermath of 1857. After sanctioning severe counterinsurgency measures against the “rebels,” the British Parliament had also abolished the tenure of the East India Company, and British Indian territories were formally brought under the rule of the British monarch. In 1858, the Queen’s Proclamation stated: It is our further Will that, so far as may be Our Subjects, of whatever Race or Creed; be freely and impartially admitted to Offices in our Service, the Duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to observe.32

While the issuance of the Proclamation had more to do with curtailing the powers of the East India Company and its trade monopoly, it had a revitalizing effect on Indians. An emergent class of English-educated Indians viewed it as the “Magna Carta” for demanding political rights and a measure of parity with their imperial brethren.33 Victorian literary production over the rest of the century, however, was unable or unwilling to cast this new variant of the Indian subject. Rather, Indians were cast in terms of irredeemable difference (as marked in Dickens’ outburst that differentiates between the “Oriental race” and those who live in the “Strand”), a template that marked a shift in colonial policy-making as well.34 To be sure, Indians featured quite visibly in a variety of literary genres. But in all cases, they were, by and large, cast in terms of a difference that was articulated primarily as stasis: they were cast as unchanging types, not as individuals who, as historical agents, could evolve to occupy different subject positions. This may well seem a familiar

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observation, and it does echo Said’s astute comment that the tense that is most commonly employed for the Orient is “timeless eternal,” for which it is “frequently enough to use the simple copula is.”35 However, it is important to also consider how and why unchangeability becomes the trait attributed to the East/India at a particular historical moment. Doing so not only explains how such a characterization garners resonance at any given time, but it also sheds light on the interlocking conversations that allow for “difference” to be inscribed as “stasis.” I turn attention, then, to a discussion that took place in 1866 at the Ethnological Society, London, between Dadabhai Naoroji and John Crawfurd. Following through the discussion highlights how nineteenthcentury Orientalist discourse variously produces orientalist effects, particularly the kind Said describes above, in ways that have as much to do with exigencies and dilemmas of liberal colonial governance as with metropolitan anxieties about race, the status of science, and the professionalization of academic disciplines.

Anthropological Difference and “Orientalist” Scholarship Born in Bombay in 1825, Dadabhai Naoroji was the first Indian to be appointed to a professorship in a prominent college when he was named Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Elphinstone College, Bombay. Traveling to England in 1853, he lived there for the next fifty years and became the first Asian to be elected to the British Parliament in 1893 (for Central Finsbury). Naoroji was deeply immersed in the political and intellectual life of the imperial metropolis, so it is no surprise that he took it upon himself to provide a rebuttal to John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological Society, who had dwelt at some length on the inferiority of Asiatic races in a paper that he presented before the society, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man” (February 13, 1866).36 Crawfurd’s deliberations on Asiatic races reflected a preoccupation with non-European people that had pervaded metropolitan discourse along several registers from the early decades of the nineteenth century. While much of this interest was entwined with evangelical interests, debates on abolitionism and colonial expansionism, there was an increasing interest, also, to study non-European people from an anthropological perspective. The remarkable success that anthropology was to command in the latter decades of the century often obscures its vexed origins. The Anthropological Society that was founded in 1863 was in fact a splinter

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group of the Ethnological Society. Founded in 1843, the Ethnological Society attempted to study non-European peoples from a more scientific perspective, in contrast to associations formed even earlier, such as the Aborigines Protection Society, which studied non-European peoples from a more humanitarian – rather than scientific – focus. Even as the Ethnological Society was instituted with very different objectives than the Aborigines Protection Society, it shared the liberal humanitarian belief in monogeneism – the concept of a single, shared origin and, hence, a fundamental unity of all races, a belief that was strongly propounded by James Prichard, one of the leading figures of the Ethnological Society. The findings of the Ethnological Society were cast in a more “liberal” frame, emphasizing the modifiability of racial difference and historical factors as a determining feature of a scientific racial typology. Several members of the Ethnological Society, who were led by figures such as James Hunt, however, departed from a monogeneistic belief. Instead, they advocated a polygenism, which, basing itself on the premise of a fundamental difference between races, emphasized physical and anatomical factors that proved the insurmountability of racial difference. Such an emphasis reoriented the study of race, inaugurating a “race science” that was to exert significant influence over the rest of the century. That this shift closely paralleled the response to major colonial upheavals of the nineteenth century is perhaps not a coincidence. The 1857 uprising in India as well as Governor Eyre’s suppression of a native uprising in Jamaica in 1865 witnessed, as already mentioned, a rethinking of the liberal belief in the efficacy of colonial reform and improvement, which had been premised earlier on an understanding of the unity of races. In fact, in 1866 (the year of Crawfurd and Naoroji’s address), James Hunt addressed the Anthropological Society with the observation that “[t]he merest novice in the study of race-characteristics ought to know that we English can only successfully rule either Jamaica, New Zealand, the Cape, China, or India, by such men as Governor Eyre.”37 Crawfurd’s paper dwelt at length on the inferiority of Asiatic races when compared to their European counterparts. The chief criterion for Crawfurd’s pronouncement was that of progress. The notion of progress – the leitmotif of the nineteenth century – commands double importance in the context of Crawfurd’s address. One, it reflects the importance accorded to ideas of development in a post-Darwinian climate in which racial difference was explained in terms of a secular evolutionary model that sought to explain why, although mankind was one in origin, “not all groups had progressed to the same level.”38 Second, the idea of a graded progress was also mutually

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constitutive of liberal political thought, which, caught between a commitment to universal equality and the need to justify its own interventions in the context of empire, postulated a civilizational hierarchy, wherein different races were perceived to be situated along different stages of development, such that those who were deemed to be “backward” legitimated England’s civilizing mission to bring them in alignment with a progressivist “present.”39 Crawfurd’s address hinged on this notion of progress, one that entwined scientific thought with liberal ideology. But what is also of interest is the way in which Crawfurd presented the idea of progress itself. Unlike many contemporary scientific findings, which located “other” civilizations in an anterior stage of development, Crawfurd, betraying perhaps his schooling in Prichardian ethnology, located Asian civilizations otherwise. Prichard, influenced strongly by the philological theories of Orientalist scholars, such as Max Müller and William Jones, had advocated the primacy of the comparative study of languages over that of physical characteristics. In this reckoning, the proximity of Sanskrit with European languages resulted in Indians and Europeans coming off as “long-lost” brothers, whose consequent estrangement seemed to provide the guiding motive for philological and even ethnological study. But the place of a language-based study in the scientific examination of race came under duress in the mid-century. The rising prominence of anthropology provided a compelling alternative, especially because the increasing professionalization of science demanded a very different mode of scientific investigation. The Ethnological Society shared in fact an uncertain relationship with the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), the regulating body responsible for professionalizing the pursuit of science. Structurally divided into a number of “sections,” the intellectual and methodological preferences of the Association can be gauged by the implicit ranking of the “sections”: Section A, devoted to physical and mathematical sciences, claimed substantial funds and attention, while a field like ethnology had to jostle to even gain recognition from the BAAS.40 In this context, it is significant that Crawfurd’s paper reveals a transition from Prichardian ethnology to a study of race based on visible, physical characteristics. Evidently, this was by no means a smooth transition: beginning with a summary description of the physical characteristics of Europeans vis-à-vis Asiatics – “the limbs of the European are larger than those of the Asiatic, more especially the hands” – Crawfurd seems compelled to concede that “the differences in the intellectual and moral qualities of the European and Asiatic races are of far more importance

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than those in their mere bodily structures, and deserve to be considered at greater length.”41 Such a move was perhaps prompted not just by his grounding in a certain kind of ethnology (albeit one that was fast losing ground) but also in his own extensive work on the languages, especially Malay, of the Southeast Asian archipelago. It was perhaps as a result of both of these influences that Crawfurd presented a view of the Asiatic races that was reluctant to fully locate them in an anterior stage of development. Rather than positing the backwardness of Asiatic races, therefore, Crawfurd highlights the remarkable facility with which Asiatic races “emanated sooner from savagery and barbarism than the European”(p. 60). Having granted the “precociousness” of Asiatic races, however, Crawfurd points to their subsequent stagnation: “having reached a certain point of civilization,” as Crawfurd notes, the Asiatic’s “progress becomes nearly stationary” (p. 60). It is this idea of stasis that provides the narrative framework for Crawfurd’s thesis. While he foregrounds the accomplishments of Asiatics in fields as diverse as agriculture, sculpture and textile manufacturing, among many others, he punctuates each of these observations with a statement regarding their subsequent lack of progress. With reference to metallurgy, for instance, he notes that while it was in Asia that the “art of making iron malleable” was first invented, “it is probably at present nearly what it was when first discovered, and there is not a hundred weight of good malleable iron in all Asia, which is at present supplied from Europe” (p. 62). And by way of illustration, Crawfurd records how British attempts at educating Indian natives were stymied by the fact that while native students made more progress than European students in the early years, they failed to make much progress upon attaining puberty (p. 60). It is observations such as these that build toward Crawfurd’s overarching argument, which he states in the final paragraph: “the inevitable conclusion to which we must come is that between the European and the Asiatic races of man there is a broad innate difference, physical, intellectual, and moral” (p. 81). Not only does Crawfurd problematically conflate the physical with the intellectual and moral, but, by applying a somewhat circular logic, he projects his observations backward in time as well, making them at once the cause and effect of racial difference: “such difference has existed from the earliest authentic records,” he states, “and is most probably coeval with the first creation of man” (p. 81). It is not surprising, then, that the Asiatic potential for development is key to Naoroji’s counterargument. Ironically, he counters Crawfurd’s pronouncements of Asiatic inferiority by urging the Ethnological Society to establish a more scientific mode of inquiry. In doing so, he addresses the

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anxieties of the Society, which in the preceding decades had to ward off allegations that its humanitarian concerns would “compromise the pursuit of ‘pure science.’”42 Held in suspicion, in fact, by the BAAS, the London Ethnological Society secured grudging approval upon the understanding that it would concentrate its resources toward documentation of data alone.43 Crawford’s observations, Naoroji felt, suffered from the flaws attending the reports of most foreign travelers and investigators, namely that of “superficial observation and imperfect information” (p. 127).44 By contrast, Naoroji refers to the work of contemporary scholars attesting to the scientific and cultural legacy of Asiatic civilizations, especially that of India. The paper makes extensive use of references from William Jones and Max Müller and even reproduces extracts from Hindu and Persian scriptures. Naoroji is also careful to assert the importance of firsthand evidence presented by contemporary Indians, including himself. Questioning the admissibility of European testimony as the indubitable standard of judgment, he points out, rather tongue-in-cheek, “If such evidence as Mr. Crawfurd relies upon to be conclusive as to the character of the natives of India, I do not see [how Indian conclusions] cannot be also admitted as proved” (p. 142). As he argues further, European judgment of non-European cultures is flawed by the fact that “every wrong act of the native is at once condemned as innate in the native,” whereas “similar acts of Europeans are of course only individual delinquencies, or capable of explanation!” (p. 144). But the thrust of Naoroji’s response is his emphasis on the potential for reform. He counteracts Crawfurd’s claims of Indian inferiority by stating that the present state of Indian disarray was just an aberration resulting from centuries “of foreign rule and oppression” but could be remedied by “British rule rightly administered” (p. 144). The implicit faith in the benevolence of British rule is not surprising at this point, given that it constituted a key principle of India nationalist thought until well into the twentieth century. But it is interesting to note how Naoroji recasts British presence in India as “not foreign.” Rather, contrary to an increasingly biologized study of race (the Anthropological Society soon advocated anthropometric methods to study race), he reiterates a more affiliative relationship with the British, displacing the study of physical characteristics by alluding to the theory of common Indo-European origin, a favored position of the language-based Orientalists. He questions Crawford’s premise that “because there is a diversity in the intellectual and physical character of various nations, they must therefore have separate origin.” For Naoroji, such a premise does not hold ground. While making such a claim, though, he is quite circumspect, refusing to be drawn directly

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into the heated debate about polygenesis versus monogenesis: “I do not mean to undertake here,” he stated, “the solution of the most difficult problem of the unity or plurality of races” (p. 147). But even as he explicitly leaves the matter in the balance, for all practical purposes he outlines an argument that reinforces the notion of a common Aryan origin that had been proposed by comparative philologists.45 His paper refers not only to India’s classical past but finds in it enough evidence of its shared racial heritage with Europe and England: “enough has been ascertained,” he pronounces, approvingly citing the scholar Horace Wilson, “to determine the actual existence in Sanscrit … of a very extensive literature of fiction, in which many of our European acquaintances are at once to be recognized” (p. 131). And it is this filiality that for Naoroji disproves not only the case for “innate difference” but also its concomitant charge of India’s irremediability (and unchanging nature). With reference to Naoroji’s address, C. A. Bayly notes that the singling out of the idea of “innate difference” by “an Indian intellectual in 1866 is striking.”46 Farsighted as it may have been, Naoroji’s contribution of course did not in any way alter the path that metropolitan science was to pursue. But his navigation of the terrain of metropolitan knowledge production, especially about the East, reveals its highly contested nature, a feature that perhaps affords a polemical entry point for Naoroji even as it orientalizes him.

O/orientalism The concluding scene of The Moonstone is narrated to us by a Mr. Murthwaite, who has traveled widely in the East and is the source of “expert knowledge” on India in the novel. In his familiarity with several “Eastern” languages as well as his emphasis on the timelessness of Hindu customs (as he sees practiced in Somnath and what he sees as guiding the three priests in the novel), Murthwaite could in many ways be a fictional Crawfurd (who also knew six languages and had spent considerable time in India and Southeast Asia). It is important, in fact, to track the presence of the Orientalist figure across a number of registers, if only to understand the cumulative effects of nineteenth-century orientalist discourse. It is more important to do so because Naoroji’s intervention in itself did not, as already mentioned, have much effect on the direction that metropolitan race science was to take. Yet, if Naoroji is able at all to dislodge certain aspects of Crawfurd’s argument, it is significant to note the extent to which he refers to the work of Orientalists such as Max Müller and William Jones. In reading his address, one can, on the one hand, hardly be unmindful of the damaging and exclusionary effects

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of the Indo-Aryan lineage that Naoroji configures even if in recompense.47 On the other hand, by keeping in mind the various strands and circuits of Orientalist scholarship that Naoroji’s address points to, one is able to disaggregate that scholarship in ways that go some distance in understanding the complexities of how Victorians conceived of the “East” in the heyday of liberal imperialism and, regrettably, in understanding the staying power of that orientalist perception as well.

Notes 1. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 73. 2. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 73. 3. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 73. 4. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 72. 5. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 91. 6. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 91. 7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Viking Books, 1978), p. 58. 8. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review 6:1 (1953): pp. 1–15. And, more, recently, John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 9. Sanjay Krishnan, “Opium and Empire: The Transports of Thomas de Quincey,” boundary 2 33:2 (Summer 2006): pp. 204–234, p. 211. 10. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 91. Jean Christophe Adelung, an eighteenthcentury German philologist, was the author of Mithridate, or a Universal Table of Languages. 11. De Quincey, Confessions, pp. 108–109. 12. Said, Orientalism, passim. 13. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 23. 14. See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: Study in Nineteenth Century Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 15. For an articulation of the relation between literature and anthropological theory in the Victorian period, see Kathy Psomiades, “The Marriage Plot in Theory,” Novel: A Forum in Fiction 43:1 (Spring 2010): pp. 53–59. 16. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 62. 17. See, for instance, G. O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan, 1866). For a historical account of Englishwomen looking to the East for validation of their professional status, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

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18. The most compelling and incisive critique of this phenomenon remains the one offered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985): pp. 243–261. 19. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 7. All references are to this edition, and further citations will be included in parentheses within the text. 20. For a different but important argument about the significance of the detective genre to the Victorian imperial project, see Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 21. I refer here to the condition of the unmarried, working-class woman as exemplified by Rosanna Spelman in the novel. I also refer to Ablewhite’s status as a parvenu, a position that exposes him to class snobbery, which, amongst other things, arguably fosters a socially destructive streak in him. 22. For an account of Collins’ more critical stance on Britain’s response to the Indian Uprising of 1857, see Maria Bachman, “Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Perils of Imagined Others,” in Fear Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, eds. Marlene Tromp, Maria Bachman and Heidi Kaufman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), pp. 101–123. 23. Governor Eyre’s invocation of martial law in brutally suppressing the “rebellion” in Jamaica evoked sharply divided responses in England. The Jamaica Committee, consisting of men like John Mill, T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, Henry Fawcett and John Bright, condemned the violation of liberal principles, while John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens were among those who argued for his action on grounds of imperial expediency. For details of this uprising, see Sarah Winter, “On The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre-George William Gordon Controversy, 1865–71,” in BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, www.bran chcollective.org/ (accessed March 7, 2017). 24. Orientalism has also been read as offering a monolithic view of the European/ colonial social order. See Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 1. 25. See, for instance, Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 26. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 108. For a related reading of the conclusion of The Moonstone, see Ian Duncan, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic,” Modern Language Quarterly 55.3 (September 1994) pp.297-319, 303. 27. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. 28. John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government [1861],” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): pp. 205–470, p. 453.

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29. There are numerous accounts of the uprising, but a standard account of the rebellion from the Indian perspective has long been R. C. Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963). 30. Charles Dickens, Letter to Angela Burdett Coutts, October 4, 1857, cited in Alex Tickell, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Limits of Colonial Government,” Nineteenth Century Literature 67:4 (2013): pp. 457–489, p. 462. 31. See Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 32. Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India (Published by the Governor-General at Allahabad, November 1st, 1858) (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1858), pp. 117–118. 33. See Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the LateVictorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 34. See Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3, part 4. 35. Said, Orientalism, p. 72. 36. John Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5 (1867), pp. 58–81. 37. Cited in Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 93. 38. George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 236. 39. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, p. 78. 40. Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackeray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 275–276. 41. John Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5 (1867): pp. 58–81, p. 60. Henceforth all references to this paper will be parenthetically cited in the text. 42. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 245. 43. Morrell and Thackeray, Gentlemen of Science, p. 96. 44. Dadabhai Naoroji, “Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’s Paper on the European and Asiatic Races,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5 (1867): pp. 127–149. Henceforth all references to this paper will be parenthetically cited in the text. 45. See Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), chapter 1. 46. C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 175. 47. See Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond c. 1770–1880,” Modern Asian Studies 41:3 (May 2007): pp. 471–513.

chapter 5

Orientalism and Victorian Fiction Daniel Bivona

In this chapter, I intend to discuss not the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of Orientalist representations in the nineteenth century but the Oriental fantasy elements at play in British fiction in the Victorian age, the Orientalist conventions that writers drew on for their imaginative work. This means I distinguish between fiction set in the Orient (the genre that stages in fictional form the complex interchanges between East and West) and “Orientalist discourse” (a vast body of writings of multiple genres that Said draws on in his book Orientalism: the body of work produced by professional and amateur Orientalists). In particular, I am interested in exploring a larger theme that gives some shape to this diverse body of fiction or at least the canonical representatives of it: what one might call the gradual displacement of the focus of Oriental fiction from a fascination with Oriental object to fascination with European subject, its gradual movement from a preoccupation with what Disraeli called the “Great Asian Mystery” to foregrounding what I am calling “The Great European Mystery.” That early twentieth-century British fiction focuses intently on British character and empire, anyone familiar with the work of Forster, Orwell, Greene and others can attest, but it is prevalent in nineteenth-century canonical fiction set in the Orient as well.1 In fact, I will argue that a concern with dramatizing the psychological stresses of being a member of the ruling race, what one might call the dramatization of “Conradian interiority,” comes to mark canonical Oriental fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The unanswerable identity question “Who is Kim?” haunts much of that literature.2 If one treats the concept of Orientalism narrowly, then, as a set of self-referential representations of “the East” that only purports to represent the long engagement, both friendly and hostile, between Europe and the Muslim world, the indubitable role of literary fantasy in shaping constructions of the Orient comes to the foreground. Whatever one thinks about Said’s sweeping claims, one cannot overlook the fact that the 101

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representation of the Orient in European literature involves the repeated deployment of a recognizable set of tropes and fantasy elements that help to construct the generic category of Orientalist literature. The Orient is, among other things, a world of sexual fantasy, in its most extreme form, a world of lustful Turks lounging about in the seraglio, repeatedly violating young English girls who eventually learn to enjoy their violation. This is the “pornotopic” world identified by Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians (1966) and associated especially with the anonymously authored pornographic novel The Lustful Turk, published in Britain in 1830.3 This world of the seraglio is recreated, later in the century, albeit in a much more decorous Southeast Asian setting, by Anna Leonowens, who served as governess at the court of the King of Siam and, even later, in the midtwentieth century, in the musical The King and I. In British literary discourse, one can highlight a set of diverse but popular literary representations that run from Beckford’s Vathek (1786) in the late eighteenth century through Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam and Burton’s 1885 translation of the Arabian Nights. This is, we might say, one generic mainline of Orientalist literature. Its influential representations offer opportunities to readers to indulge romantic fantasy not easily admitted to in fiction set in Europe in that time: the erotic as exotic. In discussing Orientalism in Victorian British fiction, I will of necessity set aside literary representations of the Far East and sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention the so-called white settler colonies, for the purposes of analysis, even though European imperialism engaged mightily and often with those places. Limiting ourselves to fiction, as I propose to do here, and primarily canonical fiction, also means necessarily suspending, for the moment at least, consideration of the central role of travelogues and administrative memoirs that, Said argues convincingly, were crucially important to constructing the discourse on the East for European readers in the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, from the works of Montesquieu through Fourier, Burckhardt, Champollion, Lane, Burton and Cromer, to cite just a few examples important to Said. These qualifications (and the need to observe space limitations) shrink the number of works I will discuss to a more manageable size in the interest of focus, while causing us to put aside for the purposes of this discussion some imperial adventure fiction (H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She, for example) as well as a significant body of boys’ adventure literature written by popular writers such as G. E. Henty. In canonical fiction, Thackeray, Collins and Dickens become less useful to my design despite the important background role of India in

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Thackeray’s and Collins’ fiction and Dickens’ representation of commercial free-trade imperialism in Dombey and Son and opium dens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (or, for that matter, opium dens in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray). While Orientalist motifs can be found in much literature of the Victorian era, the most significant examples of the genre tend to focus on an imagined Muslim world running from North Africa and the Levant to India and Southeast Asia. For that reason, I will narrow the rest of my comments on Orientalism and Victorian British fiction to the genre of fiction and to a few prominent examples of mainly canonical fiction that have for their settings this constructed Muslim world. The fictions I will discuss are generally classified as canonical (with the exception of Disraeli’s Tancred), and that necessarily means that they exhibit generic elements found in much Victorian Oriental fiction while also, to an extent, raising interesting challenges to generic conventions. Indeed, that is arguably why they were elevated to the canon. The list of works of Oriental British fiction I will discuss here admits not only exemplary texts that engage with sexual – particularly miscegenistic – fantasy but also works that test some generic rules and thus come to stand out while exerting a strong fascination on readers for years after their publication dates. These works include Disraeli’s Tancred (1847), Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Flora Annie Steel’s classic Mutiny tale On the Face of the Waters (1896), Rudyard Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy” (1890) and Kim (1900) and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899). All foreground sexuality and the violation of European sexual norms: they test and mark out the limits of what Robert J. C. Young calls “hybridity.” The first two link contemporary issues involving the search for cultural origins, Zionism and nationalism with the Oriental quest. Steel’s work connects the concubinage system that prevailed in India under the rule of the East India Company with the rebellion that almost ended British rule in 1857 and 1858. Steel suggests that miscegenation is the metaphorical key to understanding the ultimate failure of the rebellion and the enforcement of rules against it the spur to a new order of racial separation that followed the suppression of the Mutiny in 1858.4 Kipling, by contrast, was dedicated, in his Indian tales and such novels as Kim, to offering representations of the Orient that both reinforce popular British stereotypes of Indians and, on occasion, offer a thoroughgoing challenge to them partly through the staging of love relationships that involve miscegenation.5 While Kipling and Steel, despite their novelty as writers, remain firm defenders of empire, Conrad’s convictions about

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imperialism remain more complicated. Both an enthusiast for adventure fiction and a writer dedicated to remaking adventure fiction as a genre, a man whose father was a leader of the Polish independence struggle against Russia earlier in the century, Conrad, more than these other writers, clearly is interested in the dramatic consequences of the European engagement with an East overwritten by Orientalist conventions. In Lord Jim (1899), the inscrutability once ascribed to what Disraeli called the “Great Asian Mystery” has been displaced from an external space to an internal space: essentially, onto the inscrutable European adventurer (Lord Jim). In this fiction, the conventions of Orientalist fiction have turned away, in effect, from a primary concern with the Oriental to focus on the European imperialist himself who finds himself entranced by the (ultimately sexual) spell of the Orient.

Nation, Race and Sexual Bonding Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda are unusual among novels that engage with Orientalism in promoting a kind of nationalism that is ultimately internationalist in scope, implicitly provincial but also cosmopolitan.6 One might say that both make use of Zionist plots to promote a kind of introspection that has less to do with the nature of the Orient than with the nature of the European, albeit Europeans whose origins draw them to the East. The mysterious Jewish financier who makes an appearance both in Coningsby and Tancred is Sidonia, and he often manages to distill the ideological essence of the politician/novelist Benjamin Disraeli’s political, cultural and religious ideas in pithy phrases. Sidonia clearly functions as a mouthpiece for Disraeli himself, especially when he gives voice to such aphorisms as “All is race; there is no other truth.”7 What exactly this aphorism means, though, is worth exploring further. In the 1840s “race” was commonly used as a synonym for what we would now call “nation” as well as for what we would now call “color.” Much racial theorizing of the 1840s (that is, before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the founding of the London Anthropological Society [1863]) relies on both nationalist notions (the Scottish “race,” the Welsh “race,” the Celtic “race,” the French “race”) and racial distinctions anchored in geographic distinctions that attribute imagined, but distinct, geographic origins to the races (“Caucasians”).8 Sometimes, linguistic families are invoked as the identifying features – “Indo-Europeans” or “Aryans,” “Semites,” “Hamites” – the latter two, of course, borrowing their

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names from two of Noah’s sons who helped regenerate the human race in the aftermath of the Deluge. Often, “race” stands as a synonym for “class” in the nineteenth century as well, especially when class is also being linked with “blood.” Many race theorists use it this way when they refer to, for instance, the “aristocratic” race. Arthur de Gobineau, the author of the Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–1855), mixes these class notions with linguistic ones (he is best known for popularizing the “Aryan” race concept, which was inspired by the work of Sir William Jones). Moreover, the term “race” could often be deployed to designate allegiance to a faith, as in “the Jewish race” – although Judaism is something of an unusual case, suggesting to many non-Jewish Europeans both a legible racial identity inscribed on an individual and an adherence to an “Asiatic” religious practice that may not be legible on the body. However, even religious faith offers little hope of stabilizing a proliferating category confusion. Bayly notes that Hinduism was repeatedly misinterpreted as a “faith” along the lines of Islam by British Orientalists when, in fact, its role in Indian life was closer to what we now call “culture” than it was to “faith.” It was actively being reshaped over the course of the nineteenth century in response to pressures from other prosyletizing faiths – Islam and Christianity in India and Southeast Asia, in particular.9 When Sidonia claims “all is race” in Tancred, he appears to be suggesting that the concept of race embraces a multiplicity of meanings, that its explanatory power rests on the fact that its boundaries are ever shifting. However, Disraeli complicates this picture by having Sidonia also tout the particularistic superiority of the “Hebrew intellect.”10 In the last novel of his trilogy, published a year before the Chartist crisis reached its peak, Disraeli attempts to turn his readers’ attention away from intractable domestic issues of class in the “Hungry Forties” with which he engaged in the two previous books of his “Condition of England” trilogy, Coningsby and Sybil, and toward imperial adventuring as a new field for the formation of upper-class British youth in Tancred. Tancred, the main character, whose name is borrowed from the Crusader hero of Torquato Tasso’s well-known romance, courts a woman named Eva and befriends her brother Fakredeen, who is an Eastern Christian infatuated with the goal of conquering the Levant to restore Christian predominance (“conquest” is often presented as “restoration” in Disraeli’s fiction and political writings). As in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which owes something to Disraeli’s novel even though Eliot herself largely disparaged it, Disraeli is peddling a form of Zionism – albeit of a peculiarly Disraelian sort – through his mouthpiece Sidonia. As I have argued elsewhere, Disraeli is

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intent on justifying a Zionist reversal of the Diaspora while refusing to honor commonly used distinctions, such as that between Arabs and Jews, that in the twentieth century have come to be seen as vital to delimiting the identity of Jewishness: “The Arabs are only Jews upon horseback” is another character’s way of putting the case in Tancred.11 The project of reversing the Diaspora, which is clearly implied by this amalgamation of “Semitic” and “Indo-European” races here, is arrested abruptly at the book’s close with the arrival of Tancred’s father and mother, Lord Montacute and his wife, who appear in Jerusalem just in time to rescue their son from what they consider an imprudent marriage he is about to make with Eva. Despite Eva’s metaphorical dressing as the unifying mother of the entire human race and a figure of prominence in all three major religious traditions with origins in the Middle East (Islam, Judaism and Christianity), the ending reasserts, albeit somewhat lugubriously, the predominance of British political and domestic order, as Lord Montacute and his wife arrive in Jerusalem just in time to impose that order by preventing Tancred’s marriage. By this act, they void any attempt to see the entire Zionist project through because its success appears to hinge on the marriage of the two young people. Apparently, Tancred’s planned marriage to the reincarnated mother of the human race had to be stopped to prevent the forging of an imprudent match – even Eve’s blood is apparently insufficiently pure for an English aristocratic alliance. One can easily understand George Eliot’s reluctance to celebrate Tancred as the forerunner of her penultimate novel Daniel Deronda, as Tancred’s artistic flaws and contradictions are all too obvious. Moreover, the unsatisfactory ending of Tancred reasserts a somewhat silly domestic order of power, thus converting the meaning of the novel from a grand project of cultural syncretism to nothing but a boys’ lark spoiled by the arrival of the adults at the end. Eliot’s opening line in Daniel Deronda – “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning”12 – also insinuates that a playful meaning (“make-believe”) invests Deronda’s identity quest in Eliot’s novel as well, while attributing merely instrumental motives to Deronda’s search for his own Jewish origins, as if the goal of doing something were simply to do something. Eliot implicitly undermines the seriousness of Deronda’s quest for origins precisely by suggesting that all such quests are juvenile adventures, ultimately a form of play. One is reminded of the ending of Middlemarch, which seems both to celebrate Dorothea’s “incalculably diffusive” influence on others and to reduce her heroism to fictional “unhistoric acts.”13

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Interestingly, Eliot wrote and published Daniel Deronda during the decade when Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and Rothschilds first sponsored the settlement of persecuted Eastern European Jews in Palestine, a decade in which Disraeli was also serving his longest term as prime minister. The period 1874 to 1880, in fact, saw Disraeli’s central accomplishments as a prime minister in service of a rather grandiose vision of empire. He buys the Suez Canal with an emergency loan from the Rothschild Bank (1875), crowns the Queen Empress of India (1877), dominates the room at the first Congress of Berlin, arranged by Bismarck to re-partition the Balkan Peninsula in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and ultimately ensures the dominance of imperialism in late-Victorian domestic politics by deploying it as part of a Tory strategy for recruiting the votes of newly enfranchised working-class males who succumb to his jingoist appeals. Of course, the Powers, by then, include the newly risen German Empire, flush with very recent success in its defeat of France and newly eager to share in African imperial spoils. For all of Daniel Deronda’s comparative sophistication as a novel, it nonetheless borrows elements from Tancred, perhaps most obviously the use of a central prophetic figure to announce, justify and pave the way for the Zionist project. Eliot’s Mordecai has little to do with the activities of his namesake from the Book of Esther (who protects the Jews in exile in Persia by revealing to the king a plot against his life), but he does assume a prophetic role here in promoting Zionism and, in effect, prophesying the revelation of Daniel’s Jewish identity before Daniel learns it himself from the lips of his mother at their dramatic meeting late in the novel. The promise of Zionism is ultimately demographic: a promise of growing population, but one that retains racially distinctive markings. To be sure, the novel is full of other resonances of Victorian imperialism that have little to do with Palestine. The best example, perhaps, is Eliot’s persistent metaphorical association of Gwendolen’s abusive husband Grandcourt with Governor Eyre, the white British ruler of Jamaica whose harsh treatment of rebellious blacks on the island in 1865 earned him a well-deserved name for brutality while, nonetheless, winning him the vocal support of Dickens, Carlyle and Ruskin, among other intellectuals of the day, who were convinced that strong measures were needed to suppress the rebellion.14 Indeed, Daniel Deronda’s two main plots – the Gwendolen Harleth marital plot and the Daniel Deronda identity plot – suggest that the author is deliberately juxtaposing Gwendolen’s centrifugal rebelliousness with Daniel’s centripetal concern for return and reunification. The ending of the novel then reveals the author’s choice of Daniel as

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her favorite when Gwendolen reluctantly surrenders all hope of marrying Daniel as the latter reveals his Jewish ancestry and, concommitantly, his newly affirmed and single-minded dedication to constructing a Zionist community and ultimately a Jewish state in Palestine. That Zionism in this novel is as much about the maintenance of cultural (or racial) distinctiveness as it is about the melding of different peoples together in an attempt to reverse the diaspora becomes clear at the end of this novel through Daniel’s choice of Mirah as his bride: a complete, if only implicit, repudiation of his mother’s lifelong pursuit of the goal of deracination. Moreover, the historical model Daniel seizes on to clothe the proven viability of “a new stirring of memories and hopes” in a nationalist project is a recognizably European one: the Italian Risorgimento (p. 595). It is a model that at least begs comparison with a project like Fakredeen’s in the Levant: one that would, if realized, draw the disparate strands of a diasporic nation together in a highly romantic – and, at the level of individuals, fundamentally sexual – project of reunification and reproduction, albeit one which the narrator finally admits has only the contingent nature of fiction. If “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” according to Eliot’s narrator, then a passionate interest in returning to one’s cultural and national origins places one in the realm of the imaginary: believing one is returning to a homeland that has in fact never been home, while embracing an explanation for one’s Sephardic appearance that stamps one with racialized distinctiveness necessary to buttressing the project of a restored Jewish state. Although the novel largely ties the distinctiveness of the Jews less to physical traits than to the stories they tell about racial persecution, Eliot also seems to concede, at least implicitly, the importance of racial marking for national identity. The Zionist quest is ultimately revealed to be a way for Deronda to carry out a plan ultimately birthed by men – confected by Mordecai, in fact – rather than a quest to restore a lost relationship with the person who is responsible for his biological inheritance of Jewish origins: Deronda’s mother.

Mutiny and Miscegenation in Anglo-India Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, written in the mid-1890s by an Anglo-Indian writer whose work is far too good to be kept out of the canon, is also much preoccupied with the issue of miscegenation at the time of the Indian Mutiny (1857–1858). Arguably the best of the “Mutiny novels,” On the Face of the Waters is preoccupied with the miscegenistic relations between men of the East India Company and their Indian

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concubines during the rebellion supposedly instigated by the panicked discovery by Indian troops that an English quartermaster had ordered their rifles to be greased with the fat of pigs and cattle. The hero, a secret agent named Greyman (aka “Douglas”), also exemplifies some of the abuses of Company rule. For instance, early in the novel he buys a concubine from a house of ill repute while first ensuring that she has ivory skin – he refuses to buy a “dark” woman – a promise that either marks his allegiance to European racist notions soon to be reinforced by the Raj in the aftermath of the rebellion or reinforces the appearance of his observing Indian caste allegiances dating from time immemorial, all in the interest of enhancing his disguise. He redeems himself by performing heroic acts to save the main white character, Mrs. Erlton, from death at the hands of the mutinying sepoys. The abuses that provoke the rebellion appear to originate in part from the behavior of Company men who have “gone native” – i.e. failed to uphold imperial racial, religious, cultural and power distinctions, distinctions, the author suggests, that are brutally reasserted as the British launch a vicious counterattack against the rebellious Indian soldiers.15 The novel manages both to condemn abuses such as concubinage that the Company largely tolerates and to dramatize the heroism of the brave white officers who, with unbridled brutality that Steel soft-pedals, turn the tide of battle in 1858 to restore India to its role as the distinctly subordinate Jewel in the Crown thereafter to be ruled directly by Parliament. Indeed, the novel implicitly draws on 1890s eugenicist preoccupations in suggesting that interracial sexual liaisons between Indian women and British men are not only demoralizing but inherently infertile.16 We see this when Greyman/Douglas’ concubine gives birth to a stillborn baby early on in the novel.17 However, concubinage and other Indian practices adopted by Englishmen also suggest a role for colonial mimicry that undermines, fatally, the ability of all but a handful of English to be able to read Indians. In this moment of rebellion, when loyalty cannot be counted on, unusual behavior may well be a sign – indeed, a signal – of mutinous intentions. In one dramatic moment early on, Alice Gissing laughs nervously at the difficult-to-interpret spectacle of two Indian men in whiteface and crinolines dancing while holding each other’s waists (p. 66). This moment of ambiguous gender-blending may possibly be a deliberate parodic mimicry of the English. Ever alert to signs with subversive meaning, Douglas, however, steps in to calm this particular situation by first yelling “Bravo!” aloud and then kicking the perpetrators, who turn out to be the servants Jhungi and Bhungi, whom he knows well (p. 68). What initially looks like subversion, in this case, is revealed to be

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play. Moments of apparent political subversion are only suppressed by the use of a firm hand. Moreover, Douglas himself, one of the few Englishmen who can “read” the natives fairly successfully, makes conscious use of disguise throughout the novel, in order to spy on Indians and to measure the progress of rebellious sentiment. The English have grown panicked as the mutiny spreads, and what panics them most is the thought that Hindu and Muslim troops are communicating with one another through ambiguous signs and across a heretofore unbridgeable religious gulf (p. 164): an apparent direct threat to the “divide-and-rule” strategy that marked British rule both under the Company and, after 1858, the Raj. Soon enough, Douglas discovers that messages are being sent inside of chapatti, an unmistakable sign of unprecedented coordination among Indian troops across religious lines. As Douglas warns the Resident: “And so a scene, trivial in itself, points an inexorable finger to the broad fact underlying all our Indian administration, that we are strangers and exiles” (p. 139). Published in 1895, this novel may well have influenced Kipling’s later, and more elaborate, depiction of a vast and efficient British spy network operating in India in his novel of 1900, Kim. While that latter novel depicts Kim rejecting the sexual overtures of a polygamous Himalayan princess late in the book in favor of his reaffirming his homosocial allegiance to the Lama and the Secret Service, its tone is also much different from the tone of On the Face of the Waters. The Raj of Kim appears to be mainly a very efficient and powerful institution which maintains firm political control of India by recruiting soldiers, spies and intellectuals to do its bidding.18 By contrast, the Company-ruled India of Steel’s novel is living through a convulsive rebellion instigated largely by the deplorable cultural ignorance of Company employees and other English figures (as well as the machinations of the last Mughal emperor). The Indian characters remain largely closed-off mysteries to the English, objects of suspect loyalty, their women ranging from nautch girls to servants, innocent victims of sati rules, ignorant and uneducated, the more respectable among them confined in a deep purdah. Steel’s feminist reading of the Mutiny can be distilled from her depiction of Indian women as in need of liberation from their own repressive cultural traditions, their own vulnerability to the depredations of English Company men who are “going native.” An earlier Kipling story, “Without Benefit of Clergy” (1890), offers a gentler and more poignant treatment of miscegenation in what is nonetheless a tragic tale of doomed love across religious and national boundaries. The main character, an Englishman named Holden, maintains a

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secret relationship with a young Muslim Indian woman named Ameera in a house he owns. The house functions as a kind of Bower of Bliss, allowing Holden to hide his love from the eyes of others, Indian and English, at a time, presumably late in the nineteenth century, when Anglo-Indian sexual behavior was policed by a much larger population of memsahibs (and more vigilant Club-centered socializing) than was the case in 1858. The tale itself is a political/geographic allegory of the Great Game as well as a love story. Holden’s house is guarded by a loyal Afghan named Pir Khan, whose job metaphorically connects him with all the loyal northern races (from Ghurkas to Afghans) whose presence along with British troops at the northern reaches, the mountain passes, offers hope of some tenuous protection against the looming threat of Czarist Russia, then engaged in rapid expansion across Central Asia. It is a love story containing a political clarion call to martial vigilance and a tragic warning about the brevity of all accomplishments, whether in war or love. The birth of a son to Ameera and Holden teases us with the – ultimately doomed – prospect of a successful multiracial imperial future for India. It also dashes the hope of postponing what Ameera is convinced will be her early death and displacement by her hated rival, a nameless member of “the bold, white mem-log” whom she imagines dogging her every footstep.19 After the boy is born and named “Tota,” “the Parrot,” the story dramatizes Ameera’s increasing fears that the Bower of Bliss will be riven after death as mother and son go to a different heaven from Holden: a projection of India’s racial and cultural differences into the afterlife. Ultimately, Ameera cannot be fully happy at her moment of greatest bliss because she fears the jealousy of God (p. 238). Indeed, she even goes so far as uttering apostasy: “There is no god but thee, beloved,” she says to Holden on her deathbed (p. 243). Ameera’s fears are more than fully realized toward the end of the story when “nature” decides to “audit her accounts with a big red pencil”: English bureaucratic language for a tragic undoing of their happiness that Ameera explains in terms of personal jealousy. Her death by cholera follows closely on the heels of the loss of their son, and the end of the story sees a ferocious monsoon descend from the heavens to wash the cholera-infected land “clean” as in the story of Noah. Kipling’s tale ends with the house demolished and no sign left of its ever having been (p. 246). Here miscegenation can only be understood as a tragic choice and one that leads to sterility, albeit of a poignant variety. The lesson seems to be that the jealousy of God, provoked by miscegenistic crossing, brings a brutal judgment on the heads of those who would test it.

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Conrad’s Asian Lordship Published in 1899, Conrad’s Lord Jim is a complex novel set mainly in India and Southeast Asia. Structurally the novel is divided into two main parts: the first involves the inquiries (the official one and the unofficial one conducted by Marlow) into why the crew of the Patna abandoned ship, leaving eight hundred Muslim pilgrims on the hajj floundering pilotless in the Arabian Sea. The second concerns the central character Jim’s multiple failures to make reparation or straighten out his life after this failure until he finds himself a job as the charismatic leader of a tribe of Bugis on Borneo (“Patusan”) and ultimately dies a self-sacrificial, but tragically heroic, death at the hands of a ruthless English pirate named Gentleman Brown, whom he had mistakenly decided to trust. This latter part of the novel, which is set in Borneo, is not only a highly conventional adventure tale appropriate to the tradition of the Arabian Nights but something of a Stevensonian boys’ novel tacked on to the end of a piece of Conradian psychological fiction. The mixture appears to embed Jim’s plot in two incompatible genres, the last of which is not only highly conventional in form but loudly proclaiming its conventionality throughout, almost as if Conrad were daring his readers to be moved by a piece of cheap adventure fiction, knowing full well that they would inevitably succumb because cheap adventure fiction offers emotional compensations denied by the nagging ambiguities turned up by the multiple inquiries of the earlier parts of the novel. The critics Pathak, Sengupta and Purkayastha have summarized the fabular features of the Patusan narrative succinctly: “talismanic rings are conferred, and save; rajahs are decadent and lecherous; coffee is poisoned; clocks have stopped.”20 This Southeast Asian garden even contains a “snake” in the form of Cornelius who slithers about wherever he goes, bridging metaphorically both Arabian Nights conventions and Biblical. Moreover, Conrad slathers on layers of selfconsciousness by having Marlow himself, the narrator in the tale, remind us explicitly that we are reading a romance, as if there were a chance we would forget and be tempted to enjoy the romance in a state of blissful unselfconsciousness. “Remember,” he says at one point, “this is a love story I am telling you.”21 It is a peculiar romance nonetheless. Even Jim’s beloved Jewel seems to possess a Marlovian self-awareness, which she demonstrates when, at one point, she predicts to Marlow that Jim will leave her because “They always leave us”

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(230). It is the pronoun “they” that gives the game away: a clear sign that she sees herself living out an iterable plot familiar from welltested literary convention – she is the Oriental concubine, and desertion by her lover is a generic given. The effect is to assign to Jim’s final undoing the textualized fatedness of plot that is always already recognized as such, always already known. The Jim of the first half of the novel, who failed to live up to the inhuman expectations of the code of the sea – that he ready himself to go down with the ship – is essentially assigned a reparative plot by the narrator Marlow that takes the place of an explanation of his motives. In other words, Marlow directs Jim’s actions under the guise of explaining him. By subjecting him to a merciless inquiry in Charley’s Restaurant in the first half of the novel, Marlow is attempting an inquisitorial “putting of the question” that, as with most inquisitions, tends to produce “truths” of a sort, even if they are, as here, unsatisfactory. Indeed, Marlow’s inquiry into Jim becomes an inquiry into himself as well. As an inadvertent self-examination, it returns no good answers: Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence which, after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct, I can’t explain. You may call it an unhealthy curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to find something. Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse. (p. 43)

What Marlow’s inquisition establishes is the banal, but inadmissable, truth that Jim jumps because he is afraid and he is afraid because he is mortal. The rule requiring captain and crew to go down with their ships exists to require extraordinarily heroic behavior from very ordinary men. Moreover, to acknowledge that banal fact in public, as Brierly implicitly understands, is to endanger the system of white rule because it signifies that what Orwell calls the pukka sahib code is no longer embraced by the sahib.22 By simply inquiring in public, whites expose themselves as very ordinary, very mortal folk taking extraordinary risks. European self-examination produces no answers worth knowing because there is nothing extraordinary about whites, finally, but their tendency to excessive risk-taking and their tendency to act as if they deserved to belong to a special club, to be “one of us.” The well-examined interior produces no information worth knowing.

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Only the existence of external rules places them in a seemingly exalted social position, but even that position can only be temporary (except in adventure fiction). In deserting their beloveds, they are merely following a script. In V. G. Kiernan’s view, it is all designed to reinforce a constructed mystique of race that consists of nothing more than the familiar theatrical performance of inhuman heroism: Mystique of race was Democracy’s vulgarization of an older mystique of class … This had an insidious attraction for muddle-headed plebeians arriving from Europe, where on a larger scale classes were being drawn together in brotherly harmony by a common sensation of superiority to the lesser breeds outside; above all to plebeians from England, accustomed to breathe an air composed of oxygen, nitrogen, and snobbery.23

That Marlow finds Jim an absorbing mystery testifies to the fact that he privileges the mysterious interiority over the banal discovery that there is nothing inside but the rules, which one may follow or not. That Europeans reveal themselves to be exceptionally ordinary in everything but their choice of desertion and death is Conrad’s ultimate contribution to understanding the psychology of imperial adventure. That Jim chooses to trust Gentleman Brown at the end, thus inviting the death of Dain Waris and Jim’s own submission to execution at the hands of his father, is both a sign of his naivete and his willingness to live to the full the adventure hero’s scripted fate. Lord Jim is both absorbing Orientalist fiction and, in Jameson’s view, an exemplary metafiction that stages a process of self-defeating psychological introspection (Jameson pp. 206–280).24 While demystifying European claims to racial superiority, it also captures the centrality of racial mystique and sexual ambivalence that lay at the heart of the imperial enterprise.

Notes 1. A Passage to India attempts to balance both in its portrayal of Aziz and Fielding. 2. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), p. 118. 3. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sex and Pornography in MidNineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 266–286. 4. Steel’s was a complicated relationship with India. She has been referred to as “the female Kipling” (http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/11/09/floraannie-steel-female-kipling/). That is, she was an outspoken critic of colonial inefficiency (but not of empire) and managed to infuriate both the conventional memsahibs she often criticized in her writings and local Indian

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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authorities who were suspicious of her projects to advance the education of Indian women. Patrick Brantlinger identifies On the Face of the Waters as the novel about the British colonial world that comes closest to being a truly good war novel: Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 62. Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765 to 1858 (New York: Palgrave, 2011). Patrick Brantlinger, “Nations and Novels: Disraeli, George Eliot, and Orientalism,” Victorian Studies 35:3 (Spring 1992): pp. 255–275, p. 272; Amanda Anderson, “George Eliot and the Jewish Question,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10:1 (1997): pp. 39–61, p. 39. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, the New Crusade (London: Longman, Greene: 1880), p. 149. For a more thorough discussion of the interplay of “monogenetic” and “polygenetic” racial theories in mid-Victorian Britain, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 350–351. Brantlinger, “Nations and Novels,” p. 256. For a more thorough discussion of “race” and “hybridity” in the context of “colonial desire,” see Young, Colonial Desire. Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 7; Disraeli, Tancred, p. 253. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 35. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 838. Sarah Winter, “On the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre-George William Gordon Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web.Controversy, 1865–70,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga (accessed May 8, 2017). Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 1–15. The novel identifies the ratio of white men to memsahibs as twenty to one at the outbreak of the Mutiny; Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1896), p. 54. Steel, On the Face, p. 38. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 33. Rudyard Kipling, “Without Benefit of Clergy,” Macmillan’s Magazine (May 1, 1890): pp. 148–160, p. 232. Zakia Pathak, Saswati Sengupta and Sharmila Purkayastha, “The Prisonhouse of Orientalism,” Textual Practice 5:2 (Summer 1991): pp. 195–218, p. 212. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Jacques Berthoud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 221.

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22. Michael Greaney, “Lord Jim and Embarrassment,” Lord Jim: Centennial Essays, eds. Allen H. Simmons and J. H. Stape (Amsterdam: Editions Rudopi, 2003), pp. 1–14, pp. 8–9. 23. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 230. 24. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 194–270.

chapter 6

Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites Christopher Hutton

Introduction Aryanism pervades the Western intellectual tradition, emerging out of early modern understandings of human diversity and the engagement of European scholars with Asia, in particular Persia and then, centrally, India. While this engagement had an extensive prehistory, the definitive encounter took place within the context of colonialism, as part of a scholarly enterprise known, since Edward Said’s 1978 work, as Orientalism. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ernest Seillière defined “historical Aryanism,” exemplified by the work of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), as “a philosophy of history which attributes the moral and material advances of humanity more or less exclusively to the influence of the Aryan race.”1 In the interwar period, Frank Hankins glossed Aryanism as “historically the most influential doctrine of racial superiority” and included among its derivatives “Celticism in France, Teutonism in Germany and Anglo-Saxonism in England and America.” He noted presciently that Aryanism “metamorphoses, but it never dies.”2 Today, in the popular imaginary, Aryanism connotes above all Nazism and its vision of a superior “Aryan race,” as well as the white supremacism of the Aryan Brotherhood and similar far-right fringe groups. In addition to its equivalents in European languages (Arier, aryen, aryjski, ario, etc.) and the various etymological readings of the Sanskrit arya (e.g. “noble” or “pure”), Aryan is part of a complex field of overlapping terms. These include Japhetic, Caucasian, Teutonic, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, Homo europaeus, Germanic, Indo-Germanic, Indo-European or, simply, white, along with ideological movements or tendencies such as AngloSaxonism, Teutonism, Nordicism, Germanism or Germanicism (especially as a translation of Germanentum), and Pan-Germanicism (Pan-Germanentum). Aryanism also has a cultic twin, Ariosophy,3 an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic offshoot of theosophical Orientalism. The ariosophist Guido List (1848– 1919) preferred the term Ario-Germanen, since he found Deutsch too constraining.4 117

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European conceptions of peoples and their lineages took as their point of departure the “Mosaic triad” of the sons of Noah, namely Shem, Ham and Japhet (Genesis 10). According to the most popular reading, Japhet was understood to be the ancestor of modern Europeans, Shem of the Semites, and Ham of the Africans. Different moral qualities tended to be attributed to these branches, and there were arguments about whether a people and its language were “original” or “primitive” (in a positive sense) or were merely derivative. The extraordinary depth and complexity of this Biblical framework emerges from Arno Borst’s multivolume intellectual history.5 The early modern period saw discourses involving “legitimizing histories and myths which gave larger, usually politically significant, groups of people rights to their status, to their territory or to other privileges.”6 This Biblical model began to break down in the course of the eighteenth century, though this was an uneven (and unfinished) process. The notion of an intimate family history of mankind could no longer be sustained, especially given new understandings of the age of earth, and evidence of the range and historical depth of the world’s cultures. The etymological arguments used to ground genealogical speculation came to be seen as unsystematic and fanciful. Yet the Biblical framework provided a conceptual model that persists to this day. “Etymological thinking,” with its key template of the genealogical tree,7 remains fundamental to identity theorizing today. The Biblical notion of Volk (ethnos) as a collectivity sharing a common lineage, language and territory became the default setting of global modernity.8 The terms Semitic and Hamitic are still used in academic linguistics. Japhetic, after being replaced by Indo-Germanic and Aryan, is now referred to as Indo-European. Indo-Aryan is used to refer to the South Asian branch of Indo-European.9

Aryanism and the German Intellectuals The Aryan paradigm has its political origins in the struggle for German nationhood in the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789) and during the Napoleonic era (1799–1815). The Napoleonic order represented the first modernizing empire, in that it imposed by conquest Enlightenment notions of citizenship and the rule of law, symbolized in the emancipation of the Jews. The effect on the intelligentsia of German states was traumatic. One early response came in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) lyric epic Hermann und Dorothea.10 It is set in 1795 or 1796 in the area of Mainz, where refugees fleeing French revolutionary troops have crossed the Rhine to seek safety. The story concerns the love of a wealthy innkeeper’s

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son, Hermann, for a maid, Dorothea, a match opposed by Herman’s father. The natural order and enduring relation to soil of the German rural world is juxtaposed to the chaos and deracination that characterizes the French Revolution and its aftermath. Images of continuity and rootedness are expressed in terms of ownership and possession, both individual and at the level of the collectivity, the nation: “This is mine! You are mine. And now what is mine is more mine than ever.”11 A second key text in the response to the Napoleonic conquest was J. G. Fichte’s (1762–1814) lectures, delivered in the winter of 1807–1808 in Berlin under French occupation. One of the founding texts of European nationalism, the lectures represent an aggressive assertion of cultural particularism, with the German nation seen as united internally by a common language and a common way of thinking and sharply enough distinguished from other peoples to protect itself from foreign influence or attack.12 Fichte’s initial response to the French Revolution had come in 1793, in the form of work aiming to rectify “public judgments on the French Revolution.” According to Fichte, Jews were spreading throughout the European countries in the form of “a powerful state with a hostile mentality,” one which exists “in a continual state of war” with their citizens.13 German nationalism suppresses at the very outset the problem of internal difference within the Volk.14 In the absence of a political state, a fictive unity of language, lineage and culture was projected onto an imperial jumble of principalities and fiefdoms,15 and a population that lacked a common mutually intelligible vernacular, even between those that spoke some form of (what we would now refer to as) German. Experience of French colonization entrenched a form of aggressive Romantic particularism, which associated constitutionalism and modernity with the European Jews. If an enduring relationship between soil, lineage, language and culture is a key to modern nationalism, then anti-Semitism is its inevitable correlate. Interacting with this Romantic nationalism-before-the-nation was European Orientalist scholarship, arising with new authority out of British colonial engagement with India. Schwab celebrates what he referred to as an “Oriental Renaissance – a second Renaissance,” an intellectual revival “brought about by the arrival of Sanskrit texts in Europe,” which produced an effect equal to “that produced in the fifteenth century by the arrival of Greek manuscripts and Byzantine commentators after the fall of Constantinople.”16 The key figures are Sir William Jones (1746– 1794) and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). Said likewise locates the origins of Orientalism in the late eighteenth century,

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which, in his well-known Foucaultian framing, he defines as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” It is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”17 The logic of this position is that the animating intentions and academic propositions of colonial scholarship are secondary in relation to the political and intellectual structures of domination themselves.18 Islamophilia and Islamophobia are ultimately two sides of the same Foucaultian coin. What is distinctive in the late eighteenth century is the increasingly formalized imperial presence in India. In the preface to his Persian grammar, Jones noted that “the excellent writings of Greece and Rome” were “studied by every man of liberal education,” whereas the works of the Persians, “a nation equally distinguished in ancient history,” were either unknown or “considered as entirely destitute of taste and invention.” Lamenting the lack of support given to humanistic studies, Jones remarked on the importance of Persian and other “languages of Asia” now that that the British had “most extensive power” in India.19 In the same year, Anquetil-Duperron published his pioneering three-volume translation of the Zend-Avesta.20 Anquetil-Duperron is apparently the modern source of the term Ariens, as a rendering of arioi from Herodotos (c. 484–c. 425 BCE), rendered into German as Arier by Johann Kleuker (1749–1827) as a synonym for Persians or Medes (Medians).21 The conventional starting point for the modern Aryan paradigm is the proclamation by Sir William Jones that Sanskrit was “of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,” yet it bore to these languages “a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident.” This affinity was so pronounced that “no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source,” and this affinity likely extended to include Celtic, Gothic and Old Persian. Rather than anticipating the modern Indo-European hypothesis, Jones described the “immemorial affinity” of the Hindus with the “old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians.”22 Iran was the “central country” of humanity, where the three branches of humanity with “the three primitive languages” must have first concentrated.23 Jones did not use the term Aryan.24 He was working within a variant of the Biblical paradigm, within which there was long-standing

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recognition of similarities between Asian and European languages,25 traceable back to the so-called Scythian hypothesis.26 Jones did not associate Japhet with the Europeans, however.27 Through its reception by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803),28 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and others, colonial scholarship triggered the ensuing “Indomania.” This became a feature of German, even more than English or French, Romanticism, with Georg Forster’s 1791 rendering of Jones’ Sakuntala translation becoming an enormous hit among the German literati.29 In Paris from 1802 to 1804, Schlegel studied Persian and Sanskrit in a milieu which included Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (1773–1832) and the detainee naval officer Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824). He turned his back on the modern city in order to penetrate the mysteries of ancient India.30 The result was his influential Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier.31 It was also Schlegel who generalized the term Arier and applied it to the ancestors of the Germans, thereby making the key conceptual link between German nationalism and Orientalism.32 Schlegel’s concern was with the historical grounding and lineage of the German Volk, and he is the true founder of the Aryan paradigm in its modern, ideological sense. Aryanism represents an act of imaginative inclusion, the paralleling of ancient India with classical Europe by Orientalist scholars and the positioning of ancient India as a point of origin. But this inclusion was primarily the appropriation of a set of texts and an associated language. This period shows the origins of “revolutionary anti-Semitism,” within which ideas of German national liberation and salvation were inextricably bound up with mistrust and hostility toward the European Jews.33 As in Said’s model, the distinction between liberal assimilationism (under which Jews would be granted civic equality but in the expectation that this would lead to their disappearance as a distinct social group) and eliminationist hostility is less significant than the discursive framework within which Jews became the subject of particular forms of scrutiny. Jews were imagined as a problem, a project, or as the potential recipients of toleration. As a discourse of historical rootedness, Schlegel’s project was beset with ambiguity. The vision of ancient texts produced at the dawn of civilization in a location distant in time and place from the banal here-and-now produced an aura of mystery and power. But it raised the questions of how the link between that ancient and esoteric past and the present might be drawn, what kind of narrative was required to bridge these two worlds and who those ancient people were in relation to the Germans in the present. The Aryan model was intrinsically unstable, caught between newer Romantic theories whereby it was authentic rootedness that gave

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possession of territory and the older ex oriente lux paradigm, which saw human civilization as originating in the East (generally in China or Egypt) and diffusing westward. The rise of what became the Indo-European model in comparative-historical linguistics pushed languages like Chinese to the extreme margins and triggered a century and a half of futile speculation into where, between India and Europe, the Indo-European homeland or “Aryan paradise” (to use Max Müller’s revealing phrase34) had been located and what the religious and cultural characteristics of this people had been.35

Aryans and Semites in the Mid-Nineteenth Century In the period from 1830 to 1870, the Aryan paradigm stabilized, with the definitive inclusion of the Celtic languages as part of the Indo-European language family.36 Terminological uncertainty remained, with the Norwegian Indologist Christian Lassen (1800–1876) complaining of “unhistorical” terms like japhetisch and kaukasich and awkward compounds like Indo-Germanisch. While the name of the people that had settled vast areas of the earth was now lost, Lassen argued that Aryan was the most suitable, since it had been used by the Indians and the ancient Persians and was worthy of the warlike Germanic tribes. Lassen cited a passage from Tacitus’ Germania, where the term Arii was used for one of the tribes.37 While Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines38 has become notorious for its promotion of Aryan superiority and its association of miscegenation with decline, that very notoriety has obscured the depth of chauvinism in the scholarly mainstream. The Swiss linguist Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875) evoked “a people [race] destined by providence to dominate the entire globe,” one distinguished by the “beauty of its bloodline” (“beauté de sang”) and “gifts of intelligence.”39 The number of frameworks that addressed the concept of Aryan, or were relevant to it, proliferated. The Biblical three-branch model of humanity retained a presence in the nineteenth century but increasingly in an extraacademic context.40 Joseph Bosworth (1788–1876) enumerated the languages spoken by the “Japhetic race,” with its presumptive “seat” or origin being, according to some, near Mount Caucasian, according to others, with “an Indian origin.” Shemitic or Semitic languages included Hebrew (Chaldee, Syriac), Arabic, Aramaean, etc.41 Nineteenth-century “Germanic philology” (germanische Philologie) combined prehistory, history, law, folklore, mythology, literary history and the Germanic languages in their historical and geographical variation. Its primary exponent, Jacob

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Grimm (1785–1863), extolled the rise of the “indogermanische Sprache,” a chain of languages which stretched from Asia to Europe, to its position as “the most powerful tongue in the world.”42 However, for the new discipline of comparative historical linguistics, linguistic form, and not the text, was the primary object of study. The founding work of this new, systematic linguistics is often taken to be Franz Bopp’s (1791–1867) 1816 work of comparative-historical grammar.43 The aim was to construct an authoritative internal account of the origin and history of languages, understood as autonomous objects, through the application of the newly rigorous historical-comparative method. Increasingly, authentic data from attested speech forms was preferred to textual or written evidence, a clear break from the philological tradition. The effect of this method was to further complicate debates about categories such as Aryan and, in the colonial context, to introduce a form of identity engineering through its application to superficially “raw” or “unclassified” linguistic terrain. In India, British colonial linguistics articulated the distinction between Aryan and Dravidian, thereby creating a fundamental divide in the Indian subcontinent. While the distinction had a complex prehistory,44 it became salient with the publications of Robert Caldwell (1814–1891).45 From a Foucaultian perspective, colonial linguistics brought the distinction into being, by abstracting away from the beliefs, practices and metalinguistic cultures of the Indians themselves.46 Midcentury saw the rise of what came to be referred to as “Aryan invasion theory” (AIT), a narrative with a simple set of tropes: a superior invader, entering the territory of present-day India from the northwest, conquered an indigenous people. That conquest led to a flowering of a highly advanced civilization, but eventually the elite interbred with the inferior indigenous population, and this led to decadence and decline. The “Aryan conquest” is generally dated to around 1500 BCE, but every detail of this theory has been the subject of intense debate, and it remains a matter of intellectual controversy in India.47 Hindu nationalist scholarship rejects the notion of an Aryan invasion as a colonial construct.48 The discourse of autochthonous Aryans is likewise found in present-day Iranian scholarship.49 The effect of British colonialism in India was ultimately to entrench Sanskrit as the authentically indigenous classical language and, with the destruction of the Mughal court, to marginalize Persian and Arabic.50 In tracking the metamorphoses of Aryan, a complex set of problem are posed by the term race. With its cognates across the European languages, it requires historically informed readings and careful translation. Related and overlapping terms in English include people, folk and nation; these, together

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with terms in French (race, peuple, nation), German (Rasse, Volk, Nation) and other European languages, resonate with Latin gens and natio, Greek ethnos, and Hebrew am and goi. A central turning point is the rise of biological understandings of human diversity, in the form of racial anthropology. Scientific race theory has its origins in the late eighteenth century, with the studies of comparative human anatomy.51 In the mid-1840s, Andres Retzius (1796–1860) introduced the terminological opposition crucial to later Aryanism (and Nordicism) between dolicelaphic (“longskulled”) and brachycephalic (“short-skulled”); Paul Broca (1824–1880) coined the key anthropometric term cephalic index.52 At the mid-century mark, the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox (1793–1862) declared that “race is everything in human history.”53 Darwinian theory affirmed the biological unity of the human species; most radically, it suggested that the deep structures of human nature were to be understood primarily in evolutionary terms.54 In 1859, Broca founded the Société d’anthropologie de Paris; the Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863, breaking away from the Ethnological Society. This marks the beginning of a proliferation of learned societies (or sections thereof), academic journals and museum collections under the banner of anthropology, i.e. racial anthropology.55 In Germany, the ascent of Darwinism led to a mixed response, as evolutionary theory interacted with a line of Romantic biology leading from Goethe to Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) and Ernst Haeckel (1834– 1919).56 This tradition increasingly rejected what was seen as the biological materialism of the Darwinian model. A further disciplinary innovation was the development of a selfconsciously liberal Völkerpsychologie, associated with the Humboldtians Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899). Völkerpsychologie, it has been argued, represents the origins of modern cultural anthropology.57 The key concept was Volksgeist. This could be deployed in a liberal humanist spirit, in the sense that each Volk was understood to have its own culture and values, or be appropriated for the essentialization of difference, where, for example, the Semitic spirit was opposed to the Aryan (as in the phrase arischer Geist).58 Most significantly, the period saw articulation of the Aryan–Semite dichotomy and its gradual entrenchment in the social imaginary and literary controversies of educated Europeans.59 Two towering figures in this regard were Ernest Renan (1823–1892) and Max Müller (1823– 1900), during whose long and complex careers tensions between Romanticism and modernity, political liberalism and chauvinism, were played out. Both Müller and Renan took as their starting

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point the framework of comparative philology but understood it as a modern, progressive, forward-looking enterprise.60 Renan shared with Völkerpsychologie the understanding that belonging to a community was a subjective psychological act,61 but his work is associated with the elaboration of detailed stereotypes or national mentalities, notably his much-cited view of the limitations of the Semitic mind.62 Renan’s famous essay on the definition of nation should be understood as an attempt, late in his scholarly career, to deal with the insuperable definitional problems raised by the new racial framework and with the consequent disciplinary split between anthropology, understood as a “zoological” approach, and historical philology. When Renan denied that a nation could be defined racially and argued that there were no pure races, this was entirely in accord with the developing views of racial anthropologists (though not with popular racism).63 Müller’s thinking underwent a similar process. His Aryanist evocation of kinship between Indians and Europeans was a continuation of Biblical universalism, framed within paternalistic colonialism and reflecting a Romantic conception of human diversity and set of fantasy projections back onto the deep past.64 Müller made an unpopular defense of kinship between the Indians and their British rulers, namely that the same blood ran in the veins of English soldier and the “dark Bengalese”: “Though the historian may shake his head, though the physiologist may doubt, and the poet scorn the idea, all must yield before the facts furnished by language.” In ancient prehistory, “the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the Slaves, the Greeks and Italians, the Persians and Hindus” had lived “under the same roof,” separated from “the ancestors of the Semites and Turanians.”65 On this point, he had met with incredulity that “there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India.”66 This framework was disrupted by the rise of biological understandings of race. Having argued for the existence of an Aryan race (in the Biblical sense, i.e. Volk), Müller backtracked, accepting that there was no communality of blood between speakers of the Aryan languages,67 i.e. no racial community in the modern anthropological sense: “Needless to say, his retraction went largely unnoticed, and the history books recorded the earlier Max Müller who, for a quarter of a century, had contributed to the idea of a common racial Aryan ancestry based on a common Aryan tongue.”68 But Müller’s new position was in line with racial anthropology. If language were not a diagnostic of peoplehood, there was no way to construct a historical narrative in relation to terms like Celtic, German and Aryan. Müller sought to disassociate himself from the

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use of philology for racist ends and from theories of polygenesis that invoked language; yet, ironically, the later drawing of a sharp distinction between language and race meant that there could be no kinship between the “English soldier” and the “dark Bengalese”: “To me an ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.”69 Renan made an almost identical statement.70 No racial anthropologist in Nazi Germany would have disagreed. The period from 1830 to 1870 saw the articulation of a series of powerful dichotomies: between the true Aryan and the modern-day Indian; between the conquering Aryan and the indigenous Dravidian; and between the Aryan and the Semite. These dichotomies drew on and were sustained by the methodologies of historical-comparative linguistics, so that any framework that brought together a Semitic and an Indo-European language,71 or Chinese and Indo-European,72 fell outside accepted scholarly norms. Racial anthropology destabilized and in part dismantled these oppositions, which lived on in popular racism, without providing a clear and unambiguous counter-narrative. Toward the close of the century, the science of race increasingly adopted the anti-Semitism of the Aryan paradigm.

Conclusion Aryanism ultimately was defined in opposition to the Semitic, which, with the rise of European nationalism, meant that Jews became the Orient within. The opposition between Aryans and Semites arose from the reinscription of the Biblical paradigm onto nineteenth-century Europe.73 This opposition was established and deeply entrenched in the popular and scholarly imaginary before the full institutionalization of racial anthropology. Post-Darwinian racial anthropology never recognized the existence of an Aryan race, nor a Jewish race for that matter. There were Aryan peoples (Völker) but no Aryan race (arische Rasse), just as the Jews were a Volk not a Rasse. The term anti-Semitism is revealing in this respect. Modern European anti-Semitism has its origins in the discourses of Volk, in the idea that Jews were a people whose relationship to territory, culture, language was unnatural, whose “spirit” (Geist) was radically alien and whose presence as the potentially equal citizens of the European states was profoundly troubling. This was particularly the case in Germany, whose imagined ethnolinguistic unity was shown to be fictive by the new science of racial anthropology. The Aryan paradigm posed the question of how to understand the relationships within and among peoples, given the

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range of intersecting criteria (archeological, historical, territorial, racial, cultural, linguistic, etc.). In the late nineteenth century, the answer came in the form of a rising panic, the sense that whatever congruities had existed were being elided by urbanization, migration and miscegenation. Both racial anthropology and comparative linguistics were part of a wider revolt by disciplinary specialists against the philological tradition. A term like Aryan therefore might be used within the philological framework to refer to the history, languages and cultures of the Aryan peoples, within anthropology to refer to a physical type or within the new comparativist linguistics as the label for an abstract language family, i.e. a set of formal linguistic relationships. It also took on a wide range of meanings in the sphere of popular science. By 1900, the term race had at least four distinguishable applications within scholarly discourse: (i) a generic term for people, nation or Volk; (ii) humanity, as in the phrase “the human race” (Menschenrasse); (iii) a particular “breeding population” understood as a biological collective (as in the German term for eugenics, Rassenhygiene, or “race hygiene”); (iv) anthropological race (as studied in racial anthropology or Rassenkunde). The Volk/Rasse distinction was an established part of mainstream academic discourse.74 But it was also the key to a critique of the European nation state, seen as a social form that obscured underlying racial and class realities.75 An influential figure in this regard was the “anthropo-sociologist” Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936).76 The term race also had a range of extra-academic and popular science usages, including Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical concept of the “Aryan root race” with its various “sub-races.”77 The use of the term Aryan race in English-language sources as shorthand for Nazi ideology is now so entrenched as to be impervious to the textual evidence, not least the writings produced by radical-right ideologues, völkisch scholars and racial anthropologists between 1900 and 1944.78 In Nazi Germany, the German term arisch (“Aryan”) was not used in collocation with Rasse (“race”) but only with Volk (“people”). While it is a key term in Mein Kampf,79 and Nazism drew powerfully on Aryanism – the use of the swastika is iconic of fascist Orientalism – official doctrine did not sanction the use of arisch as a strictly racial term. The anthropologist Karl Saller (1902–1969) was dismissed from his teaching post in Göttingen for promoting the term deutsche Rasse (“German race”), and a similar fate would have befallen any professor lecturing on the superior qualities of the arische Rasse (“Aryan race”). This is not a mere matter of terminology. The proposed lineage of Nazism that foregrounds reactionary Aryanism, the aristocratic pessimist Gobineau and an exotic Orientalist philology

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occludes the powerful modernizing discourses that flow into Nazism, including the self-consciously modern (and often politically liberal) science of race, evolutionary theory, eugenics, modern linguistics and mainstream European ethnic nationalism.80 This focus on Orientalism and Aryanism has obscured a key historical insight: Jews did not assimilate into European modernity. They were its cocreators, not an Oriental “other” within it.

Notes 1. Ernest Seillière, Le comte de Gobineau et l’aryanisme historique (Paris: Plon, 1903), p. 1. 2. Frank Hankins, The Racial Basis of Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1926), pp. 6–7, p. 23. 3. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: Tauris, 2004). 4. Guido List, Die Bilderschrift der Ario-Germanen (Leipzig: Steinacker, 1910), p. 1. 5. Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker, 4 vols. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1995). 6. Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 148. 7. Mary Bouquet, “Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996): pp. 43–66. 8. See Josef Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954). 9. Colin Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herrmann und Dorothea (Berlin: Vieweg, 1797). 11. Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea, p. 87. 12. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1808), p. 409. 13. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (Danzig: Ferdinand Troschel, 1793), p. 190. 14. Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 163ff. 15. Suzanne Zantop, Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770– 1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 16. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [1950]), p. 11. 17. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 11.

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18. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 19. William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: Richardson, 1771), p. ii, p. xi. 20. Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil-Duperron, Zend-Avesta: Ouvrage de Zoroastre, contenant les idées théologiques, physiques et morales de ce législateur … (Paris: Tilliard, 1771). 21. Johann Kleuker, Anhang zum Zend-Avesta, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1781– 83), 2: p. 141. See Hans Siegert, “Zur Geschichte der Begriffe ‘Arier’ und ‘arisch,’” Wörter und Sachen: Zeitschrift für indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, Volksforschung und Kulturgeschichte 4 (1941/1942), pp. 73–99; Dorothy Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (Albany: SUNY, 1994), p. 139; Tuska Benes, “From Indo-Germans to Aryans: Philology and the Racialization of Salvationist National Rhetoric, 1806–30,” in The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany: SUNY, 2006), pp. 167–181, p. 175. 22. Sir William Jones, “On the Hindus: The Third Anniversary Discourse,” in The Works of Sir William Jones (London: Robinson, 1799), 2: pp. 19–34, p. 26, p. 34. 23. Sir William Jones, “Discourse the Ninth on the Origin and Families of Nations,” in The Works of Sir William Jones (London: Robinson, 1799), 1: pp. 128–142, p. 132. 24. Christopher Hutton, “Fictions of Affinity and the Aryan Paradigm,” in WortMacht-Stamm: Rassismums und Determinismus in der Philologie, eds. Markus Messling and Ottmar Ette (Munich: Fink, 2013), pp. 89–103. 25. See John Cleland, The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things … (London: Davis and Reymers, 1766). 26. See Maurice Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel,” History and Theory 33 (1994): pp. 5–25. 27. Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin W. Lewis, The Indo-European Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 19ff. 28. A. Leslie Wilson, “Herder and India: The Genesis of a Mythical Image,” Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association 70 (1955): pp. 1049–1058. 29. Georg Forster, Sakontala, oder, Der entscheidende Ring: ein indisches Schauspiel Kālidāsa (Mainz: Fischer, 1791); Romila Thapar, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 30. Michael Dusche, “German Romantics Imagining India: Friedrich Schlegel in Paris and Roots of Ethnic Nationalism in Europe,” Goethezeit-Portal FORUM: Postkoloniale Arbeiten / Postcolonial Studies (2001). Available at www.goethezeitportal.de. 31. Friedrich Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Altertumskunde (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808). 32. Friedrich Schlegel, “Über J. G. Rhode: Über den Anfang unserer Geschichte,” Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 8 (1819): pp. 413–468; Chen Toref-Ashkenazi, Der romantische Mythos vom Ursprung der Deutschen. Friedrich Schlegel’s Suche

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

christopher hutton nach der indogermanischen Verbindung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009); Markus Messling, Gebeugter Geist. Rassenlogik und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie. Studien zu Frankreich, Deutschland und Italien (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016). Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Friedrich Max Müller, Biographies of Words and the Home of Aryas (London: Longmans, 1888), p. 127. Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). James Prichard, Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1831); Adolphe Pictet, De l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit (Paris: Duprat, 1837). Christian Lassen, “Über Herrn Professor Bopps grammatisches System der Sanskritsprache,” Indische Bibliothek 3 (1830): pp. 1–113, p. 70fn. This term has a variant, Harii. It was rendered Arians in Thomas Gordon’s translation: The Works of Tacitus, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1753), p. 61. Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 2 vols. (Didot: Paris, 1853–1855). Adolphe Pictet, Les origines indo-européennes ou les aryas primitifs, 2 vols. (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1859), 1: p. 1. John Wilson, Our Israelitish Origin: Lectures on Ancient Israel, and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe (London: Nisbet, 1840). Joseph Bosworth, A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (London: Longman, 1838), p. vii. Jacob Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (Berlin: Dümmler, 1858), p. 10. Franz Bopp, Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Andreäsche Buchhandlung, 1816). Frances Ellis, “Note to the Introduction,” in Alexander Duncan Campbell, Grammar of the Teloogoo Language (Madras: College Press, 1816); Thomas Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (London: Harrison, 1856). To argue otherwise, one needs to believe that languages pre-exist their reification in linguistic description. See Roy Harris, The Language Myth (London: Duckworth, 1981). Romila Thapar, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Madhav M. Deshpande and Shareen Ratnagar, India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007). Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakadan, Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (Bophal: Amaryllis, 2011).

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49. Jahanshah Derakhshani, Die Arier in den nahöstlichen Quellen des 3. und 2. Jahrtausends v. Chr. Grundzüge der Vor- und Frühgeschichte Irans, 2nd edn. (Teheran: International Publications of Iranian Studies, 1998). For a contrasting view, see Aalireza Asgharzadeh, Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles (Berlin: Springer, 2007). 50. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (New York: Vintage, 2006). 51. Johann Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate native (Göttingen, 1775). 52. Claude Blanckaert, De la race á l’évolution. Paul Broca et l’anthropologie française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), pp. 209ff. 53. Robert Knox, The Races of Men (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), p. 14. 54. Thomas Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863). 55. Uwe Hossfeld, Geschichte der biologischen Anthropologie in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), pp. 167ff. 56. Robert Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 57. Ivan Kalmar, “The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): pp. 671–690. 58. Albrecht Wirth, Geschichte Asiens und Osteuropas (Halle: GebauerSchwetschke, 1905), p. 75. 59. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Geoffrey Nash, “Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’s Quest for the Religion of Modernity,” Religion and Literature 46:1 (2014): pp. 1–27. 60. See Dora Bierer, “Renan and His Interpreters: A Study in French Intellectual Warfare,” The Journal of Modern History 25 (1953): pp. 375–389. 61. Egbert Klautke, The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851– 1955 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), p. 42. 62. While Renan was using the term race in the sense of Volk, it is odd to acquit him on that account of racism, as if the only truly problematic discourse of difference is biological. See Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1855), pp. 4–5; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology,” Representations 106 (2009): pp. 34–62. Why “culturalism” is less toxic than racism based on biology is never explained (see discussion in Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, p. 107). 63. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? 2nd ed. (Paris: Lévy, 1882). 64. Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 15–16. 65. Friedrich Max Müller, The Languages of the Seat of War in the East, 2nd ed. (London: Williams and Nortgate, 1855), pp. 29–30. 66. Friedrich Max Müller, India: What Can it Teach Us? (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), p. 28.

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67. Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994), p. 144. 68. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 33. 69. Friedrich Max Müller, Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), p. 120. 70. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, p. 16. 71. Thomas Stratton, The Affinity between the Hebrew Language and the Celtic (Edinburgh: MacLachan and Stewart, 1872). 72. Joseph Edkins, China’s Place in Philology: An Attempt to Show that the Languages of Europe and Asia Have a Common Origin (London: Trübner, 1871). 73. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009 [1992]). 74. Heymann Steinthal, “Dialekt, Sprache, Volk, Staat, Rasse,” in Festschrift für Adolf Bastian zu seinem 70. Geburtstage (Berlin: Reimer, 1896), pp. 47–51. 75. Josef Ludwig Reimer, Ein pangermanisches Deutschland (Berlin: Luckhardt, 1905), pp. 39ff. 76. George Vacher de Lapouge, L’aryen: son rôle social (Paris: Fontemoing, 1899). 77. Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 2 vols. (New York: Theosophical University Press, 1888). 78. Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). 79. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. (München: Eher Verlag, 1925–1926). 80. Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Race, Mother-Tongue Fascism and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999).

chapter 7

Orientalism and the Bible Ivan Kalmar

It has become something of a cliché that the “western discourse” that Edward W. Said labeled “orientalism,”1 which included scholarship about an area labeled the “Orient,” regarded the Orient as the West’s “Other.” However, it was a crucial fact for both scholarly and popular Orientalism that the Orient contained the homeland of the Bible. This was because the Bible is the defining document of Christianity, and Christianity the defining document of the West. Hence the Orient was regarded as much as the Mother as the Other by Orientalists in the nineteenth century, which saw the spectacular rise of biblical philology, a discipline that regarded the Bible as an Oriental document: the product of the Oriental mind. The very concept of an Oriental mind, in fact, owed its modern essence to biblical philology. And yet, the central role of the Bible in Orientalism has often been overlooked and sometimes actively denied. My major task is to suggest some ways to begin to restore biblical concerns to their due place in the historiography of Orientalism.

Edward Said and Raymond Schwab As I will suggest at the end of the chapter, there is no contradiction between Orientalism’s biblical concerns and its imperialist implications, which were Said’s focus. Studying Orientalism’s biblical connection can, in fact, help us to understand it better as a colonial discourse. Yet while Said did repeatedly refer to biblical study by Orientalist scholars, as will be seen in some of the references that follow, on the whole he left the topic aside, in spite of its overwhelming presence in the archive. Why? It may be that Said’s neglect of the biblical dimension of Orientalism was due to his reading of Raymond Schwab’s book The Oriental Renaissance. The work first appeared in French in 1950.2 Said made about a dozen references to it in Orientalism and then wrote an admiring 133

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preface to the English edition of 1984.3 What Schwab meant by “Renaissance”4 was a surge of interest in India and the farther East, which he dated to the “discovery” and translation of the Zoroastrian holy scriptures, the Zend Avesta, by Abraham Hyacinthe AnquetilDuperron, in 1771. The “heroic age” of this “Renaissance” lasted until 1875, which, Schwab wrote, “seems a kind of boundary line after which few, if any, important revelations occurred in the regions that concern me.”5 The basic tenet pursued by Schwab is that the “oriental renaissance” was occasioned by the discovery of holy scriptures other than the Bible. Until Anquetil presented the Zend Avesta to the West, Schwab believes, the Orient was seen merely as an exotic oddity: The strangeness it offered at small cost produced an entire Orient of sofas and erotic and satiric masques that only too often encouraged literary history to frolic in shabby exoticism.6

This changed radically once the West discovered that the Bible was not the only holy scripture available to humanity. With the establishment of oriental studies an entirely new meaning was introduced for the word “mankind.” . . . For so long only Mediterranean, humanism began to be global when the scientific reading of Avestan and Sanskrit scripts unlocked innumerable unsuspected scriptures.7

Yet Schwab was aware that in the Western consciousness there had already been, even before the discovery of non-biblical holy writs, not only the exotically frivolous Orient but also what he called the “Orient of the Bible.” The Orient of the Bible had not ceased to exist in the life of Christian nations, but its complexion and its title would change. On the one hand its imagery, which made Voltaire smile, excited the imagination as it had not done since the poets of the Reformation. This was thanks to Chateaubriand and Herder, and to new interpretations which, in England and in Germany, established the Holy Scripture as a department of great primitive poetry, serving as a model for, and a virtual challenge to, learned poetry.8

However, in Schwab’s view, the Orientalist approaches to the Bible, which led theologians to seek answers to questions about the Bible in the related literatures of other, mostly Semitic-speaking, peoples, eventually caused scholars and other writers to move on. They were able to free the study of the Orient, and indeed the study of the world’s cultural heritage, from the biblical baggage of the past:

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A newcomer, Assyriology, seriously challenged exegesis; nothing so critical of scriptural authority had previously appeared, not even with Richard Simon or Jean Astruc. The innovators themselves had started on the trail of lost scriptures solely to nourish theological controversy. All the discoveries of scriptures issued from this battle over Scripture. But although they totally changed the notion of the world and the shape of history, biblical studies, which had been the point of departure, lost the initiative for advance. . . . Hebrew was eclipsed by cuneiform.9

“All the discoveries of scriptures issued from this battle over Scripture.” Richard Simon (1638–1712) is one of the early figures in what would be later called the “higher criticism” movement in biblical philology. He was probably best known for his insistence, in his Critical History of the Old Testament, that Moses could not have been the author of all the texts that were attributed to him.10 Jean Astruc (1684–1766) similarly examined the Bible with the methods of literary analysis but came to the conclusion that Moses did write all the texts whose authorship Simon had disputed. There is no doubt that the scholars who discovered new holy scriptures farther east had developed their thinking within the context of this effort to open up the Bible (and with it Christianity) to scientific philological inquiry. However, Schwab’s notion that thereby biblical studies were “eclipsed” is open to challenge. The Indologists and Persianists of the long eighteenth century were, for the most part, fervent Christians. As they studied nonbiblical Oriental religions, their motivation continued to be their concern about the comparative value and validity of the Bible. They sought not to supplant the Bible but to affirm it as part of a universal religious truth. This universal truth was demonstrated by the non-biblical Oriental scriptures as well as the Bible. Indeed, though Schwab devotes almost his whole book to discussing how India and the Far East have caused the West to change beyond the influence of the Bible, at the end of The Oriental Renaissance he does acknowledge that the “oriental Renaissance” was about a “dialogue of creeds.”11 Romantic Orientalism, which was inspired by and probably inspired much of the philological work of the higher criticism, had the avowed goal of maintaining religious faith by reference to non-Christian religions. For understanding this extremely important and pervasive aspect of nineteenth-century thought, Emily Shaffer’s Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem (1980) remains indispensable. Referring not only to Coleridge but also to his contemporaries among English-, French- and Germanspeaking authors, and their use of biblical philology, Shaffer suggests that they worked from two premises:

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ivan kalmar The first premise, that criticism could not shirk bringing the Biblical accounts under the rational scrutiny of the new natural philosophy, had originated in a scathing attack from rationalists, deists, and sceptics on the whole range of supernatural claims made by and for the Bible. The second premise, that the Bible is to be approached like any other literary text, entailed the freedom to amend the “Holy Spirit” by establishing an accurate text, sifting the historical sources, questioning the traditional ascriptions of authorship and date, scrutinizing the formation of the canon, and comparing the Scriptures coolly with the sacred and secular writings of other nations. The significance of this procedure, whether or not it was openly stated in any given case, was simply the abandonment of the claim that the Bible is “inspired.”

At the same time, however, the literary treatment of the Bible opened the way to a new apologetics of free-thinking theism, which was to salvage Christianity until very nearly the end of the Victorian era. It has been said that the higher criticism abolished traditional apologetics, only to establish a new apologetics vis-à-vis the Enlightenment.12 Here Shaffer’s analysis resembles at first sight that of Said, whose Orientalism appeared only two years earlier. Said wrote that anyone who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language was a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to Europe a sense of the holy mission it had now lost. . . . No less than Schlegel, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand, Auguste Comte – like Bouvard13 – was the adherent and proponent of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian.14

There is, however, one important difference between Said and Shaffer. Shaffer recognized that the “post-secular Enlightenment myth” was not necessarily secular: often it was explicitly and deliberately Christian, in much more than its outlines. Nor was this simply an assertion, as Schwab would have it, of a multifaith “dialogue of creeds.” For the avowed unity of Christianity and non-biblical Eastern religions was meant to be on Christian terms, affirming the superiority of Christianity while also espousing admirable features of Oriental religions. The research of similarities between Christian and other texts was in fact affirmed by many missionaries. William Jones noted that some, pointing out what they thought were similarities between the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti of Brahma, Krishna and Vishnu, suggested to Hindus that they were already “almost Christians.” Jones, however, rejected the comparison. While he was capable of enthusiasm for the Hindu religion and even

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suggested it was in some specific aspects superior to Christianity, he maintained that Hinduism did not achieve the sublimity of the Christian faith.15 Shaffer gives as her prime examples Coleridge and Hölderlin. Herder and Goethe were perhaps more “freethinking” and less attached to Christian faith, yet the overall formula applies to them as well. It applies in France to Edgar Quinet and, later, to the romantic Orientalism of SaintSimonian authors such as Enfantin or Barrault.16 This Auseinandersetzung between the Orientalist philology of the Bible and scholarship on Zoroastrian and Vedic texts begs for more research, as it is without a doubt a major feature of the genealogy of all Orientalist thought and imagination. I hope, however, to have said enough to show that Schwab was wrong to contend that the “Oriental Renaissance” (that is, Orientalism during the period that Said focused on) had left the Bible behind. It is clear that Said was impressed by Schwab, even though the latter focused on Orientalism as a creative force that reshaped the West rather than, as Said did, a discourse of Western domination. In fact, Schwab did briefly refer to early Orientalist work on the Bible by Lowth and Herder as a “preparation for the Empire of the Irrational and the Unconscious” but without a hint of awareness that Orientalism was located on the path to Western empire in the East and not only to the cult of the irrational in the West. In Sarga Moussa’s view, Said’s work was a kind of complement to Schwab’s: [W]hile Schwab focused on India, Said considered but the so-called ArabMuslim world; while Schwab was interested in the romantic image of the ancient Orient, Said stressed the Orient contemporary to the authors of his corpus; while Schwab was passionate about the process of knowledge “incorporation” and thus about the opening up of an Occident that he saw as nourished by the Orient, Said, inversely, never ceased, at least in Orientalism, to obsess about the differences . . . and, then, that Schwab made little of colonialism. As for Said, he placed it at the center of his theoretical apparatus.17

Such distinctions might have been expected to earn Schwab a negative review by Said, Moussa believes, but Said saw himself rather as enlarging on Schwab’s work, which he recognized as groundbreaking. To be sure, Said did allow himself at least one rather subdued but potent passage in Orientalism that was critical of Schwab’s project. (Note also Said’s acknowledgment, never made quite as straightforwardly by Schwab, of the role of the Bible.)

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ivan kalmar What Bouvard has in mind – the regeneration of Europe by Asia – was a very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. And from this defeat would arise a new, revitalized Europe: the Biblical imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in this prescription. Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful shaper of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so convincingly argued in La Renaissance orientale. But what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia’s use to modern Europe.18

Here Said is doing what he has done to all apparently pro-Orient, “soft orientalism”19 as a whole: revealing that Western power is one of its underpinnings regardless of any individual Orientalist’s good intentions. Given this reading (a correct one, no doubt), Said has no difficulty putting in one basket the earlier soft Orientalism of a Quinet and the later Orientalism of Ernest Renan, whom he presents as a very hard Orientalist indeed. “Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the Jews or the Muslims,” Said wrote, “it was always with his remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the science he was practicing) strictures on the Semites in mind.”20 Quinet, on the other hand, from whom Schwab appears to have borrowed the term “Oriental Renaissance,”21 was one of those who believed in the potential of the Orient to revitalize the spirituality of the West. “Out of the East-West encounter,” Said suggests, a new dogma of god is born, but Quinet’s point is that both East and West fulfill their destinies and confirm their identities in the encounter. As a scholarly attitude the picture of a learned Westerner surveying as if from a peculiarly suited vantage point the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East, then going on to articulate the East, making the Orient deliver up its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derives from the ability to unlock, secret, esoteric languages – this would persist in Renan.22

Renan The French scholar and writer Ernest Renan (1823–1892) was one of Said’s main examples of an Orientalist. Renan’s General History and Comparative System of the Semitic Languages (1855)23 was most responsible for introducing the term “Semitic” into European languages as referring not only to a language family but also to a type of culture or civilization. Said appears to

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maintain that Renan’s interest in the Semitic world was sparked not by the traditions of biblical Orientalism but by the example of Indic and Sinic studies. He proposed that “if the Orient had been hitherto identified exclusively [sic!] and indiscriminately with India and China, Renan’s ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province for himself, in this case the Semitic Orient.”24 It is as though, in Said’s eyes, Renan had found his way back to the wider biblical Orient after Orientalism had, à la Schwab, moved on from it. This would seem to suggest a chronology whereby (i) Orientalists are at first interested in the Bible, but then (ii) they turn “exclusively” to “India and China,” and then, at last, (iii) Renan returns Orientalism to the “Semitic Orient.” Now, Said’s work in Orientalism and for the most part beyond is devoted almost entirely to Western discourses about the Arab – that is, the Semitic – Orient, with important but infrequent nods to Orientalism and the Jews and some telling but relatively marginal observations about Orientalism and the Indian subcontinent. China (and Japan for that matter) is left more or less out of sight. This chronology would have allowed Said to distance himself from the study of biblical philology, but Said was mistaken. After all, among the major figures he himself used as examples from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, respectively, were the French philologist Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) and the English traveler-scholar Edward Lane (1810–1876). Each provided rich evidence for two of the features of Orientalism as a discourse of domination that Said was particularly interested in. Sacy’s compilation of Arab literature, Chréstomathie arabe (1806), for the use of students of Arabic, had a great influence on subsequent Arabists. Lane was exemplary of a later type of Orientalist, who traveled and resided in the Orient, using their sojourn as a mark of authority to report on the Orient to the West. “The Egyptians are disemboweled for exposition,” says Said, “then put together admonishingly by Lane.”25 Lane, who translated the One Thousand and One Nights into English, was said to use the King James Bible as a means to capture what he hoped would come across as “Oriental” language in English.26 (In fact, the use of the archaic second-person pronoun thou, which is typical of the Bible, remained common in popular literature, as in the best-selling Sheik saga by Edith Maul Hull, which was turned into blockbuster films in 1921 and 1926).27 The implicit association of Oriental life with life in the biblical Holy Land was made clear by Lane’s sister, Sophia Poole, on a visit to her brother in Cairo. “In the mention of the veil we trace the Hareem system to the time of Abraham,” she writes.28

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Sacy was less obviously influenced by the Bible in his assessments of Arabic and other associated languages and cultures. It should be noted, though, that even he, an heir of a Jansenist Catholic family, came to the Semitic language family by first learning Hebrew.29 Renan, then, did not come to the biblical Orient via India and China. But perhaps that is not what Said intended. Geoffrey Nash suggests a more affirming interpretation of what Said might have meant. On Nash’s reading of Said, the latter is referring to Renan’s discovery that he could draw on the work of Orientalist scholars of Persia and India and incorporate it into his own vision of a modern religion.30 Renan wrote in the context of two characteristics that defined nineteenth-century philology: first, the precise study of texts as a mirror of the creative genius of a “race”; and second, the search for salvaging religion from literalist dogma, as a form of mythology essential to humanity, with Christianity its most evolved traditional form. As examples, I have already mentioned Coleridge, Hölderlin, Goethe and others. Nash adds Matthew Arnold and Renan. As he notes, however, it was Renan who anchored, more than any of his contemporaries, the then-popular opposition between an intolerant mediocrity of religion and mind, as against freedom and creativity, in the opposition between Semites and Aryans.

Arabizing the Bible In order to preserve the superiority of Christianity, this required two moves: presenting the Bible as Semitic but also presenting Christianity, notwithstanding its biblical roots, as Aryan. I have elsewhere called the first of these two intellectual manoeuvers “Arabizing the Bible.”31 The genealogy of reading the Bible as expressing a Semitic spirit includes the long history of imagining Islam as a kindred religion of Judaism.32 It would be the philologists, cognizant of the obvious similarities between Hebrew and Arabic, who turned that kinship into one that could be studied through linguistic cognates. In the eighteenth century still, the Arabic affiliation of the Bible competed, in scholars’ minds, with what they understood as its Greek connection. They believed that Homer read the Bible. In fact, it was this assumption that led Joseph Spence, in his Essay on Pope’s Odyssey (1726), to introduce, as he saw it, the word “Orientalism” into the English language. He was commenting on a Homeric passage

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where the Greek speaks “Of the sun being perished out of Heaven, and of darkness rushing over the Earth!” I cannot express the fullness of the words – But you know the original; and, I fear, will never see a translation equal to it. This whole prophetical vision . . . is the True Sublime; and in particular, gives us an higher Orientalism than we meet with in any other part of Homer’s writings. You will pardon me a new word, where we have no old one to my purpose: You know what I mean, that Eastern way of expressing Revolutions in Government, by a confusion or extinction of light in the Heavens.33

This view of “Orientalism,” which united the Hebrew spirit with the Greek, was amenable to the Anglicanism typical at the time at Winchester College and Oxford University, where Spence befriended, among others, Robert Lowth (1710–1787), the future Bishop of London and author of the Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (which had an influence on Johann Gottfried Herder’s even more significant The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry).34 English religion and erudition, as they saw it, united and advanced the ancient Hebrew and Greek strands, as did the Bible itself. Unlike Spence, however, Lowth had recourse to other Semitic languages in his biblical interpretation, including Arabic. Lowth’s note on Job xvi. 10 is typical for the manner in which he commutes effortlessly from Hebrew to Greek to Arabic in his commentary: Jilmaleon, according to the Sept. όμαθυμαδου δε κατεδραμου: R.L.B. Gershom, They were gathered together: and the Arabic verb Mala denotes in vi. Conjugation, They assisted one another, and were unanimous, (as if a great multitude were collected together;) and it is construed with the preposition gnale, as in this passage.35

The reference to R. L. B. Gershom is evidently to Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344), a Jewish philosopher of Provence, whose familiarity with Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle made his work an important link between the Christian and Islamic heirs of Greek philosophy. Lowth’s knowledge of this Jewish scholar (and his reference to him as “Gershom” rather than the commonly used Hellenization “Gersonides”), as well as his reference to the Arabic language, demonstrate the willingness, typical of the period, to take Christianity’s Oriental context very seriously. A Christian interest is also a key to the reason why a chair of Arabic was instituted at Oxford in 1636–1641. Said dates Oriental studies to the Council of Vienne in 1312, where university chairs in Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean (as well as Greek) were explicitly mentioned as a tool for converting infidels. At Oxford, Arabic was also meant to help missionaries, and the first Oxford professor of Arabic, Edward Pococke (1604–1691),

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produced several Christian texts in Arabic with the same aim. But there can be no doubt that using Arabic for biblical exegesis (because of its proximity to Hebrew) was a far more prestigious scholarly activity than writing conversionary pamphlets. Pococke was also a professor of Hebrew, as were many if not all of his successors throughout England for a long time. The influential German Orientalist scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791), whose comments on Lowth’s Sacred Poetry were included in its successive republications, was also a major believer in using Arabic as a key to the Hebrew Bible. One of Lowth’s propositions that Michaelis espoused enthusiastically was that the Book of Job was the oldest of the Bible and that it “seems to have little connexion with the other writings of the Hebrews, and no relation whatever to the affairs of the Israelites.” Its characters are “Idumaeans, or at least Arabians of the adjacent country, all originally of the race of Abraham.” Using some further “evidence,” Michaelis in fact concluded that “most of the peculiar customs of the Israelites, those I mean which distinguished them from other descendants of Abraham, were either derived from the Egyptians, or were taught them by Moses.”36 In other words, Michaelis believed, the Israelites had brought to Egypt nothing peculiar to themselves, as opposed to Oriental peoples in general. Eventually, this kind of thinking led to a broadening of reference for the terms “Arab” and “Arabian,” such that it came to include “Jew” and “Jewish” and was in fact a precursor of what, mainly under Renan’s influence, would be called “Semite” and “Semitic” later.37 Hegel included Judaism when he spoke of “Arabian religion,” for example, as did Benjamin Disraeli when he made one of the characters in Tancred say, “Let men doubt of unicorns; but of one thing there can be no doubt, that God never spoke except to an Arab.”38 One logical, and probably intended, consequence of this denial of a distinctive Jewish cultural character of the Bible was to refuse to contemporary Jews the mantle of modern-day carriers of the biblical spirit. Instead, to find a still-living biblical culture one needed to look for a people who share that achievement but have not changed. The history of expeditions to the Orient in search of studying what might be called the “historical Bible” needs to be far more fully investigated and documented than scholars have done to date. Suffice it to say that such travel, even for short periods, became almost de rigueur for people claiming expertise on the Bible that was more than just strictly philological. Among the long list of nineteenth-century travelers who shared their insights into biblical culture, one might rather arbitrarily mention the French author and

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diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand (in the Orient in 1806);39 the author-politician Benjamin Disraeli (traveled 1830–1831);40 and the dean in his day of all Orientalists, Ignaz Goldziher (1873–1874).41

Aryanizing Christianity For Ernest Renan, too, his controversial, yet widely successful, Life of Jesus (1860) was legitimated by his field trip to the Holy Land.42 In the Life of Jesus, Renan argues that Jesus was not fully Semitic, because he came from the Galilee, which, as opposed to Judea, Renan described as a racial melting pot. Suzannah Heschel details how, through supportive reworkings by subsequent generations, the “search for an Aryan Jesus” culminated in the pronouncements of some of the theologians in Nazi Germany.43 The genealogy of the “search for an Aryan Jesus” includes the formation of “Semitic” as a designation for a racialized creative spirit that produced, most noticeably, the Bible and the Quran, which happened along with, and as an antithesis to, the evolution of “Aryan.” The latter was a civilizational term created on the basis of the philological discovery of the IndoEuropean relationship (known also as Indo-Germanic). Nash connects Renan’s practice of opposing Semitic and Aryan to a nineteenth-century tradition, exemplified by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel and Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau. In this connection, one may also include the influence of G. F. W. Hegel. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel traces the development of the Weltgeist or “world spirit” through a racialized evolution where at each successive stage a different Volk (people or race) is the carrier of each distinctive psychic constellation, producing – among other things, but perhaps most importantly – different religions. The “Arabian” religions, which include Judaism as well as Islam, constitute a stage Hegel dubs as a “religion of the sublime” (die Religion der Erhabenheit). The main feature of this form of religion and thought is that God is exceedingly distant from humanity; he is worshipped as a totally transcendental majesty. In contrast, the higher religion exemplified by Christianity, and especially by its Protestant form, is the fruit of the patient, centuries-long work (Arbeit) of the Germanic (sic – germanisches, not deutsches) Volk.44

Racial Supersessionism It is true that Hegel does not explicitly associate Christianity with other Aryans such as the Persians and Indians, whose religion he sees somewhat

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differently. But what is characteristic, if not trend-setting, is the way he, first, connects Judaism and Islam as the expressions of the same religious spirit and, second, posits Christianity to represent a higher stage, transcending the limitations of its biblical background. Whether one sees Christianity’s relationship to Judaism/Islam as a mature outgrowth, as did Hegel, or a foreign graft, as did Renan, the limits of Semitic religion are asserted and expressed in racialized terms. Christianity is the product of a race (Volk) other than the Jews or their kin, the Arabs, in spite of its holy text, and its Savior, having been born in the Orient. The inevitable tool of making this argument is to contrast the Greek “New Testament” to the Hebrew “Old Testament.” In what is perhaps the most eloquent part of his teaching, the “Antitheses” of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:17–48), Jesus makes a set of statements framed by the phrases “You have heard it said that . . . but I say to you that . . .” Most famously, in Matt 5:38–39, he advises to turn the other cheek, as opposed to demanding “an eye for an eye” (Lev 24:20). All of the Antitheses follow an Old Testament injunction with one by Jesus. In spite of the conjunction “but” (δὲ), the mainstream Christian view is that Jesus did not mean to negate the Old Testament but to enlarge on it with a higher morality. This accords with Jesus’ statement “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”45 The statement poignantly expresses the “supersessionist” view of Christianity: it does not invalidate the ancient Jewish religion but represents its higher stage. This internal supersession within the Christian Bible, of the Hebrew Old Testament with the Greek New, is fundamental to almost all branches of the Christian faith. It is frequently associated with the contrast, deemed fundamental to Western civilization by Harold Bloom, between Law and Love.46 Judaism (and, in the nineteenth-century racialized version, Semitic religion) represents the former, and Christianity (produced by the Aryan spirit) the latter. For Renan and other nineteenth-century thinkers, who were not wedded to Christianity as revealed dogma but as the highest form or religion springing from the depths of the Indo-European soul, the Aryan spirit was able to duplicate the contrast between frigid legalism and the tempering compassion of love, not only in Christianity but even within Islam. Nash details the way in which the nineteenthcentury Persian religious rebel and martyr Ali Muhammad Shirazi, aka Bab, appeared as a kind of latter-day Christ to his contemporaries in Europe.47

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The supersessionist relationship between the New and Old Testaments and between Christianity and Judaism – a relationship that purports to value the earlier version only to affirm the superiority of the later version – obtains in a sense also between the nineteenth-century “religion of philology” and Christianity. As Hegel valued Christianity over “Arabian” religion, which he, however, placed much higher than other Near Eastern religions, let alone the religions of Africa or the Americas, so he and Renan et al. placed their own understanding of universal religion higher than Christianity. This allowed them to be at the same time critics of traditional dogmatic Christianity and the associated authority of the Church and to propound an ideology of Western superiority which, regarding the Muslim-Arab Orient, rested on the superiority of Aryan religion, while regarding India it rested on the hopes that modern Western Christians can reinvigorate the dormant Hinduism and Buddhism along the lines of their own revaluation of Christianity. It is true that such feelings about India became much weaker in colonizing Britain as the resistance of the natives stiffened in the later nineteenth century. It did, however, continue in Germany, and even in the English-speaking world it resulted in millions adhering to such syncretist, Aryanist movements as theosophy.48

Conclusion This chapter is a sketch of the kind of facts available about Orientalism in biblical scholarship, a topic that still awaits definitive, book-length treatment. When all the facts are in, they will have the potential of substantially deepening, rather than denying, the force of the Saidian analysis. While Said, and indeed much of the subsequent literature on Orientalism, may have missed the full force of the Orientalists’ concerns with the Bible, those concerns did not normally stand in opposition to Orientalism’s colonial agenda. The real task that this chapter points to is not to oppose biblical Orientalism to imperialist Orientalism. It is, rather, to investigate further how theological supersessionism relates to racial supersessionism as a discourse and ideology of Western domination.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Verso, 1978). 2. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950).

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3. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 4. Schwab apparently copied the title of a chapter in Edgar Quinet’s Génie des religions (1842). The idea was that while the original Renaissance invigorated Europe through the rediscovery of ancient texts, the Oriental Renaissance did so by the discovery of previously unknown Indic and Far Eastern texts. 5. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 8. 6. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 4 7. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, pp. 4–5. 8. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 5. 9. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 5. 10. Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1685). 11. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, chapter 5, “A Question of the Soul: The Dialogue of Creeds.” 12. E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 62–63. 13. Said is referring to one of the two protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s incomplete novel Bouvard et Pécuchet. 14. Said, Orientalism, p. 115. 15. Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 17. 16. See M. Levallois and S. Moussa, L’orientalisme des saint-simonistes (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larosse, 2006). 17. Sarga Moussa, “Edward W. Said lecteur de Raymond Schwab,” Sociétés et Représentations 1:37 (2014): pp. 69–78, p. 77. Translation mine. 18. Said, Orientalism, 115. 19. See Ivan Kalmar, Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 130–131. 20. Said, Orientalism, p. 141. 21. Moussa, “Edward Said,” p. 72. 22. Said, Orientalism, pp. 137–138. 23. Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et systėme comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1855). 24. Said, Orientalism, p. 138. 25. Said, Orientalism, p. 111. 26. Paulo L. Horta, “‘A Covenant for Reconciliation?’ Lane’s Thousand and One Nights and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” in Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights, eds. Marina Warner and Philip K. Kennedy (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 154–171, pp. 156–157. 27. E. M. Hull, The Sheik (Philadelphia: Pine Street Books, 2001 [1919]); The Sons of the Sheik (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1925).

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28. Sophie Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, Written during a Residence There in 1842–46 (Cairo: American University Press, 2003). 29. Michel Espagne, Nora Lafi and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, eds., Silvestre de Sacy: Le projet européen d’une science orientaliste (Paris: Cerf, 2014). 30. Geoffrey Nash, “Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’s Quest for the Religion of Modernity,” Religion and Literature 46:1 (2014): pp. 25–50, p. 3. 31. Ivan Kalmar, “Arabizing the Bible: Racial Supersessionism in Nineteenth Century Christian Art and Biblical Criticism,” in Orientalism Revisited, ed. Ian Netton (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 176–186. 32. On the parallel images, in the Christian West of Jews and Muslims, see, for example, Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); James Renton and Ben Gidley, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia: A Shared Story? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Ivan Kalmar and David Penslar, eds. Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005); and Kalmar, Early Orientalism. 33. Joseph Spence, An Essay on Mr. Pope’s Odyssey, in Five Dialogues (London: Wilmot, 1737), pp. 214–215; Brian Hepworth, Robert Lowth (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), pp. 26, pp. 58–69, p. 68. 34. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (New York: Garland Publications, 1971). The original of this text was a series of Latin lectures, published in 1753. The English translation was first published in 1787. The text was annotated by the German philologist Johann David Michaelis. The opening sentence of Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry alleges that “everyone knows Bishop Lowth’s wonderful and widely praised book.” (Vom Geist der Ebräeischen Poesie, in Rudolph Smend, ed., Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden. Band, 5: Schriften zum alten Testament, 1993), p. 663. Herder’s work was originally published in 1782–1783. 35. Lowth, Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, p. 19, n. 36. Lowth, Sacred Poetry, p. 362. 37. Previously, the term “Semitic” was limited to language. 38. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (London: R. Brimley, 1907 [1847]), p. 319. 39. Viscount de Chateaubriand, Travels to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1835), 1: p. 1; Alain Guyot, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem de Chateaubriand: L’invention du voyage romantique (Paris: Presses de l’Universite Paris-Sorbonne, 2006). 40. Robert Blake, Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830–31 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). 41. Ignaz Goldziher, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and Psychological Portrait, ed. Raphael Patai (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). 42. It is true the most celebrated biblical scholars never set place in the Orient. The list includes Michaelis’ student Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753–1827), conventionally considered the founder of the new biblical criticism, whose

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ivan kalmar thesis was on Arab uses of money; Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), who, too, was an Arabist as well as a daring revisionist of biblical scholarship; and William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), a professor of Arabic who wrote in English on both the Bible and Arab customs. However, these armchair experts relied frequently on the reports of Orient travelers. Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sirbee. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956 [1827]), p. 355. Matt 5:17, King James Version. Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 13; Kalmar, Early Orientalism, chapter 1. Nash, “Aryan and Semite,” pp. 12–13. The mass occult movement of theosophy frequently employed references to Aryan kinship, though not always with the antisemitic passion of its offshoot, “Ariosophy”: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992).

part ii

Development

chapter 8

Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject Eleanor Byrne

The Disorienting Present Homi K. Bhabha’s introduction to his collected essays, The Location of Culture, opens with an apprehension of the moment he is writing from as one marked by disorientation, with the “posts” of postmodernism, postcolonialism and postfeminism on the one hand and, on the other, the sense of restless movements, a moving back and forth, “here and there,” that has unhooked contemporary critical theory from fixed and primary organizational categories and has produced constellations of ways of being that acknowledge “race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation.”1 The central proposition established in this opening is the argument that it is “theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, … to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference.” Much of what follows reiterates and elaborates on this central interest in the moments and processes where different experiences and narratives of self, belonging, nation, community or cultural value meet and are remade, translated or altered. Bhabha’s interest is in the terms of cultural engagement, understanding how different positions are negotiated and produced at the moment of interaction. As such, his argument is that we need to refocus in order to think about how difference is experienced or mobilized, in an argument about “where” culture actually is, as indicated by the term “location” in his title. In this important conceptual shift, Bhabha seeks to resite an understanding of culture away from authorized and pre-given forms of “diversity” that organize around assumptions of a stable self or communities and posits that culture is always in process, negotiating, the point of its articulation to an other. Its “location” is to be beyond here and there, to be disorientingly produced in fraught dialogues or dissident interventions, in restless revisions that characterize the postal age of postcolonial cultures. As he argues in virtually all his work, “terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affilliative, are produced performatively.” He continues: 151

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“The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex ongoing negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” It is from this critical position that he formulates some of his most well-known models for thinking differently about culture, through the overlapping terms of ambivalence, hybridity and interstitial, translational subjectivities. To a great extent, Bhabha’s work from the 1980s hit a receptive postcolonial audience by bringing poststructuralist theory, notably Derrida’s field-changing concepts of différance, deconstruction and dissemination, to bear on Said’s model of Orientalism. As Robert J. C. Young notes, Bhabha combined oftencontradictory theories, seeking aspects of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and critical race theory to serve his interrogation of colonial discourse and the postcolonial present.2 As well as drawing on Lacan’s influential psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity that were being eagerly used in literary studies in the late 1980s, he also drew on Foucault and Bakhtin, as well as Julia Kristeva and later Judith Butler, trying to synthesize and draw in poststructuralistinflected theory that was highly influential in this period, to mobilize and hybridize these diverse theoretical approaches for a revived and nonidentitarian postcolonial theoretical arena. Bhabha’s essays from the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s were collected in The Location of Culture in 1994; as such the essays reflect a number of key moments in the history of cultural studies, postcolonial theory and the developments in poststructuralist theory across a number of strands of critical theory during this period. Bhabha also wrote extensively for journals such as Artforum, moving comfortably into the field of visual culture and fine art at a time when the art world was rapidly changing its relation to hierarchies of race and class. In particular, in much of his work Bhabha considered how best we might begin to address various forms of what he calls, after Derrida, “displaced acceleration,” the “exilic” conditions of the present, where a new international must be sought in the singular sites of violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, economic oppression, which must be attentive to the ways in which narratives of national rootedness in the West need to be taught to remember a displaced or displaceable population, where nationalist authority is brutally asserted through dispensing with “others” who are perceived as being pre-modern and therefore undeserving of nationhood, or basically labelled terroristic and therefore deemed unworthy of a national home, enemies of the very idea of a nation peoples.3

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Bhabha’s work has participated in ongoing debates about all these issues, real-world political events, through a medium of what is often called “high theory,” and his relation to Said is a complex one, to some extent “unlikely,” as Said vigorously defended the role of the amateur critic who did not use technical or obtuse language to communicate ideas, something Bhabha, and poststructuralist theorizing, has frequently been charged with. Yet like Said, Bhabha has always found himself performing theoretical and critical acrobatics in switching between the deployment of “difficult” theory and engagement in real-world events, participating for example in organizing groups of writers and activists around the fatwah declared on Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses.4 While facing critics who baulk at his “impenetrable prose,” he was also enthusiastically taken up by artists and writers in the blossoming field of race and postcolonial theory, collaborated with eminent cultural critics such as Stuart Hall, as well as with celebrated artists such as Anish Kapoor, and written many articles relating to transformations in British culture that engaged with the dynamics of race and nation in the contemporary moment. If some of his key critical ideas – ambivalence, hybridity, the Third Space – have swept through the field of cultural theory and postcolonial studies, it is arguably because he named and attempted to contribute to the concerns of an emerging discipline. His thinking is marked by an increasing awareness in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies and feminist scholarship of cultural transformations brought about by global postwar migrations and cultural and political interventions by black and ethnic minority groups on a local and global level, and in doing so he helped artists and writers to articulate the positions they found themselves in. Interestingly, whilst one of the major criticisms aimed at his writing has been their perceived lack of relation to real-world politics (a view that he actively challenges in his article “The Commitment to Theory”), his introductory essay in The Location of Culture comes partially from an exhibition catalogue for a pivotal and controversial biennial exhibition at the Whitney art gallery in New York in 1993. The exhibition, which featured many black and minority artists, was negatively reviewed in many art establishment quarters at the time as “trendily political,” which one can read as Conservative rhetoric for actually political. Paul Richards’ review for the Washington Post, for example, comments that “its artists all feel themselves aggrieved. And here they come in their noisy droves, those martyrs of the margins, the lesbians, the gays, the inhabitants of barrios, the sufferers of AIDS.”5 Bhabha wrote one of the four exhibition catalogue

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essays, alongside Coco Fusco, Avital Ronnell and B. Ruby Rich. The exhibition was clearly a watershed moment for establishment art in the United States as it abruptly broke with models built around complacent white establishment concepts of greatness and genius. It featured, amongst many diverse and political works, Daniel J. Martinez’s lapel tag badges handed to every guest, with the words “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white” on them, and George Holliday’s ten-minute videotape of the Rodney King beating.6 Like Said, Bhabha has juggled political affiliations alongside his theoretical explorations, and this has involved thinking beyond identity politics and about alliances, models of intersectionality, and shared forms of activism and models of community that can facilitate inclusion whilst being attentive to difference. As with many of his contemporaries – theorists, writers and artists – and Said before him, a key part of his attempt to imagine the present differently was founded on returning to the discourses of colonialism and race of the nineteenth century, to make meaningful links between racist discourses of the past and their legacies in the present. While some critiques of Bhabha’s work have focused on the “textual” nature of his identification of forms of resistance, he is not merely a historian of colonialism; rather, he seeks to find a language and a set of tools to name the work and the experiences of the cultural practitioners of the present across multiple modes of oppression, race, class, gender, sexuality, outsiderness, illegality, vulnerability and precarity.

Orientalism, Ambivalence, Hybridity Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from historical knowledge.7 Said … hints continually at a polarity or division at the very centre of Orientalism. It is, on the one hand, a topic of learning, discovery, practice; on the other, it is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements. … [T]his line of thinking is given a shape analogical to the dreamwork, when Said refers explicitly to a distinction between “an unconscious positivity” which he terms latent Orientalism, and the stated knowledges and views about the Orient which he calls manifest Orientalism.8

Bhabha’s work theorizing colonial discourse influenced a generation of postcolonial scholars, largely through the widespread discussion and adaptation of his key concepts of ambivalence and hybridity. His reading of interactions between colonizers and colonized peoples resituated Said’s

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model of colonial discourse counterintuitively, as something that does not only facilitate the embedding of colonial systems of power. He does so through arguing for a kind of “play” inherent in such discourses issuing from a fundamental irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of colonialism and Imperialism. Bhabha shares Said’s sense of complicity and interrelation between Orientalist discourses and political or administrative systems – modes of maintaining, asserting, showing, displaying and “having” power – but he argues the knowability of the colonial subject always eludes colonial discourse, and he proposes that colonial discourse produces ambivalent, fraught, psychically inflected knowledge and that such discourse says as much about the colonizer as it does about the colonized. Bhabha develops Said’s particular models of discourse analysis in Orientalism, demonstrating that colonial discourse was not monolithic but internally riven. Bhabha’s approach is largely influenced by his use of seminal essays on deconstructive literary theory by Jacques Derrida, who proposed a deconstructive approach to literary and philosophical texts as a critique of Western metaphysics that highlighted the ways in which any text is founded on internal contradictions that reveal its foundations to be “impossible,” the text working “against itself.” In Derrida’s work, writing undoes itself, as it holds irreconcilable meanings, and the literary critic can find in this instability the politics of the text. Derrida’s work clearly resonates with Bhabha as he thinks through the ways in which colonial discourses set themselves up as knowledge but register their own profound instability and illegitimacy at the same time. Bhabha also uses psychoanalytic literary theory to rethink Said’s description of Orientalism, homing in, in what he calls an “underdeveloped passage in Said,” on lines that for a reader of Freud are immediately suggestive: What is this theory of encapsulation or fixation which moves between the recognition of cultural and racial difference and its disavowal, by affixing the unfamiliar to something established, in a form that is repetitious and vacillates between delight and fear?9

As Robert Young suggests, “Bhabha exploits the ambivalence which Said denies but nevertheless demonstrates.”10 At the centre of Bhabha’s work we find a focus on the stereotype that brought the term “ambivalence” into play as a key mode of reading colonial discourse and the role of the stereotype in that discourse. Bhabha offers a close reading of what he terms “the stereotype-as-suture” as a form of fetishistic identification that

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is profoundly split in a number of key ways but is also attempting to knit together those “splits.”11 By doing so, he is able to see that a colonial text (indeed any text) is not already self-sufficient in the meanings it contains but produces resistance as something that it does to itself as form that produces an internally split meaning, not a clear message that is opposed from the outside, or at least not only opposed from the outside. Instead, he is interested in the way that colonial discourse anxiously repeats its stereotypes, which survive into the present day, partially adapted but largely intact. Rather than seeing the stereotype as simply inaccurate and empowering to the one doing the stereotyping, he reads, with Derrida in mind, texts that are as anxious and unstable as they are fixed and certain about the stereotype they deploy. Bhabha moves away from thinking about stereotypes as positive or negative and away from a model where stereotypes are just projections of negative or unwanted aspects of those doing the stereotyping. He reflects poststructuralist ideas about narrative and ways of understanding how meaning is created. The stereotype becomes a fault line or a way of entry into thinking about colonial discourse itself as split and ambivalent. The stereotype he argues is a peculiar paradigm for colonial discourse, a privileged sign, something that denotes a strange, arrested, mix of desire and hate. Bhabha argues that “the stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations” (p. 75). Bhabha uses Frantz Fanon to support this reading, citing Black Skin, White Masks (1952): “When Fanon talks of the positioning of the subject in the stereotyped discourse of colonialism, he gives further credence to my point. The legends, stories, histories and anecdotes of a colonial culture offer the subject a primordial Either/Or. Either he is fixed in a consciousness of the body as a solely negating activity or as a new kind of man, a new genus” (p. 75). Following Freud, we might best understand the stereotype as a fetish, something that, in questions of sexuality and desire, is a thing that is a substitute for a lack; one that enables control over a sense of self that is potentially threatened by a sexual encounter or by desire for an other, by bringing the object of desire under control.12 Bhabha argues that the stereotype is similar to the fetish in two ways. Firstly, it is structurally similar to the fetish, linking something scary (racial and sexual difference and confrontation with that difference) to something familiar – an object in the case of the fetish, a stereotype in the case of colonial discourse.

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Secondly, because it hovers between figuring difference as an anxiety about a lack and as an affirmation of completeness, it moves between lack and completion, and the stereotype bolsters itself by putting itself in the paradoxical place of an unattainable completion. The stereotype has to be anxiously repeated forever – even though it is supposed to fix itself to its subject, to be already known and obvious. Instead it circulates as a bogus and fetishized form of knowing, but one that Bhabha insists represents its own anxiety in the ways it circulates and is repeated. Whilst the subject is “fixed” as something, the things that it is fixed on can be quite volatile – disorder, sexual misconduct, dirt, drunkenness, bodily threat, verbal/physical dominance, ugliness – already creating an odd model of “fixed volatility.” So rather than merely a projection of what is hated or feared or a source of disgust about the self, it is an index of colonial discourse itself, and, crucially for Bhabha, it is an index of a desire that is disavowed. It simultaneously recognizes and disavows difference. The stereotype, also like the fetish, operates as a kind of metaphor and metonymy. It is always there to cover a fear and operates as a form of multiple and contradictory belief. In colonial texts it works to address moments where the difference of colonial culture and hence its threat to the colonizer cannot be named; hence, Bhabha notes, “the same old stories of the Negro’s animality, the Coolie’s inscrutability or the stupidity of the Irish must be told (compulsively) again and afresh, and are differently gratifying and terrifying each time” (p. 77). This sense of internal splitting is also key to Bhabha’s understanding of colonial discourse as always hybrid, according to Bhabha, because any attempt to impose or make meanings is always transformed in the moment of its interaction with its intended recipients. Hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures that can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation: if “the appearance of the English book is read as a production of colonial hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority. It gives rise to a series of questions of authority that, in my bastardized repetition, must sound strangely familiar” (p. 113). Bhabha argues that colonial discourse is always altered when it takes place at the point of interaction, at the moment where it is interpreted in some way by the colonized. No colonial discourse remains untouched or unaffected by this; it is always more or less than itself at the point of enunciation and reception. In his essay “Signs Taken for Wonders,” he considers the writings of Indian catechist Anund Messeh in 1817, who struggles to contain the meanings that proliferate from the readers of Bibles

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he encounters outside Delhi, as they interpret the book given to them, they say, by “[a]n Angel at Hurdwar fair.”13 Bhabha comments: “The discovery of the book installs a sign of appropriate representation: the word of God, truth, art creates the conditions for the beginning, a practice of history and narrative. But the institution of the word in the wilds is also an Entstellung, a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition – the dazzling light of literature sheds only areas of darkness” (p. 105). Entstellung would name a kind of defacement, or disfiguring, that takes place as the colonial text “takes place” in the colony. Colonial literature, such as R. L. Stevenson’s short story “The Bottle Imp,” written for a Polynesian readership while in Samoa then translated with missionary help, suffers much the same fate. The interpretation and morals extracted from his story by his Samoan readers, as Stevenson’s wife Fanny notes, reflects the profoundly hybrid condition of the colonial literary text. “I do not understand what civilizing effect the story of The Bottle Imp was supposed to have on the natives, but I cannot think it quite fulfilled the expectations of the missionary who translated it […] Samoans are in the habit of speaking in parables; they found many different morals in the Bottle Imp, some very ingeniously extracted.”14 “The Bottle Imp” is saturated with colonial assumptions about the Polynesian readership and their needs, and the role of the colonizer, but also illustrates Bhabha’s point, which is a poststructuralist one: hybridity shifts the power of the text; it questions discursive authority and suggests, contrary to Said’s Orientalism, that colonial discourse is not “in control” of its meanings. Discourse only operates as the moment of being interpreted, where it “lands,” and as such there is always an element of reversal or compromise or interpretation. Said illustrates something similar in his humorous account of his education, when he relates his experiences of growing up in colonial Egypt, attending Victoria College in Cairo, in his memoir Out of Place (1999). The education system is entirely imported from England, the school is designed to be “the Eton of the Middle East,” and “except for the teachers of Arabic and French, the faculty was entirely English (not a single English student was enrolled) … Being and speaking Arabic were delinquent activities at VC and accordingly we were never given proper instruction in our language, history, culture and geography. We were tested as if we were English boys, trailing behind an ill defined and always out of reach goal from class to class, year to year.”15 Whilst Said doesn’t employ the vocabulary of mimicry or ambivalence, he does demonstrate the ways in which the colonial education system was subverted by his classmates during an

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English lesson on Twelfth Night; “Gately [the teacher] asked us to read out loud and explain various lines in the first scene but achieved only raucous laughter, incomprehensible gibberish and horrendous Arabic obscenities presented as ‘classical’ equivalents of what the Duke of Illyria was saying” (p. 182).

Mimicry and Menace As with his work on the stereotype, Bhabha takes up the question of colonial mimicry – the desire of the colonizer for a recognizable and controllable other who is a kind of copy of the colonizer and has internalized colonial power systems – in order to mobilize what may seem an initially unpromising aspect of colonial culture and power from which to seek dissidents and resistance. Whilst mimicry is presented as disabling for the colonized, a tool for producing a lack of center and self for the colonized subject, Bhabha returns to this demand from colonial power for a fixed and recognizable other to destabilize the model and think it differently. “Colonial mimicry,” he argues, “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite. That is to say that discourse of mimicry is constructed around ambivalence; in order to be effective it must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”16 Bhabha’s explorations of the importance of a kind of disavowed mimicry for the colonizer looks at how the purported civilizing mission of British colonial expansion finds itself crossed by an anxiety – that too substantial a level of cultural and social reform would risk producing subjects that might then organize for or fight for their liberty. Charles Grant, a Scot who was chairman of the British East India Company, in “Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain” (1792) argued for a “partial reform” and partial diffusion of Christianity, following a desire to create mimic men who adhere to British Christian values but are not free subjects. “Inadvertently Grant produces a knowledge of Christianity as a form of social control which conflicts with the enunciatory assumptions that authorize his discourse” (p. 87) as well as Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous “Minute on Education” of 1835, which was, Bhabha argues, deeply influenced by this work. Macaulay notoriously comments on the relative values of an entire Oriental education versus the higher value he would put on a single primer of English literature, thus inaugurating the teaching of English to an Indian elite by the East India Company.

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Mimicry – of manners, customs, clothing, language and schooling – answers to a desire for an approved and controllable other who is never quite as good as the original in the colonizers’ view: “Almost the same but not ‘white,’” as Bhabha comments, adapting the Freudian phrase “almost the same but not quite” (p. 89). Mimicry, such as copying the wearing of a suit, as Dr. Aziz does in E. M. Forster’s bitter critique of Anglo-India A Passage to India (1924), demonstrates the way in which Aziz is seen as a “poor copy” of the English when his collar button is noted as being missing. Yet the scene where Aziz fixes his collar stud into Fielding’s collar, an act of homoerotic symbolic intimacy, which involves the “undressing” of Aziz who passes his stud to Fielding, demonstrates it is actually he who maintains the illusion of Fielding’s superiority in the eyes of others. Aziz’s hospitality and generosity are reframed as the sloppy standards of the colonial subject, because this scene is hidden from public view. As the mimic man who always gets something a little wrong, Aziz is always aware of the politics of this dynamic; in the immediate aftermath of the lending of the collar stud, he moves the terms of discussion away from where Fielding would have it. “Why the hell does one wear collars at all?” grumbled Fielding as he bent his neck. “We wear them to pass the Police.” “What’s that?” “If I’m biking in English dress – starch collar, hat with ditch – they take no notice. When I wear a fez, they cry, ‘Your lamp’s out!’ Lord Curzon did not consider this when he urged natives of India to retain their picturesque costumes.”17

While Fielding wonders idly about the quirks of English fashion and the inconveniences of the collar, Aziz points to the policing of a type of mimicry as a prerequisite for avoiding persecution and everyday harassments. Aziz knows only too well the role of the mimicry in colonial India; as Bhabha notes, following Lacan, “mimicry is like camouflage, not harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically” (p. 85). In “Sly Civility,” Bhabha builds on this troubled relation between colonizer and colonized as he proposes the self-defeating will for authority that tips narcissistic will to power into the paranoia of those in power, a “desire for authorization in the face of a process of cultural differentiation which makes it problematic to fix the native objects of colonial power as the moralized others of truth” (p.100). However, Bhabha argues that the

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act of mimicry disturbs a straightforward relationship between original and copy, drawing attention to the way in which the so-called original is a performance, thus unhooking it from a straightforward relationship with the natural. The central preoccupation of A Passage to India, the accusation and trial of Aziz for the attempted rape of the visiting English woman Adela Quested, affords Forster with an opportunity to explore what Bhabha calls “the forked tongue” of post-Enlightenment colonial discourse. After the incident at the Marabar Caves, the British gather in their club to rehearse a series of racist discourses, stereotypes and fears associated with British rule in India and the ambivalent claim to power they hold. In Forster’s narrative, fragments and murmurs from the couples grouped there are interspersed with thoughts of the Collector: He wanted to flog every native that he saw, but to do nothing that would lead to a riot or to the necessity for military intervention. … The others, less responsible, could behave naturally. They had started speaking of “women and children” – that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times … “They ought to be compelled to give hostages,” etc. … “Station a bunch of Ghurkhas at the entrance of the cave was all that was wanted.”18

Fear of the natives is quickly rephrased by a drunken subaltern; the white community appear bunkered down, on a war footing, rehearsing older, long-held, archaic fears of rebellion, taking them back to 1857 and imaginatively conjuring the power structures of police, law, armed forces to avenge themselves of the fantasized collusion of the Indian men against the white women. Bhabha notes in “Sly Civility” the common trope of paranoia, in which the delusion of the end of the world functions as a sort of permanent apocalyptic formulation that underpins the discourses of British colonial presence in India. The rhetorical mobilization of impending apocalypse, which has a lot in common with Slavoj Zizek’s account of the “tyrant’s bloody robe,” is the stage upon which a peculiar “performance” of colonial ambivalence takes place among the whites holed up in their club: “Mrs Blakison was saying if only there were a few Tommies,” remarked someone. “English no good,” he [drunken subaltern] cried, getting his loyalties mixed. “Native troops for this country. Give me the sporting type of native, give me Ghurkhas, give me Rajputs, give me Jats, give me the Punjabi, give

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eleanor byrne me Sikhs, give me Marathas, Bhils, Afridis, and Pathans, and really, if it comes to that, I don’t mind if you give me the scum of the bazaars. Properly led, mind, I’d lead them anywhere –” (p. 191)

Other members of the club assert that it is the mimic man who represents the most trusted and paradoxically least trusted form of colonized Indian: “The native’s alright if you get him alone. Lesley! Lesley! You remember the one I had a knock with on your maidan last month. Well, he was all right. Any native who plays polo is all right. What you’ve got to stamp on is these educated classes, and, mind, I do know what I’m talking about this time” (p. 192). The native Indian is both completely readable and unreadable, is predictable and has only the basest of instincts, ones that are only superficially erased by appearance, style of speech, education. Bhabha argues that in moments in which the role of difference as threat or menace to colonial culture cannot be named, fetishistic nonsense is produced, such as the club discussion, because of the anomalous role of the colonies. This is something that Sara Suleri broadly agrees with in her discussion of English discourses of India. “If the limits of cultural knowledge dictate the curious genealogy of English India, then its chronology is intimately linked with a failure of ignorance to comprehend itself, or to articulate why the boundary of culture must generate such intransigent fears.”19 This “unreadability,” Suleri suggests, fetishized a colonial fear of its own cultural ignorance into the potential threats posed by an Indian alterity (p. 7). At the end of this chapter in the English club, Fielding is forced to choose sides; he can’t participate in the paranoia and propaganda, the rehearsal of colonial ambivalence and xenophobia, matched with a condescending and hypocritical attachment to the colonized that this meeting has produced. He must refuse the nonsense of colonial discourse and see beyond it to the real social relations that have produced the hysteria and paranoia of the ruling class. The same problem occurs in the desire for an approved version of the other that is created in colonial contexts through a desire for a creation of mimicry. As Ronnie says to Adela later, after this meeting at the club, “So you won’t go saying he’s innocent again, will you? For every servant I’ve got is a spy” (p. 209). Ronnie demonstrates Bhabha’s key phrase; the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined (p. 89). As Robert Young notes, the question of whether the “native” hates the colonizer is not just a question of projection and paranoia on their part. The colonizer’s perception “he hates me” is not the overinterpretation of paranoia, therefore, but an interpretation that is entirely correct.20 The

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problem comes in not knowing when, how and from whom to detect the difference between subservient obedience and “sly civility.” It is this colonial nonsense that Bhabha sees as metonymically figured by the events in the Marabar caves; the “Oboum,” the echo seemingly without origin, was started by a tiny scrape on the wall, a touch, producing an exorbitant, exaggerated, and endless and repeating copy that resounded in an inscrutable way both in the caves themselves and in Adela Quested’s head. For Bhabha this dramatizes an enactment of an undecidable, uncanny colonial present, which dramatizes “a play between colonial desire and colonial memory” that Bhabha links to “a narrative uncertainty of culture’s in-between” (p. 127), a kind of enunciatory disorder, which bears strong similarity to Derrida’s model of undecidability which arises from an inability to impose a unified reading on events that took place.

The Postcolonial Present In “Adagio,” his contribution to the collection of essays Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, which he and W. J. T. Mitchell edited in memory of Said, Bhabha recalls a formative moment in his relation to Said’s work.21 As a graduate student, reading a discussion between Said and Gauri Viswanathan about Harold Bloom’s Diacritics, he detected a sudden shift of tone in which Said “admits to performing a kind of acrobatics between parallel lives, as avant-garde critic and Palestinian exile.” This struck a chord with Bhabha’s sense of wrestling with his own conflicted beginnings. “I immediately identified with the precariousness of Said’s acrobatics, and learnt much from his ability to be otherwise engaged both politically and philosophically, yet to be capable of a critical assessment that was free and fair.”22 For Bhabha, grappling with his study of V. S. Naipaul, Said spoke to the quandary he found himself in: how to derive important diagnostic insights from Naipaul while navigating Naipaul’s political opinions on the history of the Third World “that can be provocative and offensive” (p. 9). Bhabha suggests that Said modeled a kind of “critical distance” that enabled him to mine Naipaul’s insights into “the psychic and affective structures that inform the politics of everyday life as it is lived in the midst of the protocols of colonial power and its contest of cultures” while still vigorously resisting as morally and politically objectionable, “as I do and Said certainly did” (p. 9), Naipaul’s ideological positions. Naipaul is an unlikely point of contact between the two theorists. Bhabha is referencing Said’s well-known distaste for Naipaul’s negative and unsympathetic accounts of newly independent postcolonial

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nations and their cultures, Yet, as Said notes, Naipaul’s subject was “extraterritoriality – the state of being neither here nor there, but rather, in-between things that cannot come together for him.”23 The concept of in-betweenness was taken up by Bhabha and mobilized as a key term in his critical lexicon for his model of how subject and cultures are formed. As he proposes: “It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest or cultural value are negotiated.”24 Subjects are then formed “in-between” or in excess of the sum of the “parts” of difference, that we might consider to be stabilized or knowable categories of race, gender, class, ethnicity. They are produced at the moment of interface or exchange or, as in Naipaul’s case, find themselves caught or fraught, sometimes in belated times and places, engaging in liminal and hybrid cultural interfaces with others as part of the postcolonial condition that forms the subject. “Cultures,” Bhabha asserts, “come to be represented by virtue of the process of iteration and translation through which their meanings are very vicariously addressed to – through – an Other. This erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures.”25 It is this “location” of culture, made possible through iteration, through the other, that informs his rethinking of Said’s work in Orientalism, yet, as this tribute to Said’s work shows, he credits his professional and personal relationship with Said’s thinking and literary analysis with having enabled him to read more effectively, providing him with “a critical terrain and an intellectual project.”26

Notes 1. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 2. Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 141. 3. Homi Bhabha, “Foreword,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, Hamid Naficy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. x. 4. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (London: Fourth Estate, 1989). 5. See www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/03/04/scrawling-in-the-mar gins/8ee1f262-ef29-41dc-b03d-0ba2e49f64d2/?utm_term=.58d3ad7f1bfc (accessed March 12, 2019). 6. See www.vulture.com/2016/04/identity-politics-that-forever-changed-art .html (accessed March 12, 2019). 7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 72. 8. Bhabha, Location, p. 71.

Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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Bhabha, Location, p. 73 Young, White Mythologies, p. 151. Bhabha, Location, p. 75 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” [1927], in On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 7: pp. 351–357. Bhabha, Location, p. 103. Fanny Stevenson, “Prefatory Note” to R. L. Stevenson, Island Nights Entertainments, Tusitala edition, vol. 8, pp. xii–xiii. Cited in R. L. Stevenson, South Sea Tales, ed. Rosyln Jolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Edward W. Said, Out of Place (London: Granta, 1999), p. 198. Bhabha, Location, p. 86. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 83. Forster, A Passage to India, pp. 190–191. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 2. Young, White Mythologies, p. 151. Homi K. Bhabha, “Adagio,” in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, eds. Homi K. Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Bhabha, “Adagio,” p. 8. Edward W. Said, “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000), pp. 98–104, p. 99. Bhabha, Location, p. 2. Bhabha, Location, p. 58. Bhabha, Location, p. xxvi.

chapter 9

The Harem: Gendering Orientalism Reina Lewis

Much of the work that sought to redress the masculinist approach of Said’s original polemic Orientalism took the harem as a starting point. The harem1 – and its mobile corollary the veil2 – was, I argued in 1996, the pivot of the Western Orientalist fantasy.3 While many accepted Said’s central tenet that Orientalist knowledges and cultural forms served to produce a situational superiority for the West in which the East was rendered as feminized, supine, civilizationally inferior and available for (imperial and capitalist) penetration, the gendered presumptions and exclusions which underlay Said’s formula have in the last four decades come under sustained and fruitful investigation.4 Said himself began to address gender more directly in his subsequent volume Culture and Imperialism.5 This essay reflects on some key points of theoretical and methodological interest that have arisen in the now large and diverse fields of feminist and postcolonial cultural and historical studies of Orientalism. It is my contention that we consider the historicity of studies of Orientalism post-Said as part of the development of interconnecting research areas and forms of cultural and political activism. These areas of activity in and out of the academy are shaped by micro and macro political events, including the advent of neoliberal globalized late capitalism. In relation to the harem and veiling in particular, studies and creative practice are resituated postOrientalism by new articulations and understandings of gender, ethnicity, class, religion and sexuality. The Western fantasy of a sequestered, sexualized domain was often based on the model of the Ottoman imperial serail in Constantinople.6 This model of seclusion was not only about women and sexuality; the imperial harem served to ensure imperial power through managing access to the secluded body of the sultan at the apex of a widespread householdoffice model of governance. In this context, as Peirce has discussed, women of the imperial family living in harem seclusion at times wielded – and were 166

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known to wield – immense power,7 with women of the elite in lesser degree also able to exert influence through their segregated networks. Melding research on the historic harem and its representation with new currents in the understanding of gender and sexuality, Peirce also reminds scholars that: The spectrum of Middle Eastern sexualities was not limited to female and male. The biological sex binary was both undermined and reinforced by the indeterminate sexualities of transvestites, eunuchs, and hermaphrodites. What these groups shared was an association with the boundaries established by sacralised, imperialised, and/or gendered space.8

As Lad elaborates, eunuchs played a central role in the maintenance of architectural and social divisions that governed the imperial harem’s internal and external boundaries.9 Like other types of slaves and manumitted slaves/servants, eunuchs remained a feature of non-imperial segregated households into the twentieth century and feature in women’s accounts of their harem lives. Critical approaches to harem representation have been informed by the development of queer theory in the 1990s and the more recent transgender theory and activism in the 2000s. In the same way, attention to women’s participation in cultural forms previously relegated to the status of “minor” or middlebrow, such as memoir, popular fiction, photography and periodicals, has added also to the validation of forms of “history from below” in the understanding of the imperial record and the conceptualization of literary and art historical canons. Similarly, the development in the last two decades of a largely women-led Muslim modest fashion industry and related fashion media in print and online brings new modes of cultural creativity and mass media participation into the frame. None of this is without contestation: reviewing publications in preparation for this article, I was struck afresh by how “live” the field is, and I present my observations in the mode of “work in progress.” This may seem at odds with the aspiration to being definitive that conventionally accompanies the honour of writing for a Cambridge series, but – in a still mobile field, and especially at a time when wars and conflicts in, and understood to be related to, the regions known as the “Orient” are marking and ruining lives around the globe, and in which the renewed attention to the figure of the veiled and unveiled woman has been central to political debate on all sides – the need persists for scholarly and political dialogue that allows us to revise our opinions, to hear those of others and to engage in hard thinking.

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The “Real” Harem and the Women who Lived There: Finding Traces, Identifying Sources In riposte to the mainly male-produced sources under consideration in Orientalism, scholars turned attention to cultural forms created by women in a shift away from a focus on images of women, demanding that women’s role in histories of imperialism and of resistance be included. Early examinations of gender and Orientalism were supported by feminist studies on how the intersection of class with imperial and colonial processes of racialization played a structural role in the construction of white, as well as black and minority ethnic, gender and sexual identities in the West.10 The gender discrimination in the West that positioned even elite women as peripheral to formal imperial power did not mean that they did not participate in or benefit from imperialized relations at home and abroad: in Britain, as in the USA, suffrage and feminist campaigns in the nineteenth century relied overtly on imperialized claims to racial (and class) civilizational superiority. In relation to Orientalism specifically, the development of arguments about the mutually constituting role of the social categories gender, race and class, and the variable ways in which Western women were able to access Saidian positions of superiority in relation to the Orient, came back time and again to the harem. Understood within the logic of Orientalism as the one place in which Western women had an advantage over Western men, women’s presumed ability to claim to see into the sequestered harem domain could be a valuable asset. Able to augment men’s accounts, Western women – from Lady Mary Montagu in the early eighteenth century onward11 – leveraged their presumed gendered access to create interest and market for their accounts. For women living in Islamicate societies,12 especially during processes of modernization and anticolonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the segregations of harem and veiling were also often central to campaigns for gender and social equality at home (as also for progressive men).13 For women classified as “Oriental,” the harem and the veil set the terms for their interventions into Western discourse, providing their unique selling point of exoticized difference. In the diverse modernities of the “Muslim world,” the image of the Muslim woman – veiled, unveiled, sequestered or “free” – continued to frame and be fought over in internal national and regional understandings of nation and society. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the stereotype of the odalisque, the oppressed yet sexualized inmate of the Oriental harem, continues to

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structure rescue narratives of civilizational alterity that inform attitudes to contemporary Muslim women and men. In the colonial era, as Spivak famously described in relation to India, systemic colonial violence was cloaked in a rescue narrative (concerning for example sati) framed as “white men are saving brown women from brown men.”14 Today, Razak argues, this formula is repurposed through postcolonial Western renditions of Muslim alterity into the twinned figures of the “imperilled Muslim woman” and the “dangerous Muslim man” – a mode of governance based on the construction of Muslims as a religiously defined civilizational other that extends the West’s “ongoing management of racial populations,”15 obscuring, as Heffernan argues, “the rationalist aspects of Islam and the religious aspects of Western [Enlightenment] reason.”16 For women from Western and Eastern cultures, Muslim and nonMuslim, the desire to present the reality of harem and veiling experience has been a recurrent preoccupation. Different attitudes to the evidential basis of women’s sources and to the ideological impact of women’s interventions has been central to critical debates about women’s Orientalism. Mills early pointed out that one of the reasons why white Western women’s travel writing was ignored by cultural historians was that their demonstration of allegiance to the imperial project was often patchy – the result of their experience of partial access to forms of racialized imperial power.17 For Yeğenoğlu, the citational nature of women’s Orientalism keeps it within the Orientalist frame.18 Others discuss the ambivalence and collusion along with the contestatory potential of Western women’s accounts,19 focusing on the shifting power relationships between Western and Eastern women in the contact zone, to use Pratt’s term,20 of harem interactions. Scholars newer to the field balk at the binarisms that structured Said’s account and contest their invocation in follow-up studies as forms of essentialism.21 That many historical Orientalist sources do construct a binary divide between East and West is a matter of record. So too is the contemporary revitalization of essentialized binaries in the clash of civilizations thesis mobilized to justify the war in Afghanistan to rescue Afghan women from (presumed Taliban-imposed) burqas.22 But critical responses do not have to reinscribe binary views in the analysis of such material. It is to be expected that earlier research maintained binary visions; this is common to other recuperative histories concerned with gender, or race/ethnicity, or sexuality. Feminist art history had first to “find” the women missing from the historical record before art historians were able to develop complex analyses of if and how the gendered point of origin determines the form

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and reception of visual artifacts. As in feminist literary criticism, this process of criticality has had to respond to several shifts in the conceptualization of woman and of gender as historicized and located social categories. Historiographically, the sensitive endeavor of creating minority histories, as in the reconsideration of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness as a trans rather than proto-lesbian narrative, can unseat previously treasured reclamations.23 In relation to the harem, and to critical approaches to gender and Orientalism, as layers of research build on an ever-expanding set of resources, the complexity of gendered experience of the harem’s socializing spatiality has come fruitfully to encompass multiple approaches and analyses. Feminist interventions into debates about Orientalism focusing on the harem and the veil have followed two interconnected tracks. One provides information about the harem as the historic physical space in which many women and children (including many non-Muslims) lived within Islamicate segregating societies, drawing on historical and sociological research from Middle Eastern women’s studies.24 A picture emerged of the harem as a spatial device of household organization partnered with forms of dress – under the rubric veiling – that, as Mernissi argued schematically, aimed to extend the “protection” of the harem beyond the physical space of the segregated household.25 Writing about the spatiality of contemporary veiling fashions, cultural geographer Secor’s concept of veiling regimes also helps understand historically how clothing has projected the harem’s gender-segregated social relations onto bodies beyond those who live in, work in or visit harems. Operating within and beyond the space of the harem, veiling regimes are “spatially realized sets of hegemonic rules and norms regarding women’s veiling, which are themselves produced by specific constellations of power” and which vary in terms of “formality, enforcement, stability, and contestation.”26 Historical research has provided details and images of different types of veils worn by Muslim and other religious and religio-ethnic communities and has tracked changing fashions in the forms of garments and types of cover, as well as the enactment and – always uneven – implementation of sumptuary legislation.27 From its pre-Islamic beginning, veiling has often served to secure and signal social status rather than only or primarily identifying religion or expressing personal piety. The veil has been a form of fashionable display with potential to enhance family status (or threaten family honor), and it has served as individual self-fashioning in the context of regional nationalisms and modernities and postmodernities in contexts of Muslim minority and diaspora life.

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The second strand of feminist research analyses the development and use of the harem and the veiled/unveiled woman as tropes within imperial and anticolonial cultures and discourses. This continued chronologically to evaluate how the figure of woman – veiled and unveiled – remained central to the articulation of regional nationalisms and self-imaging of postcolonial states. Shifting policies about revealing and concealing the female body impacted variably on women during the course of a lifetime and across generations.28 These approaches provide insights into how stereotypes about Oriental women have historically played a major role in the development of Occidental attitudes to racialized and religious difference at home and abroad, as well as in the self-representation of “Oriental” societies and their diverse populations. The methodological inspiration that Orientalism provided – to “study the interrelations between society, history, and textuality”29 – contained from the start the potential for research into diverse forms of textuality. Providing historical accounts of segregated life, like other projects of restorative history (queer, women’s, black), often requires the use of previously disregarded sources to track the histories, lives lived, of those not conventionally memorialized. Recuperative histories also often require the assertion of the validity of different, sometimes minor-register, cultural and material sources as worthy of serious scholarly attention. Feminist responses to Orientalism mounted new analyses of canonical texts within literature and other dominant Western cultural forms and brought new types of source and practices into the purview of scholarly attention. Characterized by interdisciplinarity, discussions about the harem and veiling were not simply additive – providing new examples in different genres or forms or looking at sources created by women rather than by men. In aggregate, feminist responses to Said changed the way the field was conceptualized in terms of sources and analysis. Historical studies of the harem dovetailed with research on the wider class take-up of gendered imperial popular and commercial cultures30 and engaged with widening understandings of the extent to which Orientalism might be seen to have provided “inspiration”31 across art and design rather than being regarded solely within a frame of cultural appropriation or imperializing will.32 Research in the years since Orientalism has established alternative “canons” of women artists, elevating to serious critical attention major minor figures such as Henriette Browne and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and re-shaping the contours of histories of travel literature by bringing to light the many voices and different strains of harem literature, now

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established as a subgenre in its own right. If early women’s accounts were by aristocratic women like Lady Montagu, the nineteenth century saw an increase in middle-class women visiting the Orient. Most initially traveled to accompany male relatives, as with Sophia Lane Poole, who traveled to Egypt in 1833 with her brother, the explorer Edward William Lane; her travelogue The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844) was, she tells her readers, specifically commissioned by her brother to provide additional information on harem life such as “was only accessible to a lady.”33 Subsequent technological and market advances brought journeys to the Middle East within the realm of possibility for middle-class women. Traveling in growing numbers, many women, such as Emmeline Lott,34 were employed as governesses in royal and elite harems; others served as missionaries, often teaching in the missionary schools to which the progressive Middle Eastern elite were sending their daughters by the fin de siècle. Each occupation created further opportunities to publish observations of Oriental – largely female – life.35 As Melman demonstrated, women’s accounts of a wider range of households visited particularized the harem, domesticating the fantasy stereotype with details of more modest homes and a varied range of social encounters. With Murray’s 1847 guidebook institutionalizing the harem visit as a touristic must-see, by 1871 Annie Jane Harvey was reporting that “every year it is more difficult for passing travellers to gain admittance to the harems.”36 Though the interaction with Western visitors could create opportunities, as I discuss further on in this chapter, Ottoman women record frustration at entertaining foreigners, especially when local distinctions of rank were not regarded by the increasingly less elite Western visitor as noted by Musbah Haidar – herself of elevated status as a sherifa of Mecca.37 Western women evaluated the gender relations of segregated life in relation to their own changing concerns: the aristocratic Lady Mary Montagu emphasized that, unlike women in Britain, Muslim women were able to inherit property; middle-class women in the nineteenth century seized on domestic conventions allowing Muslim wives to refuse their husbands entry to their chambers.38 Running alongside women’s occasional envy for the advantages of some elements of Islamic gender conventions was a recurrent emphasis on the superiority of Western civilizational norms. Identifying a long-running strand of feminist Orientalism within Western women’s poetry and fiction, Zonana demonstrates how white Western women used Orientalist stereotypes of sexualized slavery in the harem metaphorically to counter the incipient despotism they faced from Western men.39

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Ottoman women themselves began to challenge Western stereotypes about harem life from the late nineteenth century, as female literacy – often in European languages – increased in the region.40 Elite women, like the Ottoman author Melek Hanoum in 187241 and Emily Said-Ruette from Zanzibar in 1888,42 began to produce memoirs and what we might now call “faction” for consumption at home and abroad. In the early twentieth century, as the quantity of Western women’s harem literature peaked, Western readers could read (in English, French and German) accounts penned by a generation of Ottoman women who witnessed, and contributed to, the transition from the multigenerational polygynous harem household to the smaller apartments of the nucleated family. As seen in the memoirs of the Ottoman-Turkish feminist, novelist and politician Halidé Edib,43 the shift away from the sequestered world of eunuchs and slaves into companionate nuclear family life came to mark personal modernity for the progressive Ottoman and regional elite.44 Demands for women’s emancipation were instrumentalized in movements for progressive social change. An emphasis on (limited) women’s rights, often emblematized by forms of unveiling, was characteristic of Egyptian anticolonialism and early nationalism,45 as in Ottoman campaigns against sultanic repression. The visibilization of the modern unveiled woman continued in the gender reforms of the early Turkish Republic after 1923, though the state’s top-down approach to social change displaced and suppressed previously autonomous Ottoman women’s organizations. During the last years of Western and Ottoman imperial rule in the Middle East, North Africa and the Arabian peninsula, the developing women’s press, the nationalist press and the growing market for memoir, fiction and popular literature provided opportunities for the dissemination of women’s work and often for nascent careers in literature and politics.46 As literacy rates increased and publication modes diversified, women of Muslim and other religio-ethnic backgrounds were increasingly able to discuss and dispute the relative merits of different models of gender, domesticity and society. More recent research finds ways to track the lives of non-elite and enslaved women, providing further detail for the emerging picture of gender relations and living arrangements in the region.47 As a genre, harem literature foregrounded accounts of cross-cultural exchange. Harem encounters between Western and Middle Eastern women sometimes brought new examples of the genre into being, as when British feminist Grace Ellison brokered publications for Zeyneb Hanoum and Melek Hanoum, the pen names of the two Ottoman sisters

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who had been the inspiration for Pierre Loti’s 1906 novel Les Desenchantées.48 Women’s contribution to harem literature and travel literature crossed disciplinary and media divides, with women artists illustrating (and sometimes writing their own) travel accounts.49 With Orientalist stereotypes prevailing through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, harem literature continued to be a field of literary endeavor for women, seen in the crossover work of Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi’s “memoir” telling a version of her segregated childhood in Morocco50 or in the more recent popular literature format of journalists’ accounts of their experiences in the Middle East and the Gulf – mirrored also by the near-endless appetite of newspapers for the inevitably sensationalist, even when well-meaning, formula of “my day in a veil/burqa” commissioned from non-Muslim women reporters.

Sexuality and Desire: Fantasy and Power The sensationalist nature of Western interest in the harem and the veil was well known to women from the Middle East and other segregating societies: “delete for ever that misunderstood word ‘harem,’ and speak of us in our Turkish ‘homes’” was the cri de coeur from Halidé Edib relayed by Grace Ellison on her visit to Constantinople in 1913.51 In the final quarter of the century, as researchers responded to Orientalism, feminists were still trying to debunk the sexualized stereotype of the harem as a brothel-like domain in which one man – generally elevated in Western eyes to the status of sultan – despotically controlled and had sexual access to a multitude of women. Noting the relative rarity of polygyny (in decline already by the 1880s),52 research repositioned the stereotype of the isolated harem as a familial and social domain in which women lived with multigenerational extended family members: a permeable space whose boundaries fostered visits from friends and encompassed trade, work and welfare activities that took women’s influence beyond the segregated domain. As Melman noted, matters of sexuality were not absent from women’s representations; narratives of family life often centered on social and sexual reproduction, focusing on maternity, child-rearing, marriage and divorce. For Roberts, the “prosaic narrative of the harem as a social realm” can itself serve as a “catalyst” for exotic female fantasy.53 In the contact zone of the harem visit, when women often did not speak the same language, the mutual display and exchange of clothing and adornment (sometimes dressing each other up in each other’s outfits) inserted, she argues, Western women into the visuality of the harem. This key element of

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women’s ethnographic reportage allowed them to depict themselves as the object of the Ottoman women’s gaze. This makes an important adjunct to the viewing strategy analyzed in Nochlin’s foundational art historical response to Said, which argued that the structure and technique of Orientalist paintings (like those of French artist Gérôme) obscured rather than foregrounded the presence of Western observers to the scene.54 Gérôme, and others, Nochlin proposed, presented the Oriental scene and peoples as tableaux of exotica in which the viewing position of the unseen artists hid the Western – putatively heterosexual male – viewer of the painting, who was able therefore to take a prurient interest in the scenes depicted without being seen as party to them. This convention was harder to achieve, I had argued, for women artists, whose presence in the harem was the guarantor of value for their presumed-to-be-realistic accounts, in a context where Western women’s art inevitably faced a gender-specific reception. I had also argued that literature allowed more flexibility than painting, because when Western women’s harem literature did directly invoke the perverse sexualities associated with the stereotypical harem, women authors were able to draw on the conventions of third-person reporting, presenting unrespectable events at one remove, rather than as the direct – and potentially compromising – experience of first-person witness.55 This initially left me with a dilemma about those Western women artists whose work did appear overtly sexualized, in relation to which subsequently I have been able to develop my thinking through engagement with research on the history of non-Western sexualities and approaches which reintroduce into the harem not only the sexuality of human relations but also of women’s fantasy. Roberts finds that Western women’s depictions of themselves being handled and scrutinized on harem visits allowed a narcissistic gratification by “establishing their own priority in the harem.”56 Corrective attention to women’s fantasy re-saturates the harem with sexuality, but it does not reinscribe male heterosexuality as the definitional norm. Rather, it leads to the complication of the nature of desire and object choice, foregrounding the polymorphous perversity of female heterosexuality,57 male homoeroticism,58 the lesbian gaze, and the articulation of nonnormative masculinities and nonbinary gender identities.59 The harem, and the depiction of the Orientalized woman, and man, emerge as sources of potential viewer/ reader pleasure far beyond the putative heterosexual male gaze.60 The reconceptualization of the complexities of sexualities and genders in relation to the harem and its representation is informed by developments in four related historiographical fields: an emphasis in studies of

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imperialism on the multiplicity of and competition between different forms of empire and imperialism; the shift in studies of modernity and modernism toward understandings of multiple modernities and related cultural forms;61 changes in studies of Orientalism that include attention to the multiple Orientalisms and internal processes of regional Orientalization that were themselves often integral to the staging of regional or “non-Western” modernities;62 and the challenge provided to the history of sexuality’s initially Euro-American presumptions by recent exploration of “non-Western” sexualities, most specifically those identifying shifts in the sexual organization of Middle Eastern and Islamicate societies as key to the modernization project. As Najmabadi shows for nineteenth-century Iran, the shock of being subjected to a Western imperial gaze that could not comprehend the alternative genders and sexualities of Islamicate segregated society partly determined the secularizing and Westernizing nature of processes of modernity.63 Also in the Ottoman empire over a longer period, as Ze’evi discusses, self-image was tarnished by awareness of how the West viewed the segregating world.64 In each case, modernization relied on and brought about a shift from previous models of male homosociality and homoeroticism into a characteristic male heterosociality and heteroeroticism in which changes in the licit object of adult male desire (from the bearded youth to the virginal girl) impacted on the lives of women as well as men.65 Attention to the history of different gender and sexuality histories, and the constitutive nature of interaction between East and West, further widens the frame of harem studies to include diverse forms of racialized sexual and gender subjecthood and related pleasures in cultural consumption then and now. This dovetails with forms of queer criticality that allow for the investigation of queer – in its widest sense – pleasures in cultural consumption without having to project anachronistic sexual identities back onto cultural producers or their contemporaneous audiences.66 This brings to the fore subjects such as the eunuch and the harem guard, not conventionally discussed as part of the sexualized vista of the harem, foregrounding intersectional analyses of the sexualization of racial/ethnic difference for diverse viewing subjects.67 Central to considerations of the multiple forms of pleasure made possible by representations of the harem is a refreshed understanding of the complexity of power relations inside and in interaction with the sociality of the harem. For Western women visitors, the contact zone of the harem was a space of co-presence in which relations were determined by diverse forms of local and international and transnational power. Research reveals the

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relative power of the Ottoman female elite in shaping the nature of the Western women’s interaction – though the range of their influence might be limited. The elite status of Ottoman princess Nazli Hanim gave her the upper hand when negotiating the terms under which Elisabeth JerichauBaumann could paint her portrait, but, once distant from the royal circuit of power, the artist was free to paint unsanctioned portraits and exhibit Nazli’s image in public.68

Technology and Representation Arguing from a Saidian position that photography was central to Orientalist knowledge production and instrumental in the creation of a wider cross-class appetite for “images of the Orient,” Behdad emphasizes that images of Oriental women (of all types) were the most frequent topic.69 Mass dissemination of the photographic image “democratized” the possibility of possessing the eroticized other,70 widening the appeal of Orientalism. Though early approaches to Orientalism and photography, such as Alloula’s, may have disproportionately drawn attention to pornographic renditions of Oriental women,71 it is clear that images of Oriental women found a lucrative market (though it was more often Jewish or Armenian women posing as Muslim harem inmates than Muslim Ottomans themselves). Photographs played a key role in the genre of harem literature. Grace Ellison, writing initially for publication in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, knew that she had to include photographs but found her shot of a harem interior rejected because its inclusion of European furniture challenged the imperialist nostalgia72 of Western readers.73 The Ottomans took up photographic technologies with alacrity, as private individuals74 and as a part of state power and surveillance. As Çelik demonstrates, the use of photography was part and parcel of the development of Ottoman modernity. Often operationalizing presentations of “modern” forms of gender for men as well as women, photographs were created for the internal communication of preferred versions of progress and for deployment abroad to influence the attitudes of Western powers.75 Photography also figured in Ottoman Orientalism, such as the folkloric costume album produced by Osman Hamdi with Marie de Launay for the 1873 Vienna Universal Exposition, which presented rural, peasant, regional and minority populations though a lens of nostalgic alterity. Cautioning that disproportionate focus on the albums misrepresents the vastness of the photographic record, Çelik and Eldem contend that new methodologies are needed

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alongside new critical approaches to the diversity of forms of production, dissemination and consumption.76 For studies concerned with women’s accounts of the harem and gender – a field initially characterized by a scarcity of representations rather than a superfluity – the potential size of the photographic record brings challenges and opportunities. Central to the creation and dissemination of photographs of the Orient were networks established between Western artists and writers and local photographers such as Abdullah Frères and J. Pascal Sebah.77 These relationships – enabling, exploitative, volatile and shifting – can be mirrored in the (at present still) less extensively documented links and networks between Ottoman women of all ethnicities and religions and Western travelers and artists, in which images were acquired or commissioned from local professional photographers and/or taken by women themselves. New archive finds promise further insights into women’s use of photography in self-fashioning and fantasy, such as Yasmin Taan’s preliminary investigation of amateur photographer Marie el-Khazen’s work in Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s.78

The Political Mobilization of the Female Body Veiled and Unveiled For studies of gender and Orientalism now, the reactivation of religion as a sign of civilization divide has brought new urgency to the historicized study of the harem and veiling. While making the historical case for the changing significance and mutable meanings of veiling is of value in itself, it also has a political purpose in the face of the widespread resignification of veiling as an exclusively Muslim practice. Several decades after the start of the midtwentieth-century global Islamic revival, Muslim women around the world challenge attempts to naturalize the veil, notably the headscarf or hijab, as the litmus test of female Muslim piety.79 This applies equally to the many Muslim women who have chosen to wear the headscarf in Muslim-minority countries; as Leila Ahmed has demonstrated for a younger generation of Muslim women raised in the USA, religious rights – to veil or not veil – are championed as universal human rights.80 If modest dress for women in early piety movements was often anticommercial and anti-fashion, different now is the expansion of a commercial market for Muslim modest fashion.81 Initially online and niche, led by women creative entrepreneurs and accompanied by a lively Muslim modest fashion blogosphere expanding to all social media platforms, the Muslim spend is now being promoted as of interest to global brands

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seeking to reach a youthful and growing populations.82 Whilst the enthusiasm for modest fashion and the valorization of choice is to some extent an “embrace of neoliberalism,”83 the affordances of online and digital media have created new opportunities for women to intervene in stereotypes about Muslim female life. Demonstrating intra- and interfaith connectivity and contestation that parallels the cross-cultural characteristics of harem literature, Muslim and modest fashion commentary goes far beyond the narrow confines usually attributed to fashion-speak, requiring scholars to think past the (now widely discredited) secularization thesis and take seriously the social and personal role of religion84 and ethno-religious cultures and the interaction with the market. In the face of Orientalist presumption that veiling is always and only a sign of patriarchal oppression, women participating in and commentating on forms of Muslim modest fashion – including those who do not cover – have created new forms of community on- and offline, premised on an ideal of inclusivity and respect for women’s different choices. The creative entrepreneurs and fashion mediators who create images of Muslim women on- and offline must, like their predecessors in harem literature and visual culture, navigate the opportunities and constraints of an Orientalist market.

Notes 1. Whilst many of the key points about segregated life apply to other territories, most of my examples in this chapter are related to the Ottoman empire and the ethnically diverse population that made up the population of its dominions. 2. In this chapter, I use the terms “veil” and “veiling” generically to refer to the many different garments that have been, and are, used to achieve forms of Muslim and modest dressing. For further discussion, and for a consideration of how popular non-Muslim understandings of the “veil” shift between head and face covering, see Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 3. Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996). 4. On the impact of women’s absence from Said’s conceptualization of Orientalism, see Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (London: Virago, 1990). 5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). 6. See Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso 1998). 7. Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 8. Leslie P. Peirce, “Writing Histories of Sexuality in the Middle East,” American Historical Review 114:5 (December 2009): pp. 1325–1339, p. 1334.

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9. Jateen Lad, “Panoptic Bodies: Black Eunuchs as Guardians of the Topkapi Harem,” in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, ed. Marilyn Booth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 136–176. 10. See, for example, Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 11. Montagu’s account of her visit to the Ottoman Empire in 1717 was circulated privately on her return and published – to immediate public success – in several editions from 1763. See Teresa Heffernan, Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). 12. Marshall Hodgson coined the term “Islamicate” for use in relation to cultural and social phenomena that “would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.” Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 3: p. 59. 13. See also, on India and Britain, Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996). 14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 66–111. 15. Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 6,; original emphasis. 16. Heffernan, Veiled Figures, p. 10. 17. Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991). 18. Meyda Yeðenoðlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19. See, for example, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 20. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 21. Aimillia Mohd Ramli, “Contemporary Criticism on the Representation of Female Travellers of the Ottoman Harem in the 19th Century: A Review,” Intellectual Discourse 19 (2011): 263–279; Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” A Journal of Women’s Studies 32:2 (2011): pp. 31–63.

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22. Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75:2 (Spring 2002): pp. 339–354. 23. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, eds., Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on “The Well of Loneliness” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 24. See, for example, Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 25. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male–Female Dynamics in Muslim Society, 2nd ed. (London: Saqi Books, 1985). 26. Anna J. Secor, “The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women’s Dress, Mobility and Islamic Knowledge,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9:1 (2002): pp. 5–22, p. 8. 27. Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women. The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860–1950 (London: Quartet, 1988); Jennifer Heath, ed., The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 28. See, for example, Winifred Woodhull, “Unveiling Algeria,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): pp. 112–131. 29. Said, Orientalism, p. 24. 30. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Imperial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995). 31. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 32. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 33. Sophie Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1844), in Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Sourcebook, eds. Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 79. 34. Emmeline Lott, The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1866). 35. See C. Goffman, “Introduction,” in Behind Turkish Lattices: The Story of a Turkish Woman’s Life, ed. H. Donaldson Jenkins (1911, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005), pp. v–xxix. Missionaries rarely managed to convert Muslims, succeeding mainly in converting other types of Christians. 36. Annie Jane Tennant Harvey, Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871), p. 8. 37. Musbah Haidar, Arabesque (London: Hutchinson, 1944). 38. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718– 1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). 39. Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs 18:3 (Spring 1993): pp. 592–617. 40. It was common in this period for elite women to become literate in the “accomplishment” languages of Europe rather than in Arabic or Osmanli,

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

reina lewis since these were forms of literacy associated with clerical and legal roles, neither of which were open formally to women. Melek-Hanoum, Thirty Years in the Harem: or the Autobiography of MelekHanoum, Wife of H. H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872). Emily Said-Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: Princess Salme bin Said ibn Sultan al-Bu Saidi of Oman and Zanzibar (London: Ward and Downey, 1888). Halidé Adivar Edib, Memoirs of Halidé Edib (Piscataway, NJ: Giorgias Books, 2005 [1926]); The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halidé Edib (London: John Murray, 1928). Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Margot Badran, Feminism, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Beth Baron, “Liberated Bodies and Saved Soul: Freed African Slave Girls and Missionaries in Egypt,” in African Communities in Asia and the Mediterranean: Between Integration and Conflict, ed. E. R. Toledano (Halle: Max Plank Institute and Africa World Press, 2011). Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, ed. Grace Ellison (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Books, 2004 [1913]); Melek Hanoum and G. Ellison, Abdul Hamid’s Daughter: The Tragedy of an Ottoman Princess (London: Methuen, 1913). See, for example, Zeynep Inankur, “Mary Adelaide Walker,” in The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism, eds. Zeynep Inankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011); M. Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within (New York: Doubleday, 1994). Grace Ellison, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (Piscataway, NJ: Giorgias Books, 2007 [1915]), p. 17. Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households. Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 65. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America (May 1983): pp. 118– 131, pp. 187–191. See my discussion of Emmeline Lott in Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, p. 91. Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem 1800–1875 (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses: 2002).

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58. Joseph A. Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 59. See, for example, essays in Joan DelPlato and Julie F. Codell, eds., Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (London: Routledge, 2016). 60. On women patrons of Ingres’ odalisques, see Carol Ockman, Ingres’ Eroticised Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 61. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129:1 (Winter 2000): pp. 1–29. 62. Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107:3 (June 2002): pp. 768–796. 63. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 64. Often accessed by reading Western travel writing: Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 65. Najmabadi considers that male heterosociality retains versions of homosociality only by disavowing homoeroticism, screening same-sex behaviors as sexually innocent. 66. James Smalls, “Public Face, Private Thoughts: Fetish, Interracialism, and the Homoerotic in Carl van Vechten’s Photographs,” in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. D. Bright (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 78–102. 67. James Smalls, “Menace at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” in DelPlato and Codell, Orientalism, Eroticism, pp. 25–54. 68. Roberts, Intimate Outsiders. 69. Ali Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph,” in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, eds. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), p. 18. For an alternative argument that the interactivity of photographing human subjects contains within it the possibility of disrupting the panoptic imperial gaze, see Christopher Pinney, “What’s Photography Got To Do with It?,” in Behdad and Gartlan, Photography’s Orientalism, pp. 33–52. 70. Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph,” p. 28. 71. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). For a critique, see Nancy Micklewright, A Victorian Traveller in the Middle East: The Photography and Travel Writing of Annie Lady Brassey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 72. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 73. The photograph was later repurposed in Zeyneb Hanoum’s book A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, appearing with Ellison’s editorial caption

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75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

reina lewis under the title A Corner of a Turkish Harem of Today, Zeyneb Hanoum, 1913, p. 192. See Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright, “Viewing Each Other: Visual Dialogues,” in Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Sourcebook, eds. Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 31–63. Zeynep Çelik, “Photographing Mundane Modernity,” in Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire 1840–1914, eds. Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: Koç University Publications, 2015). See Çelik and Eldem, Camera Ottomana, Introduction. See also Micklewright, “Orientalism and Photography,” in The Poetics and Politics of Place, ed. Inankur et al., chapter 6. Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph”; Roberts, Intimate Outsiders and Istanbul Exchanges. Yasmine Nachabe (Taan), “An Alternative Representation of Femininity in 1920s Lebanon: Through the Mise-en-abîme of a Masculine Space,” New Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2011), www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/wp-content/uploa ds/2011/06/NMES2011QSNachabe.pdf (accessed February 24, 2017). Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa, “As Muslim Women, We Actually Ask You Not To Wear the Hijab in the Name of Interfaith Solidarity,” Washington Post, December 21, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/ 21/as-muslim-women-we-actually-ask-you-not-to-wear-the-hijab-in-the-nameof-interfaith-solidarity/ (accessed April 5, 2016). Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion; Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010). See Aliakbar Jafari and Özlem Sandikci, eds., Islam, Marketing and Consumption (London: Routledge, 2016). Heffernan, Veiled Figures, p. 139. See also Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo, eds., Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and America (Oxford: Berg, 2013). Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

chapter 10

Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing Ali Behdad

In his posthumous satirical Dictionnaire des idées reçues, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) defined an Orientalist as “a man who has traveled a lot.”1 Flaubert may have been lampooning the cliché figure of the Orientalist, but his mocking characterization aptly captures the intimate relation between Orientalism and Middle East travel writing. Indeed, at the origin of Orientalism are the numerous travelogues by European travelers to the Middle East. Although Europe’s geopolitical interest in the Middle East dates back at least to the days of crusades in the eleventh century, starting in the late seventeenth century European travelers to the Middle East produced a substantial body of literature about the region, describing its geography, people, languages and cultures, which facilitated the rise of modern Orientalism both as an academic discipline and as a discourse of power. Indeed, modern Orientalism would have not been possible without travel literature, for, to understand and write about the Orient, Europeans had to first explore the region as travelers. In turn, by the 1870s when Flaubert wrote his encyclopedic entry, Orientalist discourse informed every account of Middle Eastern societies, as nineteenth-century travelers relied on the works of their precursors and professional Orientalists to represent the so-called Orient. As such, Orientalism and Middle Eastern travel writing maintained a symbiotic relationship that made the region epistemologically visible and exotic. In what follows, I elaborate the discursive and political implications of this relationship by considering how European travelogues constructed the Middle East as a site of exoticism and thus participated in the production of Euro-imperialist subjectivity. I will first offer a discussion of Orientalism as a discourse of power and then consider several representative examples of travel writing from the late seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries to elaborate the rhetorical and narrative techniques they employ in representing the Orient as well as discursive shifts that occurred during this period. In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said mapped the political implications of Europe’s exoticist fascination with the Middle East (or 185

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“the Orient”). He used the notion of “Orientalism” to mean three things: (i) the work of anyone who teaches and writes about the Middle East; (ii) a “style of thought” marked by a hierarchical relation between the Occident and the Orient; and (iii) “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient.”2 While the second definition is general enough to accommodate a whole range of writers from Aeschylus and Dante to Victor Hugo and Sir Richard Burton, the first and third definitions more particularly address the rise of modern Orientalist discourse since the late eighteenth century in Europe, a discourse that was more specifically tied to Europe’s colonial interests and history in the Middle East. Drawing on both Michel Foucault’s critique of pure knowledge and the interdependence of power/knowledge as well as Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Said demonstrated for the first time that Orientalist representations of the Middle East were not objective or disinterested representations of the region; rather, they were the backbone of a relationship of power, of the West’s colonial domination over the Middle East. Orientalism, in other words, is both “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts” and “a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different . . . world.”3 Mining a complex and plural field of discursive practices in Western modern culture, he argued that the Orient was thus an integral part of Europe’s material civilization and cultural self-fashioning. Although Said’s study often presents a monolithic view of Orientalism, a purely ideological and coherent discourse of power that leaves little room for the possibility of difference among various modes of Orientalist representation, it has nonetheless provided readers with an important theoretical framework to study European travel writing by shifting the focus from textuality to historicity and from the aesthetic to the political.4 Indeed, Orientalism, if viewed as a complex and heterogeneous network of representations that transformed over time, is indispensable to the understanding of Middle Eastern travel writing. Whether considered in the context of their production or their reception, European travelogues to the region can be meaningfully studied only if they are considered in terms of geopolitical distinctions, cultural assumptions and economic as well as political interests about the Middle East. In insisting that Orientalism offers a crucial perspective from which to comprehend these works and their cultural significance, I do not mean to suggest that European travel narratives of the Middle East should be viewed merely as a reflection of Europeans’ racial prejudice or that they simply validated Euro-imperial dominance

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over the region. Rather, while considering the ways in which European representations of the Oriental other are implicated in relations of power, it is crucial to attend to their discursive heterogeneity and historical specificities. Orientalist discourse depends on a principle of discontinuity that makes possible the production of a whole series of representations in different historical periods. Therefore, European travel writing constitutes not a monolithic discourse but a complex web of representations marked by difference, ambivalence and heterogeneity. Let us consider some examples of European travelogues from different historical periods to explore their relationships with Orientalism. Although Orientalism achieved its cultural hegemony in the nineteenth century, travel narratives of the Middle East date back much earlier. In the seventeenth century, for example, the British traveler Thomas Coryat (1577–1617) traveled to Turkey, Persia and India and published his highly popular Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul in 1616. More significantly, in late seventeenth-century France, the genre of Middle East travel writing became extremely popular with the rise of mercantilism and the expansionist policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the building of the French mercantile fleet, the establishing of overseas trading companies, especially Compagnie du Levant in 1670, and the broad financing for foreign travel all enabled the conditions and interests for exploration of the Middle East, which in turn served France’s new economic interests in the region. As Pierre Martino has remarked, “[T]he [Orientalist] movement becomes more carefully thought through and persistent with Colbert: as much as he encouraged the efforts of travelers in the Muslim Orient, he also created and backed large commercial enterprises.”5 Colbert also helped the founding of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, a major contributor to the study of the Middle East, and created chairs of Oriental languages in the Collège de France. Moreover, he encouraged and financially supported many French travelers, such as Jean Chardin (1643–1713), Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689) and Jean de Thévenot (1633–1667), to travel and write travelogues to inform the public and government officials about the region, its cultures and its people. Travel literature, firmly molded into the structure of colonial expansion, thus became a dominant literary genre in France as well as England in the second half of the seventeenth century. To give an idea of the growth of interest in this genre, suffice it to say that in the eighty years between 1665 and 1745, at least one hundred and fifty travelogues appeared in France, a substantial percentage of all books published during the period. While the prosperous

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economic system of mercantilism provided travelers, missionaries and ambassadors with the financial support to embark on their logistically challenging journeys to the Middle East and elsewhere, the discursive practices of travelers in turn created a rich body of knowledge through which the emerging European colonial powers such as France considered their political and economic relations with the region. There was, in other words, a circular relation between politico-economic interests and travel writing. A representative example of the articulation of the historical urge to travel abroad appears in Thévenot’s 1664 Voyage du Levant: The desire to travel has always been quite natural among men; [but] it seems to me that this passion has never incited them so strongly as it has in our days. The great number of travelers who cross paths in all parts of the world sufficiently supports this hypothesis, and the volume of travelogues that have appeared over the past twenty years leaves no doubt about it: there is no one who is drawn to beautiful things, who is touched by what he learns from them, and very few who, if they were not held back by pressing attachments at home, would not want to witness and observe such things themselves. It is these beautiful narratives that made me first think about traveling, and since in the years 1652, I did not have any considerable business that prevented me from leaving, I decided to satisfy my curiosity by following the movements that these travelogues had inspired me to undertake.6

Although Thévenot describes the desire to travel as a natural phenomenon, he is quick to acknowledge that what motivated him to embark on his journey were other travelogues. His recognition of the mediated nature of his passion or curiosity to see other worlds points to the power of the intertext that informs and enables every traveler’s desire for the Oriental journey. Thévenot’s remarks thus speak to the emergence of a discourse of otherness that was productive of the desire for adventure. What is notable about Thévenot’s introductory remark is also the way he describes his desire for travel to the Orient as a curiosité, which signifies a lack of serious or scientific interest in exploration. Unlike later travelers of the eighteenth century, Thévenot displays no professional affiliation or institutional commitment in making the journey East. What characterizes seventeenth-century representations of the Orient is an exoticist mode of travel that is less interested in providing any scientific observation or pedagogical material than seeing “marvelous” and “strange” lands. As the frequent appearance of words such as le merveilleux, l’inconnu and la curiosité in the travelogues of Thévenot and his contemporaries suggests, seventeenth-century Orientalism was mostly amateur and had not yet

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become the professionalized and systematic discourse that it became in the early decades of the nineteenth century. To underscore the nonscientific or nonprofessional tendencies of such travel narratives, however, does not suggest an absence of an ideological discourse of otherness in the seventeenth century. Quite the contrary, the seemingly innocent or personal desire to explore non-Western societies was implicated in an ideology of difference that assumed the superiority of the West and the inferiority of the Orient. Consider the following statement in the beginning of another seventeenth-century travelogue, Tavernier’s Les six voyages en Turquie & en Perse: One cannot travel in Asia as one would in Europe; trips are not undertaken at all hours of the day nor with the same ease. One does not find transportation going every week from one city or province to another, and the countries are markedly different. In Asia, one sees regions that are entirely uncultivated and uninhabited; or one finds men who, either because of the harshness of the climate and the terrain, or because of laziness, prefer to live in poverty rather than work. There are vast deserts to be traversed, passage across which is dangerous because of lack of water and the crossings of Arabs. In Asia, one does not find inns that are orderly and well-run, or hosts who care to take travelers in and treat them well.7

Tavernier begins his observation with the idea of essential ontological and epistemological differences between the Occident and the Orient. The geography and the people of the Orient, according to him, are the exact opposite of those in Europe: the towns are uncultivated, depopulated and deserted; the landscape is arid, desolate and dangerous; and the people are inhospitable, lazy and violent. Such misrepresentations of the otherwise prosperous Ottoman and Safavid empires speaks to an ideological form of exoticism that characterized Europe’s encounter with its Oriental other from the very beginning. Although seventeenth-century Orientalism had not yet achieved the status of scientific discourse, it nonetheless displayed the same kind of binary logic that located the Westerner in a position of cultural and political superiority. As a result, seventeenth-century Orientalist travelogues were no less implicated in a colonialist will to dominate the Orient. Consider the following dedicatory note to Louis XIV in Tavernier’s 1675 Nouvelle relation de l’intérieur du sérail, the imaginary account of his journey to the interior space of Ottoman Sultan’s harem: “It seems to me that all the kings of Asia and Africa are made for the sole purpose of one day becoming your tributaries, and that you are destined to rule the entire world.”8 This bluntly imperialist statement in the beginning of a text ostensibly about the erotic world of the

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harem speaks to the intertwined relationship between travel writing and imperialism in the seventeenth century. It is not surprising that the rise of Orientalist travelogues in France coincided with the expansionist policies of Colbert, for there was a circulatory system of exchange between aesthetic and discursive representations of the Orient and the political and economic interests of mercantilism in seventeenth-century France. Although Orientalism as a modern discourse of power emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that systematic and “scientific” investigations of the Middle East appeared. Until then, as I have suggested, Orientalism and travelogues of the Orient were largely amateur endeavors that engaged in a discourse of exoticism. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, an explosion of interest in the Orient occurred among European politicians, philologists, historians and philosophers who viewed the region more professionally as a place for serious scholarly exploration and observation. A significant factor in the rise of a systematic and professional form of Orientalism was the influence of travel literature, which, as Said points out, “brought the Orient into sharper and more extended focus.”9 What distinguished late eighteenth-century travel writing from its seventeenthcentury predecessor, and what made it particularly significant with regards to the rise of modern Orientalism, was a shift from the exoticism of adventure to the science of adventure. An adequate discussion of the forces that enabled this shift is beyond the scope of this chapter, but two major factors that helped produce this discursive shift are worth mentioning in passing. First, there was the rise of positivism and empiricism which Johannes Fabian, in his seminal Time and the Other, and Mary Louise Pratt, in her path-breaking book Imperial Eyes, have convincingly mapped in the context of travel literature. Late eighteenth-century travel literature was informed by what Pratt calls a “planetary consciousness” – that is, an epistemological vision “marked by an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction of a global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatuses of natural history.”10 Dating back to Charles de la Condamine’ scientific journey of 1735 to South America and Carl Linnaeus’s 1735 Systema naturae, planetary consciousness offered travelers to the Middle East a classificatory system useful not only in observing and cataloguing what they saw but also in creating a narrative of their experiences of other places in evolutionary terms. Second, the declining power of the Ottoman Empire and the collapse of Safavid dynasty in Persia in 1736 created the political vacuum the European domination of the Middle East subsequently filled. European powers no longer felt either threatened or

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competitive with imperial states in the region and were thus able to pursue their own expansionist policies there. It is perhaps for these reasons that Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Syria became the new sites for Europe’s imperialist ventures. To elaborate some of the specific discursive characteristics and political implications of the shift from the exoticism to science in Orientalist travel literature, let us consider two exemplary travelogues from the period: Claude-Étienne Savary’s Lettres sur l’Égypte (1785–1786) and Constantin-François Volney’s Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1783). Unlike their seventeenth-century precursors who were directly supported by governmental agencies, Volney (1757–1820) and Savary (1750–1788) voluntarily embarked on the Oriental journey, and they viewed their journeys as self-educating enterprises. The secular idea of traveling, which characterized their mode of travel, constituted a discursive transformation that necessitated new relations with the Orient and new strategies of observation and representation. The late eighteenth-century traveler felt compelled, for the first time, to contemplate the value of his journey, rationalize his discursive practice, formulate new relations with the Oriental other, engage in an empirical mode of observation and classify in a positivist fashion what he observed. As well, he viewed his journey as a serious educational experience to learn and produce an account of his journey that would contribute to Europe’s understanding of nonWestern worlds. Both travelers, for example, begin their narratives by pointing out the educational benefits of seeing foreign lands and the intellectual values of exploring other cultures. Savary, for example, remarks: Traveling is Man’s most instructive school. It is by travelling that he is able to know his fellow men; it is by living with other peoples, by studying their customs, their religion, their government, that he has a standard of comparison by which he can judge the customs, religion, and government of his country.11

Savary views his journey as a mode of self-realization and appreciates its pedagogical value. For the late eighteenth-century traveler, the Oriental journey is not a search for the exotic or the eroticized other but an instructive activity that not only completes his formal education but also benefits the general public by raising awareness about one’s own religion, government, and moral and cultural values. The Orient still remains Europe’s other, but otherness becomes an object of interest as a serious subject of study and exploration. Volney too speaks about his “taste” and

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“passion for learning” and explains that he decided to embark on his journey to Syria and Egypt because they “seemed to me appropriate grounds for making the political and moral observation to which I wanted to devote myself.”12 The eighteenth-century traveler learns about other cultures, religions and political systems, and the knowledge he gains provides him with an opportunity for comparison. The more he learns about other cultures, the better he understands and appreciates his own culture, religion and government. “Comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals,” as Said explains, is “synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient.”13 The late eighteenthcentury traveler presents himself as the powerful subject of knowledge, a savant, invested with the discursive authority to represent the other; he knows, and has the necessary credentials to judge and make authoritative statements about, other cultures. It is for this reason that both Voleny and Savary take pains in their introductory remarks to highlight their credentials. Whether presented as a piece of autobiographical information – as in the case of Volney, whose education and acquired passion for learning have prepared him for the journey – or given as a piece of advice – as in Savary’s case – the traveler emphasizes his educational preparation for such an undertaking, which gives him the authority to observe and represent the Orient. Savary, for example, points out that “it is important” that travelers “have an extensive knowledge of geography and history [of the region]. The first will situate the place which served as a theatre for great events. The latter will retrace those events in the memory.”14 It is significant that Savary considered history and geography as the two crucial fields of study necessary for traveling in the Middle East, for Orientalism as a discourse of power required a geopolitical awareness and a historical understanding to comparatively locate the history and culture of the Oriental other within the privileged Western savoir. Knowledge of geography and history provided the traveler-savant with useful tools to make an accurate assessment of what he observed, enabling him to locate the Orient and its people in spatial and temporal terms. Moreover, the traveler must have some knowledge of Oriental languages to be able to communicate with local people and to effectively observe other cultures. This is the indispensable criterion that Volney claims most of his earlier predecessors woefully lacked. He points out that, by “hastily traversing the country . . . [w]ithout language, we would not know how to appreciate the essence of a nation’s character.”15 Volney’s statement speaks to how the new discipline of philology helped professionalize both travel to

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the Orient and Orientalism itself, making them both more systematic and scientific. Volney’s remarks also point to an ethnological interest in the Orient, one that goes beyond the archaeological interest in Egyptian antiquity and the superficial observation of earlier travelers. Unlike the cursory and one-dimensional views of Egyptologists and earlier Orientalists, the late eighteenth-century traveler is interested in the modern culture of the Orient. He resides for a longer period, and his knowledge of Oriental languages allows him to interact with the local people more directly, and he is thus able to understand and penetrate the essence of the Orient. Not surprisingly, the longer sojourn and the knowledge of Oriental languages are not meant to bring the European traveler any closer to the Orient or make him form a more intimate relation to the object of his study. On the contrary, what is emphasized in the new approach to the study of the Oriental other is distance. Both Savary and Volney underscore the importance of professional aloofness from their objects of study. Savary speaks of the need to approach the Orient without “any emotion” and “to not place oneself in front of what is depicted” in order to give weight to what the traveler ultimately exposes about the other.16 Similarly, Volney cautions the traveler against the initial sense of wonderment and shock, encouraging a more distant and dispassionate relation to the Oriental other. He argues: “One must wait for this initial shock to subside and repeat the observation more than once, in order to be assured of its accuracy.”17 The Orientalist, as Said points out, “is a watcher, never involved, always detached.”18 Distance here means impartiality: to be an objective judge of cultural difference, the traveler must stand apart from his object of study. The late eighteenth-century traveler’s claim to absolute truthfulness and total objectivity points to a discursive strategy by means of which ordinary and personal observation gains the status of science. Travelogues of the late eighteenth century are therefore peppered with statements that anxiously insist on objectivity and truthfulness. Savary, for instance, insists that a traveler must “rise above partiality and opinion” and that “in describing cities and countries, his brushstrokes [should] be guided by the hand of truth.”19 Similarly, Volney speaks of his “impartial love of truth” and claims that “I forbade myself any imaginary depiction.”20 What these travelers’ tenacious claims of objectivity and truthfulness point to is not merely a love for factual depiction but rather the authorization of what is ultimately a personal narrative as a scientific discourse. Savary’s and Voleny’s insistence on complete objectivity, in other words, is in essence

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a rhetorical move to conceal their opinionated presence, to camouflage their sense of European superiority and to diffuse their authoritative voices in order to claim the role of a savant or a scientist. More importantly, the notion of observational distance and emotional detachment posits a binary and hierarchical relation between the Western traveler and the Oriental other, one in which the European is always the subject of knowledge and power and the Oriental other is consistently the object of epistemological investigation. That the traveler is always the inquiring and observing subject positions the Oriental as an inferior other in need of examination, correction and ultimately colonization. Savary’s and Voleny’s discursive practices mark a new development in travel literature, namely its crossing of what Michel Foucault calls the “threshold of scientificity.”21 Their discussions of the necessary credentials of an effective traveler, their claims of objectivity and truthfulness, and their classificatory representations of the Orient speak to a shift toward a systematic and scientific phase of travel literature, one that would achieve its full development in the nineteenth century when Orientalists such as the Anglo-Swiss Jean Louis Burckhardt (1784–1817), Baron Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892) in France were able “to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and to establish its intellectual and worldly institutions,” as Said has convincingly argued.22 The travelogues of the late eighteenth century introduced a number of formal criteria for travel to the Orient, defined certain rules for an effective approach to represent it and proposed new strategies of cultural encounter that had transformational effects for the emerging discourse of modern Orientalism. The systematic ways of representing Orientals and the scientific methods of observation are precisely what gave Orientalism its status as an authoritative body of knowledge about the Orient. To underscore the shift in the discourse of travel from exoticism to scientificity is not to claim that other forms of travel writing became obsolete or that exoticism as a mode of representing the Middle East became outmoded. Rather, as Foucault explains, such discursive shifts mean that “a general transformation of relations has occurred.” Indeed, new discursive formations always entail a great deal of “continuity, return, and repetition” in relation to their precursors.23 In the nineteenth century, there is a proliferation of travel writing of every sort, as technological advances in transportation and political changes in Europe and the Middle East ushered in a new era of mass travel to the Middle East and elsewhere. Not only did the development of steamships and the construction of railroad lines between various cities in the Middle East

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revolutionize travel in the region, but the increasing presence of European colonial powers in the Orient provided the necessary logistical support and security for European travelers. Moreover, the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and France’s subsequent occupation of the broader Maghreb, the ending of the Greco-Turkish conflicts in 1828, and the British presence in Egypt and India “stabilized” the sociopolitical situation in the Middle East, providing travelers with the extra security to travel there. The improved traveling conditions and the presence of Europeans throughout the Middle East made the Oriental journey, once an arduous, demanding and ambitious endeavor, an easier, less time-consuming and more practical enterprise, thus generating a steady flow of European travelers to the Orient. With the increase in the number of travelers, we witness the multiplications of the genre of travel writing since the mid-nineteenth century. Let us consider three types of journey to the Orient by way of elaborating the interdependence of Orientalism and travel writing. Above all, there was the heroic and adventurous traveler who wished to provide Orientalism with new information and knowledge about the less accessible regions of the Middle East. Sir Richard Burton’s (1821–1890) Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah (1857) and Charles Doughty’s (1843–1926) Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) are two representative examples of this mode of travel. In the beginning of their narratives, these travelers make prefatory remarks that address and justify the purpose of their travels, their qualifications as valiant travelers and their institutional affiliations. Burton, for example, begins his travelogue by introducing himself as an adventurous traveler whose “zeal for discovery” has made him offer his services to the Royal Geographical Society of London “for the purpose of removing . . . the huge white blot which in our maps still notes the Eastern and the Central regions of Arabia.”24 He goes on to list the principal objects of his journey, namely “to find out if any market for horses could be opened between Central Arabia and India . . . ; to obtain information concerning the Great Eastern wilderness, the vast expanse marked Rub’a al-khálí (the ‘Empty Abode’) in our maps; to inquire into the hydrography of the Hijaz . . . ; and finally, to try, by actual observation, the truth of a theory proposed by Colonel W. Sykes, namely, that if tradition be true, in the population of the vast Peninsula there must exist certain physiological differences sufficient to warrant our questioning the common origin of the Arab family.”25 Burton underscores his institutional affiliation, which provides him with financial and logistical support and the authority to speak as an expert. Far from being a personal narrative as the title of his travelogue indicates, he embarks on his journey

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as a representative of a major institution in order to contribute to several bodies of knowledge, namely the economic, geographical, hydrographical and ethnological fields. Burton also points to his philological training and his “Arabic studies,” his commitment to a long sojourn in order to penetrate and understand the “Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country,” and the “dangerous” nature of his endeavor to highlight his qualifications as a professional Orientalist and as a heroic adventurer wishing “to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed.”26 Burton’s travel narrative speaks to the convergence of the autobiographical and the professional, as personal observations of an eccentric adventurer yield new knowledge useful to official Orientalism. In the nineteenth century, we also witness the emergence of a Romantic type of traveler who embarks on a journey to the Orient to satisfy his nostalgic desire for a disappearing other. Unlike his heroic and professional counterpart, the Romantic traveler neither views his journey as a daring and adventurous endeavor nor wishes to engage in a scientific or systematic exploration to produce new knowledge about the Orient. At a time when the exotic Oriental had become a familiar figure of otherness, the Romantic traveler could not help but experience a sense of belatedness that produced either a sense of disorientation and loss or an obsessive urge to experience the life of an authentic, albeit disappearing, other. Gérard de Nerval’s (1808–1855) Voyage en Orient (1851) and Gustave Flaubert’s (1821– 1880) travel notes of his 1849–1850 visit to the Orient offer two examples of this mode of travel. Unlike Burton, Doughty and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), whose travelogues are marked by an egotistical will to discover, Nerval and Flaubert felt nostalgic about what they perceived to be a disappearing other, a feeling that made their romantic representations of the Orient ideologically ambivalent, vacillating between a repetition of Orientalist clichés and a subtle resistance to European cultural hegemony. Nerval, for example, describes his travelogue in a self-doubting manner as “a fairly sad litany of misadventures” as well as “a rather weak description,” a “painting without horizon,” and a tale full of “melancholic reveries.”27 Throughout his narrative, he yearns for a time when “real” adventures in unknown lands were possible, when the exotic other had not become a cultural platitude. That the belated traveler views the Orient on the verge of disappearance, however, does not prevent him from attempting to explore and represent it. Consider the following exemplary passage in which Nerval critiques the superficial tourist:

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But Egypt, solemn and pious, is always the country of enigma and mysteries; the beauty surrounds itself, as before, with veils and wrappings, and this gloomy attitude easily discourages the frivolous European. He leaves Cairo after eight days and rushes toward the waterfall of the Nile, searching for other disappointments which science has in store for him, and which will never be suitable to him. … Why go so fast? Let us stop and attempt to lift a corner of the stern veil of the goddess of Saïs.28

Nerval’s representation of Egypt repeats the Orientalist cliché of the country as an enigmatic and mysterious space while simultaneously considering it a beautiful and complex society that resists the gaze of European travelers. Distinguishing himself from the superficial tourist who quickly leaves the culturally rich city to see the pyramids, Nerval presents himself as a serious and patient traveler who wishes to have a more “authentic” experience of the Oriental life. The romantic traveler’s critique of superficiality, thus, implicates him and his representation in official Orientalism’s project to penetrate the Orient and to claim epistemological mastery over it. In his “Journal de bord,” Nerval, like the authoritative Volney, even goes so far as to claim that his fanciful representation is nothing but “humble truth” without any “dramatic and novelistic devices.”29 That Nerval’s attempt to go beyond the official Orientalism ultimately fails suggests that there is no easy escape from the authority of the dominant discourse. In spite of his intertextual relation with earlier travelers, Nerval’s desire for an immersive experience of the Orient still differs from that of his more serious British counterparts. Nerval’s long stay in Cairo did not aim to produce new knowledge about the city, as he copied verbatim texts from Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians; instead, he indulged in the pleasure principle associated with Oriental culture. In Nerval’s travelogue, we witness the emergence of a hedonistic tradition in Orientalism that viewed the Oriental journey as a leisurely experience to step out of the familiar reality of Europe, a trip that would ease the cultural ennui associated with the boredom of his daily modern life. Romantic travelers like Nerval, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier (1811– 1872) and Pierre Loti (1850–1923) were motivated by a form of cultural escapism that turned the occasionally serious Orientalist into a man of pleasure, a sort of self-indulgent traveler less interested in reproducing a copiously depicted Orient than in pursuing a nostalgic desire to experience the life of a disappearing other. In an exemplary moment in his journey, Nerval writes: “I did not attempt to represent Constantinople; its palaces, mosques, spas, and shores have already been described so many

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times: I simply wanted to give an idea of a promenade through its streets and squares at the time of major holidays [i.e. Ramadan].”30 The romantic traveler is not in a hurry to accomplish anything; he is a self-indulgent and hedonistic traveler satisfied with his personal experiences of an alien culture. Nerval’s derogatory reference to the frivolous traveler in his travelogue speaks to the emergence of another type of travel in the nineteenth century, namely tourism. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the improved travel conditions and political changes in the Middle East democratized the Oriental journey, allowing the bourgeois class to tour the region. Accordingly, with the rise of tourism came a new mode of travel writing, the guidebook. Orientalist tourist guides appeared almost simultaneously in France and England in the mid-nineteenth century. In France, Marchebeus’ 1839 Voyage from Paris to Constantinople by Steamship was the first such volume. It was soon followed by Quetin’s more practical Guide en Orient in 1846. In 1861, Adolphe Laurent Joanne published its first handbook for Egypt with maps, providing detailed information about accommodation and transportation and incorporating beautiful engravings that accompanied its descriptions of towns. In England, London publisher John Murray, who had a monopoly on tourist guide production, published Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and Constantinople in 1840. Murray subsequently produced several focused tour guides for Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Palestine in the 1850s. Following in Murray’s footsteps, the German publisher Karl Baedeker also began publishing new and improved tour guides for travelers to the Middle East. Equipped with high-quality maps, texts by scholars and Orientalists, and detailed descriptions of architecture and historical monuments, Baedeker’s guides were extremely popular and were translated into French and English. Scholars have often overlooked the discursive formation of tourist guides in the nineteenth century, viewing the genre of handbook as an insignificant form of representation catering to bourgeois consumerism. Roland Barthes’ dismissive comment that the tourist guide “testifies to the futility of all analytical descriptions, those which reject both explanations and phenomenology” captures the generally negative view of the genre.31 Such characterization, however, discounts the informational nature of the guide and its contribution to popularizing Orientalist discourse. Indeed, tourist guides were systematic bodies of encyclopedic knowledge that provided travelers with information on everything from how to prepare for the journey to the Orient to detailed descriptions of roads, historical

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monuments, religions, languages and even government systems in Oriental countries. Baedeker’s 1885 guide for travelers to Egypt, for example, included essays by such distinguished Egyptologists as Georg Moritz Ebers and Georg Steindorff. Unlike the travelogue, the handbook as a modern and popular form of Orientalist discourse was a dispersed and heterogeneous text that borrowed from several disciplinary domains to educate its user about the Orient. Whereas the travelogue valorized the figure of heroic adventurer in search of knowledge about the Orient, the tourist guide positioned the reader as a potential traveler and Orientalist. In contrast to the individualistic style of the travelogue, handbooks exhibited an inclusive attitude, wishing to address every type of traveler. Quetin’s 1846 Guide du voyageur en Algérie, for example, lists various types of traveler in its subtitle, such as le savant [the learned man], l’artiste, l’homme du monde [a worldly or cosmopolitan man] and even le colon [the colonial settler]. These categories suggest different uses of the information the handbook can offer. Not surprisingly, the guidebook does not posit a unidirectional relation with its readers but involves the reader to refine its information. Acknowledging “the absence in Eastern countries of those local records and public notices which are to be found in every town and village of the West,” Murray’s Hand-Book, for example, encourages its readers to check – to confirm or deny the accuracy of the information it provides.32 There is therefore a circular system of exchange between the tourist and the guide, positioning the reader as a potential contributor to correct any factual error. In contrast to the travelogue, in which the reader is positioned as a passive consumer of the heroic traveler’s adventures, the guide demands an active reader who participates in the production of practical knowledge. It is not fortuitous that the tourist guide makes a conscious attempt to turn its readers into serious travelers by augmenting their desire for adventure and exoticism. Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Island, Greece, Turkey and Constantinople, for example, tells its reader that in the Orient “[y]ou are in immediate contact with nature” and that “[e]very circumstance of scenery and climate becomes of interest and value” and that “[y]ou are constantly in the full enjoyment of the open air of a heavenly climate – its lightness passes to the spirits – its serenity sinks into the mind.”33 Similarly, Quetin’s tour guide represents the Orient as a “natural” theater where the tourist can experience the untouched natural scenery and observe the exotic and colorful costumes of Oriental people. In this sense, the handbook is not merely a guide for the traveler but productive of his desire for travel to the Orient.

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To the extent that the tourist guide has the potential to transform the middle-class tourist into an amateur Orientalist, it marks a significant reconfiguration of Europe’s discourse about the Orient. Indeed, the handbook has an important role in both the production and dissemination of Orientalist knowledge. As the word “handbook” suggests, the large body of Orientalist knowledge, once a heavy burden on the traveler, now served as a vade-mecum, a helping hand, to be held in the hand and to be carried by every traveler as a necessary travel accessory. The emergence of handbooks, in other words, attests to the inception of an advanced stage of Orientalist knowledge production and dissemination in which different modes of observing and representing the Oriental other are now systematically packaged as the guide for every traveler, from the savant to the worldly man, from the artist to the colonizer. As a guiding manual, the handbook offered the tourist a fully programmed approach to the Orient by mapping a suitable itinerary, determining the important sites to visit, planning the appropriate activities and, indeed, defining the desire for the Orient itself. In this sense, the emergence of the tourist guide marked a new and more hegemonic stage in the evolution of both travel writing and Orientalism by perpetuating and popularizing the desire for Oriental exoticism at a time when European hegemony had already transformed the Orient into a familiar space.

Notes 1. Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Paris: Éditions du Boucher, 2002), p. 70, author’s translation. 2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 2–3. 3. Said, Orientalism, p. 12, original emphasis. 4. For a discussion of the problematic tendency in Said to view Orientalism in monolithic terms, see Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 5. Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1906), p. 44, author’s translation. 6. Jean de Thévenot, Voyage du Levant (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1980), p. 31, author’s translation. 7. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Turquie et de Perse (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1981), 1: p. 39, author’s translation. 8. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Nouvelle relation de l’intérieur du sérail du Grand Seigneur: contenant plusieurs singularitez qui jusqu’icy n’ont point esté mises en lumière (Paris: Olivier de Varennes, 1675), not paginated, author’s translation. 9. Said, Orientalism, p. 117.

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10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 15. 11. Claude-Étienne Savary, Lettres sur l’Égypte (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1932), p. 1, author’s translation. 12. Constantin-François de Chassebeuf Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1959), p. 21, author’s translation. 13. Said, Orientalism, p. 150. 14. Savary, Lettres, p. ii. 15. Volney, Voyage, p. 23. 16. Savary, Lettres, p. iii. 17. Volney, Voyage, p. 23. 18. Said, Orientalism, p. 103. 19. Savary, Lettres, p. iv. 20. Volney, Voyage, p. 23. 21. For a detailed discussion of the implication of this shift, see Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 166–177. 22. Said, Orientalism, p. 130. 23. Foucault, Archeology, p. 173. 24. Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1964), I: p. 1. 25. Burton, Pilgrimage, 1: p. 3. 26. Burton, Pilgrimage, 1: p. 2. 27. Gérard de Nerval, Le Voyage en Orient, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980), 1: p. 55, author’s translation. 28. Nerval, Voyage, 1: p. 149. 29. Nerval, Voyage, 1: p. 337. 30. Nerval, Voyage, 2: p. 361. 31. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 75. 32. John Murray, A Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and Constantinople (London: John Murray, 1840), p. iv. 33. Murray, Handbook, pp. i–ii.

chapter 11

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism David Weir

Orientalism in the American context differs from its better-known British and Continental manifestations in some significant respects. Principal among these is the absence of anything like the centuries-long colonialist projects that rendered the inhabitants of distant lands of either the Near or the Far East as subjects – but not citizens – of Western empire. In this respect, America actually has something in common with India: both were victims of the commercial and imperial ambitions of Great Britain. The shared past probably has something to do with the imaginary attachment certain Americans entertained between themselves and the nations of the Far East: at different periods and in different ways, they believed that something of value might be gained by greater exposure to the political, religious and artistic traditions of China, India and Japan. The Near East not so much: better known today as the Middle East, it was after all the Holy Land, the very fount of Christianity that gave the Puritan settlers the strength and courage they needed to pursue the righteous life in the New World free of the hated strictures of Church and King. The Calvinist Congregationalist looked inward, not eastward, led by the light of conscience, not the Light of Asia. Unitarian Protestants in New England, by contrast, found theological confirmation of their own beliefs in the religious systems of the Higher Hinduism that the mythographers of an earlier era had discovered. This early history of American engagement with Eastern culture points to another difference between Orientalism as it was in the United States and as it was in Great Britain or in the European nations: the experience of the Far East for most Americans was almost wholly limited to what they read in books or put in their parlors, to translations from various Asian languages or to furniture, artifacts and brica-bracs, first from China and then from Japan. Encounters with actual Asians (leaving aside missionary experiences in India and China) remained quite rare until the powerful railway companies 202

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engaged cheap Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railway in the mid-nineteenth century. Once the vast transcontinental project was complete, the workers were no longer welcome, and the nation took legal action against them in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Possibly the most striking thing about American Orientalism in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth is the degree to which Americans preferred imaginary over actual Asians. An exception to this general rule is the interest shown in certain remarkable individuals, such as the Chinese giant Chang Yu Sing, exhibited by P. T. Barnum in the early 1880s, or the pacifist Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who drew mass audiences to his lectures on a tour of 1917. But even in these and other cases (there are numerous examples), an element of the “imaginary” somehow legitimizes the “actual,” which would otherwise be objectionable. American acceptance of individuals like Chang and Tagore depended on their standing with respect to larger racial stereotypes. With his Western suit and his oversized pocketwatch, Chang emerged as a civilized exception to the negative stereotype of the “heathen Chinee”; with his meditative manner and message of peace (not to mention the Nobel Prize he received in 1913), Tagore confirmed the positive stereotype of the Indian Holy Man. Chang’s popularity runs parallel with the first legislation to exclude Chinese immigration, while Tagore’s American celebrity peaked in the same year that the 1917 Immigration Act, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, went into effect. The law set limits and mandated restrictions (including a literacy test) on all groups of immigrants, but it targeted Asians in particular. These two examples are not isolated: despite a series of shameful anti-immigration laws to keep the Oriental out,1 Americans remained enthusiastic about Oriental religion, Oriental literature and Oriental art. In many or possibly even most cases, they did so because they thought Asian culture conferred some positive benefit to lives made empty by the excesses of American life. The scenario whereby the spiritual riches of the East serve as a corrective to the material riches of America is not one that receives a great deal of attention in Edward Said’s landmark study of 1978. Orientalism sets out to investigate primarily the role of the European colonial powers – mainly the French and the British – in forming the Orient as a rich and often contradictory ideological construct reflective of both the cultural and material demands of the West. For Said, the Orient offers not only a cultural counter to Europe, “as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” but also all manner of economic advantages, as “an integral part of European material civilization.” This complex history, he adds, is not

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completely shared by Americans, who “will not feel quite the same about the Orient” and whose understanding “will seem considerably less dense.” The focus on the Islamic Orient of the Arabic, Persian and Ottoman populations of the Middle East is another element of Said’s book that limits its relevance to American Orientalism. Said does say that “since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did.” He mentions in his acknowledgments that the bulk of the book was written “during 1975–1976,”2 both significant years in American history: the first because it marked the end, in April, of the Vietnam War; the second because it saw the celebration of the American Bicentennial in July and the election of Jimmy Carter as president in November. The strange combination of military defeat, patriotic celebration and the election of a progressive president (who would go on to facilitate the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978) hardly seems conducive to comparisons likening the United States during the height of the Cold War to France and Great Britain in the age of colonial empire. If anything, America was demoralized and chastened by its failure in Vietnam, so it seems odd that Said should insist in the mid1970s that the United States has inherited the mantle of Orientalism from the European powers. If Said’s claims about the meaning of American Orientalism in the latter half of the twentieth century seem overstated, his assessment of American Orientalism prior to 1950 is understated, almost dismissive: “[I]n the United States knowledge of the Orient never passed through the refining and reticulating and reconstructive processes, whose beginning was in philological study, that it went through in Europe.”3 On the contrary, those “refining and reticulating and reconstructive processes,” inspired by philological investigation, are very much a part of the American experience of the Orient, which begins in the eighteenth century with the printing, however limited, of classic Chinese texts in translation and the widespread study of mythographic material about Eastern systems of religion. In 1738 Benjamin Franklin printed extracts from “the Ta hio [Da xue], or The Great Science,” using the title “From the Morals of Confucius” in the Pennsylvania Gazette.4 Later in the century, Thomas Jefferson took such great interest in the Comte de Volney’s mythographic analysis of the relation of Eastern religion and Eastern empire that he made his own anonymous translation of it.5 Both Franklin’s and Jefferson’s interest in the philosophy and the religion of the Far East was explicitly political: Franklin, long an apologist for enlightened despotism before his somewhat grudging acceptance of the need for revolution in 1775, found in Confucius

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confirmation of the kind of reasoned, moral authoritarianism he advocated during the colonial period. By contrast, Jefferson meant to counter authoritarianism by looking to the work of his friend Volney (the Frenchman visited Monticello on his American tour of 1795)6 to support arguments about the need for the separation of church and state. True, these early American efforts to engage intellectually with Eastern thought are fraught with error and misunderstanding, but such is the necessary and inevitable first stage that allows for a later process of refining, reticulating and reconstructing knowledge, which is precisely what occurred over the next two centuries. After the limited engagement with early translations and mythographic interpretations of Far Eastern culture on the part of the American philosophes Franklin and Jefferson, the next stage was mostly theological and mostly confined to Hinduism, the principal actors in this part of the story being New England Unitarian churchmen and their Concord contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The transcendental philosophy of these two figures, that of Thoreau especially, also included interest in Confucianism and even Buddhism, in addition to the larger awareness of Hinduism that carried over from the early Unitarian phase. By the middle of the nineteenth century, American Orientalism had begun to include a scholarly dimension with the appointment in 1841 of the German-trained philologist Edward E. Salisbury (1812– 1901) to teach Sanskrit at Yale University and with the founding of the American Oriental Society in 1842. Later in the century, with the opening of Japan to the West in 1868 by the Meiji dynasty, Americans regarded Buddhism as a rich source for both scholarly investigation and aesthetic reflection. In the early twentieth century, prior scholarly and philological involvement in Sanskrit combined with highly aesthetic approaches to Japanese culture during the fin de siècle to fuel the rise of modernism, with, for example, T. S. Eliot exploiting Hindu and Buddhist traditions and Ezra Pound finding cultural material in ancient Japan. In addition to the theological, scholarly and aesthetic manifestations of American Orientalism, popular culture also provides numerous examples of Orientalist trends. P. T. Barnum, by most accounts the originator of mass entertainment, staged Oriental exhibitions from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the earlier example of Chang the Chinese Giant shows. Barnum’s contemporary Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (they both died in 1891) concocted a strange mixture of occult and Oriental theology called Theosophy that became a mass movement but also had a bizarre bearing on the development of modernist literature.7 Through all of these

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permutations, the Orient retained a certain power as a potential source of political insight, theological solace, scholarly curiosity and artistic inspiration, a positive legacy made all the more remarkable by the reprehensible history of Asian immigration in the United States. That history does not begin until fairly late in the nineteenth century, with the Exclusion Act of 1882. Neither the political prelude to American interest in the Orient on the part of Franklin and Jefferson nor the more extensive theological involvement of New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists in the early nineteenth century includes any direct contact with Asian peoples on American soil. That said, the absence of actual Orientals on American shores did not preclude the influence of certain remarkable individuals on American conceptions of the Far East. The earliest example of what would turn out to be a continuing pattern is the secular Brahmin Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), whose theological disputes with Baptist missionaries at the Danish colony of Serampore near Calcutta made him something of a celebrity among Boston Unitarians, even though they would never meet him in person. Roy’s American reputation was promulgated by means of the Unitarian press, primarily the Christian Register, which recounted in detail the controversy with the Baptist missionaries. In 1820, Roy published a redaction of the Gospels titled The Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness, extolling the teachings of Jesus for their morality and rationality. The book was published by the Baptist Mission Press and was originally meant to be used for conversion purposes in a Bengali translation. But because Roy’s rational emphasis on ethical conduct omitted mention of the miracles of Jesus, the Baptist missionaries turned against the book they themselves had published, and no translation was ever made. Roy’s relationship to the Baptists became even more fraught when he attempted to collaborate with the Reverends William Yates and William Adam on a translation of the four Gospels from the original Greek. Roy insisted that the best translation of the Greek word dia in John 1:3 should be “through,” not “by,” as the King James version has it: “All things were made by Him”. His Baptist co-translators concurred, unwittingly committing something close to heresy. As one critic observes, translating the passage as “All things were made through Him” was tantamount “to asserting the Vedantic theory of creation by emanation and contradicted the Church doctrine of creation by God’s command.”8 The ensuing controversy put an end to Roy’s involvement with the Trinitarian missionaries and even led the

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Reverend Adam to abandon the Baptists and start his own Unitarian Church at Calcutta. The action earned the Reverend the disrespectful epithet “the second fallen Adam” among his former coreligionists.9 Mary Moody, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt, was among the numerous Boston Unitarians who followed the religious saga of Rammohun Roy in the pages of the Christian Register. In 1822 she sent her nephew news of the Indian Brahmin’s theological adventures with the Baptist missionaries, and he wrote back to thank her with this telling comment: “I know not any more about your Hindu convert than I have seen in the Christian Register, and am truly rejoiced that the Unitarians have one trophy to build upon the plain where the zealous Trinitarians have builded thousands.”10 The comment is telling because the reference to Roy as a “Hindu convert” betrays confusion about who converted whom; after all, it was Adams, not Roy, who underwent a conversion experience and abandoned his Trinitarian views. The confusion Emerson evinces in this particular case became a constant in his engagement with Asia. A frequently cited example of his uncertain grasp of fundamental Asiatic matters is the comment Emerson made in a letter to his sister in the mid-1840s when he called “the ‘Bhagvat-Geeta’” the “much renowned book of Buddhism.”11 The translation of the Hindu classic that Emerson read was the one by Charles Wilkins done in 1785, the first into English. An official with the British East India Company, Wilkins held Unitarian views and reflected those views in his translation, which probably helps to account for the book’s circulation among “Brahmin” Bostonians like Emerson. Although Emerson eventually modulated his thinking away from Unitarianism, he continued to rely on variants of Hinduism to supplement the philosophical sensibility that soon took the name of Transcendentalism. “Variants” here is a generous term, since Emerson’s understanding of Hindu tradition continued to be marked by misunderstanding. A measure of this misunderstanding can be taken by a glance at the “Ethical Sayings” sections of The Dial, the journal Emerson founded with Margaret Fuller to air Transcendental thought. In the July 1842 issue of the journal, Emerson extracted axioms from Wilkins’ translation of the Heetepades of Veeshnoo-Sarma that must have satisfied the sage Bostonian’s need for profundity. His purpose in doing so was not to provide instances of Hindu thought, exactly, but examples of what Emerson imagined to be the content of Universal Scripture, as he explains in a headnote to the selections: “Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of the other nations, and sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions to

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bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules for the guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal; – a work inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to be done by religion and not by literature.”12 In other words, Emerson hopes to eliminate the culturally specific portions of the Hitopadesa just as, in the “Divinity School Address,” he urges omission of “historical Christianity” from the New Testament to better intuit “the moral sentiment” therein.13 A more culturally appropriate sense of the Hitopadesa might have acknowledged the work for what it is, “not a piece of sacred literature” but “a manual of instruction in practical politics and economics” for use by the sons of kings to help deal with the unscrupulous nature of their eventual subjects.14 The royal advice is conveyed in the form of animal fables, spoken by the likes of Durganta the lion, Hiranyaka the mouse, Chitra-greeva the pigeon and so on. This dimension of the Hitopadesa was not exactly unknown in Emerson’s day. In fact, Wilkins’ introduction mentions that the great Orientalist William Jones had likened the fables to Æsop.15 But Emerson chose to ignore the particulars of Oriental scholarship in favor of the universals of transcendental philosophy. Emerson’s posture with respect to this Asiatic material runs counter to the next phase in the American awakening to the literature of the Far East. Even as Emerson mined ancient Hindu texts for transcendental meaning, American interest in the Far East inched toward a new, more scholarly understanding that, for the first time, began to take account of the original languages in which those ancient texts were written. The first course in Sanskrit offered in the United States was evidently the one taught in 1836 at the City University of New York by the Bavarian-born Hebrew scholar Isaac Nordheimer (1809–1842), who had studied philology in Munich.16 Nordheimer’s plans to professionalize Orientalism were cut short by his early death, but a year before he died Yale University established the first chair in Oriental languages by appointing Salisbury to teach Arabic and Sanskrit. Salisbury was also quite active in the American Oriental Society, founded in 1842 by a mixture of businessmen and Congregationalist ministers. Although the Society’s early interests tended toward the translation of the Gospels into Asian languages for missionary purposes, the involvement of scholars like Salisbury (who had studied in Berlin with the great philologist Franz Bopp)17 assured that a more secular, intellectual attitude would eventually take hold. Curiously, some of Emerson’s associates in the Transcendental movement appear to have sensed the scholarly turn in American Orientalism and cultivated a more reserved, careful

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approach to Eastern texts. The grandiose Emerson was after universal wisdom in whatever form he could find it: his selections for the “Ethical Scriptures” sections of The Dial are in fact wildly “universal” (one issue might feature extracts from the Divine Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus and the next selections from the “Chaldean Oracles” translated by the British Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor). The context suggests that, strangely, there is nothing specifically Oriental about Emerson’s Orientalism. By contrast, Henry David Thoreau appears to have been more discriminating in his efforts to understand differences between Confucianism, say, and Buddhism. Thoreau’s interest in Buddhism is especially noteworthy, since that culture was virtually unknown in mid-nineteenth-century America. His interest derives from Eugene Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du buddhisme indien (1844) and from Thoreau’s Concord contemporary Elizabeth Peabody (1804–1894), who translated extracts of Burnouf’s French version of The Lotus Sutra as “The Preaching of Buddha” for the January 1844 issue of The Dial, a translation long thought to have been done by Thoreau.18 The misattribution of Peabody’s translation of Burnouf to Thoreau brings us to another point about American Orientalism that might be said to lie in the interstices between theology and scholarship: the use of Eastern faith as a guide to personal conduct. Readers of Walden (1854) should have no trouble concurring in the view that Thoreau’s best-known book means to examine the question of how best to live in the world. Certain passages from Walden work in concert with sections of Thoreau’s correspondence to suggest that the man had found inspiration for the quiet, reflective life he sought to pursue in his simple cabin on Walden Pond by looking to the Far East. An 1849 letter to his friend Harrison Blake contains the surprising claim that Thoreau “would fain practice the yoga faithfully.” He adds that, “[t]o some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.”19 In Walden, Thoreau says he understands “what the Orientals meant by contemplation and the forsaking of works” after sitting “in my sunny doorway from sunrise to noon, rapt in revery.”20 The Walden passage echoes the title of the fourth chapter, or “lecture,” of Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad-gita, “Of the Forsaking of Works.” In that chapter and others, Krishna explains to Arjuna the importance of “forsaking the fruits of action for obtaining eternal salvation” and lectures the reluctant warrior on the nature of those “works” – i.e. “the fruits of actions” – that are best abandoned. “A disinterested mind,” he says, “who, in all things, is free from inordinate desires, obtaineth a perfection unconnected with works.” From Wilkins, also, Thoreau probably got some idea of what

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it might mean to “practice the yoga.” The words yoga and yogi do not appear in Walden, but Wilkins’ description of the “Yōgēē” who “constantly exerciseth the spirit in private” seems something that Thoreau might well have taken to heart: “He is recluse, of a subdued mind and spirit . . . He planteth his own seat firmly on a spot that is undefiled, neither too high nor too low, and sitteth upon the sacred grass.”21 The best-known example of Thoreau’s Orientalizing impulse in Walden, the fable of “an artist in the city of Kouroo,”22 also owes something to Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad-gita, though how much is hard to say. Thoreau’s “Kouroo” seems an echo of the name Ko˘o˘ro˘o˘ in Wilkins, the name of the place (Kuru in modern transliteration) where the sons of Pāndu and the sons of Dhritarāshtra ready for battle. However the fable of the artist so focused and dedicated to the perfection of his art that he escapes the effects of time is interpreted, surely it matters that Thoreau has chosen a Hindu context for it. The mere association of Far Eastern culture with art in Thoreau’s parable is something new. Although Thoreau should not receive credit for the late nineteenth-century shift in interest from Oriental theology to Oriental aesthetics, the change is certainly noteworthy because the increasingly secular nature of American society from the late nineteenth century on harmonizes with a growing focus on the relevance of art in assessments of the value and meaning of the Oriental world. Aesthetic values came to the fore as never before when Japan was opened to the West in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, so called because the power of governance was restored to the imperial court, led by the Emperor Meiji. Prior to the Restoration, Japan was effectively a closed feudal society, ruled continuously by the Togugawa shogunate since 1603. During the Meiji period, which runs until 1912, Japan embarked on a period of rapid modernization, a program that included official invitations to Western scientists and intellectuals to teach at Japanese universities. One of the most influential of the scientists was Edward S. Morse, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, and a devotee of Darwin noted for his expertise in the evolution of brachiopods. Morse’s role in the aesthetic awakening of America to Japan is twofold. First, he developed an interest in Japanese ceramics and amassed a huge collection, later shipped to his native New England to form the foundation of the Morse Collection of Japanese pottery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Second, he recruited other New Englanders to come to Japan and participate in the modernization program by teaching subjects that were more philosophical and literary than those of the severely scientific Morse, whose fascination with ceramics always reflected his

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naturalistic orientation (he was more a taxonomist of ceramic “specimens” than a connoisseur of art). Among Morse’s recruits, no one was more important to the aesthetic turn in American Orientalism than Ernest Fenollosa, who came to Japan to teach the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and the dialectical philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. Spencer’s philosophy of economic individualism may have helped to lay the groundwork for capitalism in the island nation, but it was Hegel’s idealism that helped lead Fenollosa toward an idiosyncratic understanding of Japanese and Chinese culture that was to have far-reaching effects in the age of modernism shortly to follow. The confluence of Fenollosa’s Hegelianism and his Orientalism was triggered by a commonplace observation that Morse and other Americans habitually made about Eastern culture, Japanese especially: that it was not just different from Western culture – it was actually an inversion of it. Morse writes that “in many operations we do just the reverse of the Japanese” – “the last page of our books would be the first page of theirs,” for example.23 Percival Lowell, who traveled to the Far East in the early 1880s, also argued that the “Far Oriental” (a term encompassing the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans) was literally the opposite of the “Near Occidental.” In the case of the Japanese, he wrote, “the world stands reversed” in such great degree that when “we gaze at them” we seem to be “viewing our own humanity in some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind.”24 This sense of inversion or contrariety made it easy for the Harvard Hegelian Fenollosa to make East and West the terms of a dialectical argument; that much is unsurprising. What is surprising is the form the argument took, for Fenollosa came to regard the result of the dialectical interplay of Western thesis and Eastern antithesis as a higher synthesis that might lead to a new world culture, no less. Fenollosa knew from reading Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837) that America would ultimately be revealed as “the land of the future,” a nation that would one day abandon “the historical lumber-room of Old Europe” where “hitherto the History of the World has developed itself.” Fenollosa also learned from Hegel that “[t]he History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning.”25 Fenollosa concluded that, if history had indeed ended in Europe, it could be renewed in America by a return to Asia, where history had originated, thereby realizing a synthesis of East and West. At first, Fenollosa’s Hegelian fantasies seem removed from the work for which he is best known, thanks to Ezra Pound, namely The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. But that book opens with a vague cultural

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prediction informed by Fenollosa’s Hegelian concept of a new world culture created by the synthesis of East and West: “This twentieth century not only turns a new page in this history of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.”26 What Pound took away from the manuscript Fenollosa’s wife had entrusted to him in 1908 was mainly the idea that the Chinese language, because of its supposed “ideographic” nature, provided a more direct, precise indication of the relationship of word to thing than Western languages could offer. Hence Chinese was an ideal medium for poetry, imagism especially: Pound followed Fenollosa in thinking that Chinese characters conveyed miniature images of ideas. The notion is mistaken, of course; the Chinese writing system is phonographic, not pictographic, despite the fact that a small portion of the characters originated in pictograms (and even the “pictographic” characters convey meaning by the arbitrary sounds assigned to them, not by their visual resemblance to things). Fenollosa’s thinking was deeply informed by his reading of Emerson, whose works he taught to his Japanese students around the same time that he began to turn his attention to Chinese literature.27 In “Nature,” for example, Emerson claimed: “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.”28 Fenollosa found in the Chinese character the perfect illustration of “picturesque” representation. Indeed, what seems to be the case is that his reading of Fenollosa led Pound to Orientalize Emerson even more that Emerson had Orientalized himself: “Chinese for Pound meant the recovery or reinvention of Adamic speech, ‘in which words contain the essence of the things they name,’ a return to the world Emerson had outlined.”29 Fenollosa therefore aided Pound in the development of his poetic method, but he also provided material that enabled Pound to put that method to work in order to produce some of the finest poetry of the early twentieth century. Both Cathay (1915), a collection of poems translated from the Chinese, and Certain Noble Plays of Japan, reprinted as “Noh,” or Accomplishment (1917), owe their origins to the manuscripts Pound received from Fenollosa’s widow, Mary. Although Pound would go on to darker Oriental explorations with his use of Confucius to justify authoritarian ideology in the 1930s, notably in the 1935 pamphlet Jefferson and/or Mussolini, his earlier Japanese- and Chinese-inspired transformations of English poetry remain one of the more enduring examples of how Eastern tradition can supplement and validate American culture. After all, much of

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Pound’s vaunted modernism has its origins in that same New England Orientalism that suffused the thinking of Fenollosa, whose ideas, in turn, owed so much to Emerson. Pound’s one-time protégé T. S. Eliot also participates in the tradition of New England Orientalism, but Eliot did not use Indic tradition for the purpose of poetic innovation. Where Pound found support in Chinese and Japanese literature for his own efforts to renovate English poetry, Eliot used the scholarly knowledge of Sanskrit he acquired at Harvard to supplement and complicate the philosophical ideas and religious sentiments in both his criticism and his poetry. In a series of essays over the long course of his career, Eliot sought to articulate the concept of wisdom in poetry and used the Bhagavad-gita, “the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy within my experience,”30 to explain the concept. The problem Eliot sets himself is the difficulty of distinguishing wisdom from both philosophy and religion. The appeal of the Bhagavad-gita cannot lie in the philosophical or religious dimensions of Hinduism because those elements are culturally removed from the Western reader. But the great Western poets Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe also are removed from the modern reader in various ways, yet all three possess something in common that assures their continuing permanence and universality. That something is wisdom: “Whether the ‘philosophy’ or the religious faith of Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe is acceptable to us or not . . . there is the Wisdom that we can all accept.”31 Eliot the critic seems intent on providing support for Eliot the poet by devising a critical template to cast the philosophical and religious dimensions of his work into the realm of wisdom poetry. That maneuver seems to lie behind his incorporation of Sanskrit words into The Waste Land (1922), notably the concluding line: “Shantih shantih shantih.” Eliot’s note to the line informs the reader that “‘The peace which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent to this word” (emphasis added),32 as if to say that some larger wisdom encompasses both religious traditions. An even clearer example of the relation of Indic literature to Eliot’s wisdom voice is his use of a modern persona of Krishna in “The Dry Salvages” (1941), one of the long philosophical poems that comprise The Four Quartets. Even before Krishna is named outright, Eliot evokes the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation that Krishna elaborates to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita when he articulates one of his more constant themes, the relation of individual experience to cultural tradition:

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Later in the same poem, the allusion to the Bhagavad-gita becomes explicit: “So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna / On the field of battle.”34 Since “The Dry Salvages” was composed during the London Blitz (September 1940–May 1941),35 Eliot’s evocation of the bygone battle on the field of Kuru suggests that the modern AngloCatholic poet means to match the wisdom of the ancient Hindu author. High-culture Orientalism reaches a kind of culmination in the wartime poetry of T. S. Eliot. After World War II, when the American economy took off and consumer society began to flourish, pop-culture Orientalism began to emerge more forcefully than ever before. The best-known instigators of this development are the Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. While their work might be more properly described as countercultural, such explorations of the Far East became increasingly associated with popular culture, as illustrated by the involvement with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his transcendental mediation movement on the part of the Beatles and other celebrities in the late 1960s. Historically, popularizations of Eastern culture in the latter half of the twentieth century are traceable to a major event in the nineteenth: the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in conjunction with the Columbia Exposition of 1893. The Parliament’s organizers understood Far Eastern faiths as meaningful but incomplete – because their adherents had not experienced Christian revelation. Needless to say, a number of representatives from India and Japan challenged this notion. The Indian Hindu delegation, led by the charismatic Swami Vivekananda, used pseudo-Darwinian language to argue that all religions were subject to spiritual “laws” that would lead toward the “evolution” of an all-encompassing, universal faith. The Japanese Buddhists, headed by Shaku Soen, chief abbot of a Renzai Zen temple, and his younger, layman associate Hirai Kinzo, challenged the primacy of Christianity in both moral and political terms by criticizing the misuse of American power in Japan and other Eastern nations.36 Both Vivekananda and Shaku went on to enjoy successful lecture careers

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in the United States after the parliament, with Vivekananda founding the Ramakrishna movement in America.37 But Shaku Soen’s influence as a lecturer and author intent on explaining Zen Buddhism to Americans was more far-reaching, mainly because of the man who accompanied him, his student and translator D. T. Suzuki. Suzuki, in fact, emerges as a kind of missing link in mass culture responses to Eastern thought in the United States, the connection between the first efforts to popularize Zen Buddhism in the first decade of the twentieth century and the second efflorescence of Zen in the post–World War II period. Although Suzuki did not return to the United States until 1950 (to lecture on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University), he had published a number of books in English, including Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series) (1927) and Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series) (1933). The parenthetical subtitles of the two books of essays on Zen Buddhism are evidently intended to evoke Emerson, who likewise subtitled his essay collections First Series and Second Series.38 The Emersonian allusion seems to be an effort to “Americanize” Zen Buddhism, a tendency validated by Suzuki’s best-known book, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959). That study is replete with comparisons of Zen Buddhism to American thought. For example, Suzuki quotes Emerson’s poem “Brahma” as a way of illustrating the psychology of Zen swordsmanship and finds analogies in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Renzai spirituality. In Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), the character Japhy Ryder, a fictional avatar of the Beat poet Snyder, is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism who lives in a twelveby-twelve shack, sleeps on a straw mat and reads, along with sutras and haikus, “the complete works of D. T. Suzuki.”39 This fictional illustration of Suzuki’s influence could be multiplied many times over in the examples of such San Francisco Renaissance figures as Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Watts and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, not to mention Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder himself. One of the cultural ironies of this Bay Area Orientalism is that it opened the way not just to a broader acceptance of Far Eastern culture by the American public but also to an increasing commercialization of that culture. Today, transcendental meditation is trademarked as TM, every strip mall has a Chinese martial arts studio and Indian yoga is a billiondollar industry. No doubt the tendency was helped along by changing attitudes toward Asian immigrants, partly the result of such major legislation as the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which lifted existing strictures against Asian immigrants and Asian residents, and the Indochina Migration and

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Refugee Act of 1975, which aided resettlement of significant numbers of Vietnamese people in the United States after the American defeat in Vietnam. The influx of Asian immigrants immediately after these two major pieces of legislation was profound and continues to be so. According to the US census of 2010, the “race group” that increased more than any other in the ten years after the 2000 census was Asian, growing four times faster than the general population as well as faster than any other race group. As of 2010, the Asian population numbered just above 17.3 million, or 5.6 percent of the total population.40 If American Orientalism in the past was driven by ideological fantasies made all the more fantastic by the absence of direct experience with Asian peoples, the fact that more and more of those peoples are now citizens of the United States is bound to have an effect on American attitudes toward them – mainly because they are no longer “them” but “us.” For this reason, the Far East is hardly the rich source of Orientalism today that it was in the nineteenth century or even in the middle of the twentieth century. As for the Near East – that is a different and darker story, one that has become so complex and disturbing that the academic concept of American Orientalism hardly seems adequate to address it.

Notes 1. For details of the immigration legislation of 1882, 1888, 1892, 1902 and 1917, as well as the quota system imposed by the Immigration Law of 1924, see the Congressional Record, as follows: 47th Congress, 1st Sess. (May 6, 1882): chap. 126; 50th Congress, 1st Sess. (October 1, 1888): chap. 1064; 57th Congress, 1st Sess. (May 5, 1892): chap. 60; 57th Congress, 1st Sess. (April 29, 1902): chap. 641; 64th Congress, 2nd Sess. (February 5, 1917): chap. 29; 68th Congress, 1st Sess. (May 26, 1924): chap. 190. 2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 1–2, p. 4, p. xi. 3. Said, Orientalism, p. 290. 4. “ From the Morals of Confucius,” Pennsylvania Gazette, February 28–May 7, 1738, p. 2. 5. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 32: pp. 441–442n. 6. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Cantanzariti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 27: p. 390n. 7. See, for example, Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 8. J. P. Rao Rayapati, Early American Interest in Vedanta (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1973), p. 78.

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9. Igbal Singh, Rammohun Roy: A Biographical Inquiry into the Making of Modern India, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1983), 3: p. 255. 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Mary Moody Emerson, 10 June 1822. Cited in James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1887), 1: pp. 80–81. 11. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York, 1939), 3: p. 290. 12. “ Veeshnoo Sarma,” The Dial 3:1 (July 1842): p. 82. 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” Essays and Lectures (New York: New American Library, 1983), p. 76, p. 86. 14. William Bysshe Stein, “Introduction,” in Hitopadesa: Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968 [1787]), pp. v–vi. 15. Charles Wilkins quotes from Jones on this point in his preface; see “Translator’s Preface,” in Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit, Being the “Hitopadesa,” trans. Charles Wilkins (London: Routledge, 1885 [1787]), p. 10. 16. Dale Riepe, The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1970), p. 22; Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 164–165. 17. Riepe, The Philosophy of India, p. 12. 18. Wendell Piez, “Anonymous Was a Woman – Again,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 3 (Fall 1993): pp. 10–11. 19. Henry David Thoreau to Harrison Blake, November 20, 1849. Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), pp. 210–211. 20. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 411. 21. The Bhagvat-Geeta, trans. Charles Wilkins (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959 [1785]), p. 51, p. 131, p. 63. 22. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 582. 23. Edward S. Morse, Japan Day by Day: 1877, 1878–79, 1882–83, 2 vols. (Atlanta: Cherokee, 1990 [1917]), 2: p. 25. 24. Percival Lowell, The Soul of the Far East (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), p. 2, p. 3. 25. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibrew (London: Bohn, 1861), p. 90, p. 109. 26. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, n.d. [1936]), p. 3. 27. Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 218. 28. Emerson, “Nature,” Essays and Lectures, p. 22. 29. Ira B. Nadal, “Constructing the Orient: Pound’s American Vision,” in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

david weir Press, 2003), p. 17; Nadal quotes Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 143. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 219. T. S. Eliot, “Goethe as the Sage,” On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1957), p. 263. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 69, p. 76. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 194. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 197. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 262. For Vivekananda’s, Shaku’s and Hirai’s addresses, see The World’s Parliament of Religions, 2 vols., ed. John Henry Barrow (Chicago: Parliament Publishing, 1893), 2: pp. 968–978 (Vivekananda); 2: pp. 829–831, p. 1285 (Shaku); 1: pp. 444–450 (Hirai). Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 16–47. For a fuller discussion of this point and Suzuki’s relation to Emerson generally, see Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 196–197. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Road Novels 1957–1960, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 292. Elizabeth M. Hoeffel et al., “The Asian Population: 2010,” in 2010 Census Briefs (Washington, DC: US Bureau of the Census, 2012), pp. 3–4.

chapter 12

Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures Valerie Kennedy

Edward Said’s work is central to the study and theorization of resistance in colonial and postcolonial literatures. Although Orientalism (1978) ignored resistance, Said’s many writings on Palestine, Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994) provide many of the parameters for the fields of postcolonial literary and cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Culture and Imperialism offers several concepts that were to become central to resistance in postcolonial studies, but it also responds to work being done by Mary Louise Pratt, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Harlow and others. This chapter focuses on works originally written in English, thus bypassing the Négritude movement and the Bengali Renaissance, although Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) (Les Damnés de la Terre [1961]) will be discussed because Fanon’s critique of Western colonialism is central to Culture and Imperialism and to the works of one of the most important postcolonial resistance writers, Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1969), although first published in Arabic, will also feature because of its relation to Said’s arguments about resistance in Culture and Imperialism.

Edward Said and Resistance Despite its groundbreaking role in bringing the combination of politics and literature into the Western academy,1 Orientalism (1978) neglects resistance, homogenizes Orientalist discourse and ignores the role of women in both Orientalism and imperialism.2 The neglect of resistance in Orientalism is related to Said’s espousal of a form of Western humanism that takes white, middle-class, male-authored canonical texts and experience as its central point of reference. Said focuses on Western politics and literature, scarcely acknowledging resistance either in the colonial period or in the work of non-Western postcolonial writers. Indeed, in relation to the 219

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colonial period he argues that there was “very little resistance on the Orient’s part.”3 Moreover, Western Orientalist works are seen from an excessively homogenizing perspective, which explains why Said is unable to study “other cultures and other peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective,”4 although he recognizes the urgency of this task. “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985) stresses the importance of producing “non-dominative and non-coercive” forms of knowledge, and Said admits that Orientalism ignored the “repressed or resistant history” of opposition to imperialism.5 He acknowledges the work of nonWestern writers like A. L. Tibawi, Abdullah Laroui and others who challenge “the authority, provenance, and institutions” of Orientalism and of the Subaltern Studies group who document popular “resistance to elite domination” and challenge “the elitism of modern Indian historiography.”6 There are also references to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha, both significant figures in postcolonial studies in relation to resistance.7 Said’s writings on the Middle East are also significant. In The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981) and Blaming the Victims (1988), Said challenges, respectively, the accepted Western and Israeli versions of Palestinian history (notably the claim that the Israeli state is “a land without people, for a people without land,”8 which he dismisses as obfuscatory and Orientalist), the Western media’s representations of Palestinians, and what, in the subtitle to Blaming the Victims, he calls the “Spurious Scholarship” relating to Palestine – that is, the perpetration of hegemonic/biased Orientalist visions of the country and its non-Jewish inhabitants. After the Last Sky (1986) provides a combination of textual and photographic narratives to challenge the hegemonic pro-Israeli view of Palestinians, and the essays in The Politics of Dispossession (1995), many of which were written before the publication of Culture and Imperialism, take up the same issues. In all of these works, Said argues for the need for a Palestinian narrative of resistance as well as for a Palestinian state; this means having “Permission to Narrate” (the title of an 1984 essay) the Palestinian side of the story, because “[f]acts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them.”9 In other essays like “Intellectuals in the PostColonial World” (1986), he provides examples of resistance in colonial and postcolonial literary texts, including works by Conrad, Fanon, Ngu˜ gı˜, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Salih and Salman Rushdie, all of whom figure in Culture and Imperialism. Similarly, in Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Said defines the responsibility of public intellectuals like himself as “speak[ing]

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 221 the truth to power,” questioning and undermining authority, and speaking for “the weak and unrepresented.”10 Said has said that he thought of Culture and Imperialism as “a sequel to Orientalism, including the resistances . . . of European and American intellectuals and scholars,”11 although his failure to mention nonWestern figures here is striking. Some of the key ideas and strategies of Culture and Imperialism are clearly developments from Orientalism: for example, Said’s emphasis on the inextricably intertwined histories of the colonizers and the colonized and his explorations of the colonial complicities of canonical works like Mansfield Park, Heart of Darkness and Kim recall the earlier focus on Orientalist discourse. However, Said’s analysis of examples of political and textual resistance to imperialism, notably in writers like Franz Fanon, and his articulation of the concepts of hybridity and of contrapuntal reading extend the scope of the earlier work.12 In the “Introduction” Said argues that there was almost everywhere both “armed resistance” and “cultural resistance” to imperialism,13 and in chapter 3, “Resistance and Opposition,” he distinguishes between “‘primary resistance,’” which is political, and “secondary, that is, ideological resistance,”14 although his main focus is literary. Chapter 3 begins by discussing resistance and liberation movements between World Wars I and II, citing works by E. M. Forster, André Gide and André Malraux and taking W. B. Yeats as an example of the national and nationalist poet. Placing Yeats in the context of Irish nationalism causes Said to discuss the problems caused by the collaboration of what Fanon calls the nationalist bourgeoisie with the colonial or neocolonial powers, although Yeats is also taken as an example of the antiimperialist cultural resistance whose primary task was “to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land,” and Said sees him (along with Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mahmoud Darwish) as one of those writers who sought to reclaim not only their land but also its heroes, mythology and language.15 Said admits that Yeats “expresses the predicament of sharing a language with the colonial overlord,” but he does not acknowledge that the ambiguities of Yeats’ position as a member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy makes him a problematic choice as an antiimperialist poet.16 In “The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition,” Said focuses on the work of four non-Western writers, seeing James’ The Black Jacobins (1938), George Antonius’ The Arab Awakening (1938), Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and S. H. Alatas’ The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) as key works of resistance literature and examples of what he

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calls “the voyage in” – that is, the “extension into the metropolis of largescale mass movements” in the form of “anti-imperialist and scholarly work done by writers from the peripheries who have immigrated to or are visiting the metropolis.”17 While he argues that all four resist imperialism, he seems to prefer the strong narrative lines of James and Antonius to the irony and hermeneutical suspicion which characterize Guha and Alatas’ more specialized writings, perhaps partly because, as Mary Louise Pratt suggests, the two earlier writers synthesize Western and “native” cultural traditions.18 But Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is Said’s most important resistance text. Like Fanon, Said sees nationalism as an essential transitional stage between political resistance to imperialism and the ideological resistance that leads to the establishment of new states, although, also like Fanon, he argues that it is not enough.19 Said emphasizes Fanon’s awareness that conventional narrative is generally identified with imperialism and thus cannot be taken over unproblematically by nationalist movements, which must instead develop “lateral, non-narrative connections among people whom imperialism separated.”20 But, as Said’s writings on Palestine show, he also believes in the possibility of a counter-narrative, to be used as a tool of liberation by previously colonized peoples. Culture and Imperialism does not always do the subject of colonial resistance justice. Said modifies Fanon’s uncompromising critique of European imperialism, asserting that Fanon wants to link Europeans and natives “in a new non-adversarial community of awareness and antiimperialism,” although Fanon specifically excludes from his new imagined community of “European peoples” and the colonized those whom he calls “our common masters”21 – that is, the European ruling classes and the nationalist neocolonial bourgeoisie. Moreover, Said does not endorse Fanon’s statement that “Europe is literally the creation of the third World” because of Europe’s exploitation of the raw materials and human labor of its colonies.22 Again, Rabindranath Tagore is mentioned, but the Bengali Renaissance is not discussed, and Said fails to see the Orientalism of Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Said does anticipate later discussions of resistance in postcolonial literature by identifying the significance of rewritings of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, arguing that Conrad’s novella is reconfigured in Ngu˜ gı˜’s The River Between (1965) and Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and that The Tempest is central to George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960).23 He also raises the issue of language and identifies two themes of much postcolonial resistance

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 223 literature: the rewriting of colonial history and the reassertion of the value of the colonized culture. Said refers to Ngu˜ gı˜ decision to abandon English for Gikuyu in the cause of liberation, arguing that “resistance . . . is an alternative way of conceiving human history” by “writing back” to metropolitan cultures and making them “acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories”24 and also reviving the colonized culture. The phrase “writing back” recalls Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s 1989 The Empire Writes Back, an anthology of postcolonial writing focusing on its radical challenge to Eurocentric notions of language and literature. Indeed, work by several writers on colonial and postcolonial resistance can be linked to Culture and Imperialism. For example, the idea of “Overlapping Territories [and] Intertwined Histories” (the title of the first chapter of Said’s book) is developed by Elleke Boehmer in her exploration of the interrelation of political and literary resistance in Ireland and India and of the ways in which imperialism and resistance to it determined the form and the content of modernist texts in various ways. Boehmer argues that “an anti-colonial discursivity [was] manifest in literary nationalist as well as more overtly political writing as early as the late nineteenth century” and that the empire’s global nature “paradoxically facilitated the rise of cross- or transnational resistances.”25 Among Boehmer’s examples of Indian resistance literature are works by Sister Nivedita (born Margaret Noble) such as Kali, The Mother (1900), The Web of Indian Life (1904) and Aggressive Hinduism (1905) as well as Sri Aurobindo’s The Doctrine of Passive Resistance (1948), “New Lamps for Old” (1893) and some of his poems. In the Indian and Irish contexts, Boehmer demonstrates how resistance in politics and literature intersect by showing that works of literary resistance were part of political campaigns relating to the colonies, as in the case of Arthur Griffith’s “Ballad of the Transvaal Irish Brigade” or Lady Gregory’s “Boer Ballad in Ireland,”26 and by analyzing the interdependence of political action and writing in Maud Gonne’s anti-conscription campaign in World War I and her advocacy of Irish freedom in her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen (1938). Boehmer’s analysis may also be related to “A Note on Modernism” in Culture and Imperialism.27 Through her extended discussions of the overlap between Irish and Indian literary and political resistance, Boehmer develops Said’s arguments that European modernism is characterized by various “manifestations of empire” such as the resisting native and imperial rivalry28 and that

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it responds to “the external pressures . . . of the imperium through “perceptual uncertainty or hesitancy” and a retreat into the aesthetic realm.29 Said’s demonstration of the colonial complicities of canonical texts in Culture and Imperialism is developed by Philip Darby, who argues that while literary resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism is central to postcolonial African fiction, general theorizations of postcolonial fiction tend to romanticize resistance and to neglect the fact that many narratives by colonial and postcolonial writers from the Indian subcontinent show “points of convergence with imperial ones.”30 By contrast Said’s comments on Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o and especially Decolonising the Mind and Ngu˜ gı˜’s move from English to Gikuyu in fiction can be linked to Neil Lazarus’ discussion of resistance in postcolonial African fiction where he sees Ngu˜ gı˜ as “exemplary” among African writers in his “commitment to a revolutionary conception of intellectualism,” especially his work in popular theatre with Gikuyu peasants and workers, which caused his imprisonment.31 Both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism played key roles in establishing postcolonial studies, where the analysis of resistance is a main concern. For example, in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha uses concepts like “the in-between,” “not quite/not white,” and “the third space,” as well as hybridity and colonial mimicry, to focus on the resistance to and subversion of colonialism and imperialism. Some of Bhabha’s essays predate Culture and Imperialism, but the relevance of Orientalism is clear. Gayatri Spivak develops Said’s ideas about alternative histories or narratives to analyze the position of colonized women and to theorize resistance. Her “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) argues that in Jane Eyre various types of English identity are established at the expense of that of Bertha Mason, the colonized woman, so that the novel and much feminist criticism “reproduce the axioms of imperialism.”32 In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985), Spivak argues that the resistance of subaltern or colonized people(s) cannot be expressed autonomously, since it is subject to the categories of the dominant discourse which relegate them to a position of subalternity. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) can also be seen to derive partly from Orientalism, although Pratt uses the concept of “transculturation” to examine the resistance involved when “subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture”33 more extensively than Said does. Said’s identification of Heart of Darkness and

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 225 The Tempest as key works revised in resistance literature has been developed by critics like Phillip Darby and John Marx.

Resistance in Colonial Literatures As noted, Culture and Imperialism breaks new ground in emphasizing the centrality of the imperial framework to canonical nineteenth-century texts: slavery is linked to the bourgeois world of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), the ambiguities of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) are discussed at length (although there is also an ironically Orientalist reading of the “darkness” metaphor), and the attractions as well as the insidiously Orientalist and imperialist ethos of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) are demonstrated. Said’s analysis of Mansfield Park demonstrates the interdependence of bourgeois English civilization and colonial slavery seen in the reliance of the ordered world of Sir Thomas Bertram’s English estate on the colonial exploitation and violence of his Antiguan slave plantation. Said mentions the “threatening presence” of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847),34 but he does not point out that, while in Austen’s work the colonial reality exists only on the periphery, in both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (1847) the characters identified with the colonial world (Bertha Mason and Heathcliff) are brought into the metropolitan centre and challenge it. Heathcliff’s racial indeterminacy makes him an example of the class and racial Other, and his whole life is a form of resistance to the middle-class culture of the Earnshaws and Lintons that identifies him as a savage. Similarly, Bertha Mason responds to the epistemic violence of being labelled a “murderess,” a “wild beast,” a “fiend,” a “vampyre,” “a hyena,” and a “maniac”35 by the racial and class hegemony represented by the Rochesters and Masons by trying to kill Rochester, wounding her brother and finally destroying Thornfield Hall and herself. In 1985, eight years before Culture and Imperialism, as mentioned, Spivak had identified Jane Eyre’s complicity in the imperial ethos in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” and, doubtless thanks to both Spivak and Said, Charlotte Brontë’s novel has become a locus classicus of postcolonial rereading. Spivak’s article might be seen as an example of Said’s theory and practice in Culture and Imperialism of “contrapuntal reading” in that it examines Jane’s Eyre’s relation to the much more explicit dramatization of resistance to the colonial ethos in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), where Christophine, the black servant of Antoinette (the Bertha Mason figure), explicitly criticizes both slavery and the post-

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Emancipation colonial regime and also asserts her resistance to the postEmancipation colonial order.36 However, as Spivak asserts, Christophine is still “tangential” to Rhys’ narrative, because it is a rewriting of “a canonical English text . . . in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native.”37 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the colonial literary text that is most central to Culture and Imperialism, reflecting the canonical but controversial status of Conrad’s novella in postcolonial studies, a status due in part to Chinua Achebe’s 1977 article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’” Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s novella makes three main points: Conrad uses Africa only “as a foil to Europe” rather than seeing it in its own right; he dehumanizes Africa and Africans and deprives them of speech because he has a racist attitude to black people; and he is a “purveyor of comforting myths” who offers no “alternative frame of reference” to the imperialist one.38 Said invokes Achebe’s critique twice, first defending Conrad by arguing that Achebe ignored “the limitations placed on Conrad by the novel as an aesthetic form” and then apparently endorsing Achebe’s charge that Conrad dehumanized Africa and Africans by stating that the tendency to dehumanize non-European races became “more prominent and explicit” in Conrad’s later works like Nostromo and Victory.39 Said also endorses Achebe’s criticism of Eurocentric concepts of universalism.40 He never directly challenges Achebe’s reading of the novel, although his discussions of Heart of Darkness do offer a potential or partial answer to Achebe’s points about Conrad and imperialism. Said argues that, at the end of the nineteenth century, “the sovereign historical force of imperialism” meant that “other non-imperialist alternatives [were] unthinkable,” but he proposes that there are “explicit references to the outside” in Conrad’s narrative form, references made possible by Conrad’s exilic status, which allows him to maintain “an ironic distance” from imperialism.41 These references point “to a perspective outside the basically imperialist representations provided by Marlow and his listeners” and so “[unsettle] the reader’s sense . . . of empire [and] reality itself.”42 But Said never uses these arguments to directly confront Achebe’s critique, which pays little attention to fictional form. Indeed, occasionally Said himself seems to succumb to the Orientalism of Conrad’s text, writing as if the metaphor of darkness were an unproblematic descriptive trope. For example, he says: “Conrad’s genius allowed him to realize that the ever-present darkness could be colonized or illuminated” and that “Heart of Darkness is full of references to . . . benevolent as well as cruel schemes to bring light to the dark places and peoples of this world.”43 The expressions “the ever-present darkness” and “dark places and

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 227 peoples” seem to reinscribe the imperialist and Orientalist view, as does the later sentence that evokes Conrad’s narrative’s preoccupation “with what eludes articulate expression . . . Africa’s magnificent, ineffable, dark life.”44 On the earlier occasion, however, the next sentence argues that Kurtz and Marlow “(and of course Conrad) are ahead of their time in understanding that what they call ‘the darkness’ has an autonomy of its own, and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism has taken for its own,” and Said criticizes the Eurocentrism and Orientalism of Heart of Darkness by arguing that, while Conrad, Kurtz and Marlow all “acknowledge the darkness” as “independent,” since they were products of their time they could not see that the darkness was a world resisting the empire.45 While Said does mention non-European writers of resistance literature such as Ngu˜ gı˜, Achebe and Salih in Culture and Imperialism, his main focus is still on canonical works by European authors: works by non-European writers receive far less attention than those by European ones. Moreover, he does not clearly distinguish between European and non-European resistance in the colonial period, instead amalgamating discussion of the themes of resistance culture, nationalism and “the voyage in” and thus blurring the difference between the explicit resistance to imperialism in non-European writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao and the greater ambivalence of their European counterparts. For example, Anand’s Untouchable (1935) criticizes the discrimination against Untouchables by higher-caste Hindus as well as British racism and “divide and rule” colonial policies, while Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) dramatizes both Gandhian passive resistance to and more violent actions against British colonialism; it represents its author’s conscious attempt to use Indian English and style to represent the worldview of the colonized rather than that of the colonizer.

Resistance in Postcolonial Literatures: Definitions Barbara Harlow, John Marx, Phillip Darby, Fredric Jameson and Jahan Ramazani provide some useful guidelines for defining postcolonial resistance literature. Harlow – whose work Said mentions in Culture and Imperialism and who, in Resistance Literature, thanks both Said and Spivak for their “support and example” – sees resistance as “a political and politicized activity” that is “immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production,” arguing that “[n]arrative . . . provides a more developed historical analysis of the circumstances of economic, political, and cultural

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domination and repression [than poetry],” an argument supported by the fact that the most explicit and developed examples of postcolonial resistance are found in fiction.46 Harlow focuses on cultural resistance in the Middle East, drawing on Said’s ideas of resistant history47 and analyzing non-canonical works by non-Western writers, including a number by Palestinians, some also discussed by Said, such as Halim Barakat, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. For his part, Marx argues that postcolonial literature resists colonial or neocolonial ideology either by “repudiat[ing] the canon” or by “revis[ing] canonical texts and concepts” by “[u]nwriting” works like The Tempest or Heart of Darkness,48 the second of these points having been raised in Culture and Imperialism. Darby defines “‘resistance literature’” as “texts of cultural affirmation and national liberation” and rightly asserts that after independence such works were “mostly directed against the new elites and characteristically [took] the form of political allegory,”49 particularly in African fiction. By contrast, he argues that Anglophone Indian fiction was often ambivalent about imperialism rather than necessarily resistant to it. Darby’s view of African literature supports Jameson’s over-generalized but nonetheless useful argument that in “Third-World Literature” “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” and that “third-world national allegories are conscious and overt,”50 and indeed this the case in much African postcolonial fiction, notably that of Ngu˜ gı˜. Ramazani analyzes postcolonial poetry in relation to two of the resistance themes Said identified in Culture and Imperialism: the need to reclaim the land and the need to establish an independent communal history,51 arguing that postcolonial poets show either a “resistive” and/or an “affiliative, if still revisionary” relationship to European writing and demonstrating that many postcolonial writers have incorporated Western literary techniques into their works, as is also suggested by Marx.52

Varieties of Resistance Writing The works of Ngu˜ gı˜ demonstrate many of the different types of postcolonial resistance writing. Firstly, there is his political and fictional critique of colonialism and neocolonialism, which draws heavily on Fanon’s ideas and which is to be found in Barrel of a Pen (1983), Decolonising the Mind (1986) and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998), among other works, and in the novels A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1982) and Wizard of the Crow (2007). Secondly, in his decision to move from English to Gikuyu in his fiction and to draw heavily on Gikuyu

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 229 cultural forms in his translations, Ngu˜ gı˜ represents postcolonial resistance to European languages and literary forms and the concomitant assertion of the values of the formerly colonized culture, often using traditional oral narrative forms and/or fantastic realism. Thirdly, in his prison memoir Detained (1981), Ngu˜ gı˜ reexamines colonial settler culture in Kenya and the history of Gikuyu resistance to colonial oppression, as well as giving an account of his own detention. Perhaps the only form of resistance literature not to be found in Ngu˜ gı˜ is that which focuses on the experiences of racism and alienation of individuals from former colonies in the Western metropolis, often challenging colonial and/or world history, writing which might be seen as another version of Said’s “voyage in.” Ngu˜ gı˜’s political writings all demand the African writer’s solidarity with peasants and the urban poor.53 In Decolonising the Mind Ngu˜ gı˜ also argues that postcolonial African writers need to write in their own indigenous languages, to exploit their oral traditions and to express communal rather than individual politics and desires.54 However, significantly, even after declaring that Petals of Blood would be his last novel in English, he continued to write autobiographical and polemical texts in English and translated Devil on the Cross and The Wizard of the Crow, although into an English shot through with Gikuyu verbal patterns and cultural forms. Decolonising the Mind offers many parallels with Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Like Fanon, Ngu˜ gı˜ emphasizes the potential of the peasants and workers for resistance and the need for African writers to reconnect with them lest they become too Europeanized and write “AfroEuropean novel[s],” and he follows Fanon in castigating the nationalist bourgeoisie for its ties with foreign capitalists and its exploitation and robbery of the masses.55 He also gives an account of the genesis of his Gikuyu play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) in 1977, its banning, and its role in his detention and exile. Ngu˜ gı˜’s novels offer the most consistent examples of postcolonial literary resistance as versions of national allegory and challenges to colonial history. For example, General R. in A Grain of Wheat declares: “‘We want a Kenya built on the heroic tradition of resistance of our people,’”56 and the novel deals with the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonialism, rewriting hegemonic accounts of the rebellion and documenting Gikuyu mythology. Later novels like Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow challenge the neocolonial elite’s exploitation and manipulation of peasants and ordinary people57 and celebrate resistance to it by both men and women. Both novels include strong women characters – Wanja, in the first, Wariinga in the second and Nyawira in the third – who show that

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women are, as Ngu˜ gı˜ says in Detained, “the most exploited and oppressed section of the entire working class” and that they also have “a will to resist and to struggle” against this.58 Such novels show why Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a key text of postcolonial resistance. Fanon insists that political independence often represents no change for the mass of the formerly colonized population, because “the national bourgeoisie” – the neocolonial elite, including most intellectuals – is assimilated to Western values and maintains its contacts with foreign powers and capital, thus betraying the aspirations of the majority of the people.59 Ngu˜ gı˜’s Devil on the Cross dramatizes precisely this betrayal.60 Moreover, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and The Wizard of the Crow exemplify another important form of postcolonial linguistic resistance: the inclusion of non-English words and expressions and of folk tales, praise songs and myths from the culture of the previously colonized people, since they are full of Gikuyu words, proverbs, songs, poems, riddles and incantations, which dramatize popular culture and resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. In Wizard of the Crow in particular, Ngu˜ gı˜ uses a form of magic realism that is a departure from the partly allegorical realism of early works, such as The River Between and Weep Not, Child, and that might be compared to the different version of magic realism to be found in the works of Salman Rushdie.61 In Culture and Imperialism, Said discusses Ngu˜ gı˜’s second novel, The River Between (1965), as a rewriting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, suggesting “a return to an African Africa,” and he notes that Ngu˜ gı˜ and Tayeb Salih reexamine “such great topoi of colonial culture as the quest and the voyage into the unknown” from a postcolonial perspective.62 Said ignores the resistance to neocolonial injustice, exploitation and repression by peasants, workers and some intellectuals in A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977) or Devil on the Cross (1982), thus overlooking the continuity in Ngu˜ gı˜’s work between his call for resistance by African peasants, workers and writers in Decolonising the Mind and its dramatization in the actions of Wanja, Munira, Karega and the lawyer in Petals of Blood; those of Warīīnga, Mūturi and Gatuīria in Devil on the Cross; and those of Nyawira and Kamiti in Wizard of the Crow. Neither does Said register these novels’ use of Gikuyu language and cultural forms or the use of magic realism in Devil on the Cross. Overall, Said accurately identifies Ngu˜ gı˜’s debt to Conrad and the significance of the change from English to Gikuyu, but perhaps the focus on Conrad causes Said to neglect other important elements of cultural resistance in Ngu˜ gı˜’s writings. What Said says of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) also applies to Ngu˜ gı˜’s use of

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 231 magic realism in his later works: like Rushdie’s novel, which Said takes as an example of “the voyage in,” they attempt to “enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories.”63 However, in Ngu˜ gı˜’s case this discursive challenge articulates an explicit call for political resistance, while Rushdie’s magical realism offers oblique political critique rather than the direct attacks on neocolonialism found in the works of Ngu˜ gı˜ and other African novelists.64 Salih’s Season of Migration to the North offers an early example of Said’s “voyage in” or of what Aamir R. Mufti calls the “literature of immigration,”65 where colonial subjects or their descendants confront metropolitan racism. However, Salih’s novel is unusual in that its protagonist Mustafa Sa‘eed exploits sensual Orientalist stereotypes to seduce Western women, as well as describing the European desire for the Other as a “disease,” while its unnamed first-person narrator sees his “village at the bend of the Nile” in Orientalist terms as unchanging, timeless and innocent, although it is also characterized by sexual license, and he also criticizes neocolonial abuses of power.66 Later novels by Sam Selvon and Andrea Levy develop this theme by exploring the experiences of their protagonists in the metropolis.67

Conclusion From Orientalism to Culture and Imperialism, Said’s works offered paradigms for the analysis of literary resistance in postcolonial writing. Culture and Imperialism outlined some of the main areas of such resistance: the rewriting of canonical Western texts and the reconfiguring of canonical representations of the colonized, the challenge to colonial history, the use of indigenous literary forms and languages, and alternatives to hegemonic colonial and neocolonial narratives. As I have suggested, Said’s ideas were adapted and developed by postcolonial theorists such as Spivak and Bhabha as well as by a plethora of other writers, so that his work remains a key starting point for any analysis of postcolonial literary resistance.

Notes 1. Said was not first in the field, but he was the first to have widespread influence. 2. For discussion of the gender and other criticisms, see Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 30, pp. 37–46, p. 153 n26.

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3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 7. 4. Said, Orientalism, p. 24. 5. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985): p. 91, p. 94. 6. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 41, p. 43. 7. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” p. 93, pp. 104–105. 8. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 9. 9. Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 254. 10. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 7, p. 67, p. 17. 11. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Paul A. Bové, “An Interview with Edward W. Said,” boundary 2 20:1 (Spring 1993): p. 1, p. 2. 12. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xii. 13. Said, Culture, p. xii. 14. Said, Culture, p. 252. 15. Said, Culture, pp. 268–270, pp. 272–273. 16. Said, Culture, p. 274. 17. Said, Culture, p. 294. 18. Mary Louise Pratt, “Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium,” Social Text 40 (Fall 1994): p. 7. 19. Said, Culture, p. 252, p. 263. 20. Said, Culture, p. 330. 21. Said, Culture, p. 331; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 106. 22. Fanon, The Wretched, p. 102. 23. Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (1956) is another postcolonial revision of The Tempest. 24. Said, Culture, p. 257 (original emphasis), p. 260. 25. Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 11, pp. 4–5. See also Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 115. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 56, and V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (London: Minerva, 1991), p. 517, make similar arguments. 26. Boehmer, Empire, p. 27. 27. Boehmer, Empire, pp. 226–229. 28. Said, Culture, p. 226; Boehmer, Empire, pp. 169–170. 29. Said, Culture, 227; Boehmer, Empire, p. 172, p. 175. 30. Philip Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism (London: Cassell, 1998), p. 127, p. 226. 31. Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 215, p. 213.

Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 233 32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), p. 262. 33. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 9. 34. Said, Culture, p. 73. 35. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 220, p. 221, p. 297, p. 307. 36. See Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 11, p. 103. 37. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” p. 272. 38. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” The Massachusetts Review 57:1 (2016): p. 15, p. 21, p. 22, p. 19, p. 20, 39. Said, Culture, p. 91, p. 200. 40. Said, Culture, p. 335. 41. Said, Culture, p. 26, p. 27. 42. Said, Culture, p. 31, p. 33. 43. Said, Culture, p. 33. 44. Said, Culture, p. 199. 45. Said, Culture, p. 33; original emphasis. 46. Said, Culture, p. 280; Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. xx, pp. 28–29, p. 78. 47. Harlow, Resistance Literature, p. 28. 48. John Marx, “Postcolonial Literature and the Western Literary Canon,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 83; original emphases. 49. Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism, pp. 27–28. 50. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): p. 69, p. 80; original emphases. 51. Jahan Ramazani, “Edward Said and the Poetry of Decolonization,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and Haken Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 161. 52. Ramazani, “Edward Said,” p. 165; Marx, “Postcolonial Literature,” pp. 88–92. 53. Other examples are Amilcar Cabral’s “National Liberation and Culture” and Arundhati Roy’s denunciations of Indian state repression. For the latter see Mufti, Forget English!, p. 188. 54. Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 80 (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), pp. 29–30. Writers like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott and Chinweizu et al. also call for the use of indigenous forms and types of English. 55. Ngu˜ gı˜, Decolonising the Mind, p. 2, p. 29, p. 70, pp. 81–82. 56. Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 217. See also Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949) and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988). 57. Some works among many critiquing neocolonialism are Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother (1971), and Wole

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62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

valerie kennedy Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1972) and his plays A Dance of the Forests (1960), Kongi’s Harvest (1964) and Madmen and Specialists (1970). Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Detained (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 10. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 152. Other examples of such fiction are Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) and Nuruddin Farah’s trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979, 1981, 1983). This technique of using non-English words also characterizes Achebe’s novels, Farah’s trilogy and Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother (1971). Indian examples are Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988); Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008); and Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002). Said, Culture, p. 255, p. 34. Said, Culture, p. 260. The same is true of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), An Antique Land (1992), The Glass Palace (2000) and the Ibis Trilogy (2008, 2011, 2015) or Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (1991). The term is adapted from Mufti’s phrase “novel of immigration”; see Forget English!, p. 168. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 33, p. 1. See Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999) and Small Island (2004), as well as Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).

chapter 13

Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? Andrew C. Long

Aijaz Ahmad’s chapter “Orientalism and After,” collected in his 1992 book In Theory, has proved to be one of the most thorough and lasting critiques of a large span of Edward Said’s work, ranging from The Question of Palestine to Culture and Imperialism. Ahmad’s criticism of Said’s work is informed, incisive and biting, but it is his comments on Said’s literary criticism which suggest that the latter absolved Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster and other cosmopolitan modern writers of racism even as he was critical of so many others. Of course, Said’s work is not racist by association, as most of his writing after Orientalism was directed toward the scrutiny and exposure of racism and colonialism, in canonical literary texts and especially in representations of the Arab and Muslim world. So, in this instance the cosmopolitan writer is not the critic Edward Said but rather the cosmopolitan intellectual, a worldly figure who thinks and writes from the borders of national ideology, a detached critic. In particular, it is Said’s sustained engagement with the work of Joseph Conrad, and especially his 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, which we must reconsider in order to answer Ahmad’s charge against Said and to understand why so many scholars defend Conrad’s novella. Indeed, Said never fully answered Chinua Achebe’s denunciation of the novelist as a “thoroughgoing racist,”1 and his reluctance, I argue, is rooted in his intellectual formation in Cold War literary and cultural criticism, or what I call a Cold War cultural critique, which possibly accounts for the contradictions in his positions that so exasperate Ahmad. The problem, then, lies with the influence of Lionel Trilling and Clement Greenberg on Said, and less so with Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. To this last end, I have paired Said’s analysis of Heart of Darkness with his comments on Albert Camus’ short novel L’Étranger (The Stranger) in order to explore how the Cold War cultural critique works in both novels and to show the difference in treatment by Said, as both concern 235

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colonialism, racism and liberal Western values and both are canonical modern texts. The two novels complement each other – as a matter of difference with regard to racism, the cosmopolitan writer and Said’s literary criticism. While the racism of Heart of Darkness is obvious, The Stranger is more difficult to read as a racist text, and it is only with Said’s reading practice, as he elaborates in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, that we might understand how this vaunted novel of Western consciousness is in fact an insidious text of liberal settler consciousness. Moreover, and contrary to Ahmad’s distinction between Said’s literary and political work, the latter’s reading practice is always evident in his critical approach in his post-Orientalism writing, whether to novels or Palestine, and in his essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” we see the methodology of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism at work. His reading practice here is linked to standpoint, a term or hermeneutic with which we might reassess and press his idea of the contrapuntal reading as we reconsider Said’s preference for canonical texts and cosmopolitan writers – including Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, whom Said considers first-world writers – at the expense of third-world writers. I will develop this last point with reference to the Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips’ interview with Chinua Achebe and to the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s recent novel The Meursault Investigation, which is an answer to the cosmopolitan Albert Camus’ The Stranger, thus the legacy of French colonialism from the standpoint of an Algerian.

Ahmad on Said In “Orientalism and After,” Ahmad makes it clear that he admires Said’s writing about Palestine and his advocacy for the Palestinian cause, though it is due to his solidarity that he feels obligated to criticize Orientalism and his literary criticism.2 The larger part of Ahmad’s chapter on Orientalism is dedicated to a critique of the canonical and transhistorical sweep of Said’s book and Said’s commitment to the European tradition of comparative literature, even as he seeks to debunk it. Ahmad also criticizes Said’s use of the work of Michel Foucault, as, while Said remains an avowed humanist, Foucault’s project was entirely opposed to the institutions of the Enlightenment and Western humanism. Similarly, Said’s references to Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and other communist writers resonate with the anti-Marxism in American academia during the 1980s. This anti-Marxist tendency in Said’s work is

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related to his championing of third-world intellectuals, who, Ahmad tells us, are from their respective national elites and upper classes and whose work is devoid of class analysis with regard to third-world literature. As for third-world literary texts, while Ahmad admires Said’s close readings of the Western literary canon, he pays scant attention to the work of third-world writers, and when he does comment on third-world writers, such as Ngu˜ gı˜, Ahmad points out that he misrepresents their work. It is especially exasperating for Ahmad that Said champions Salman Rushdie, a writer long based in Britain. Without supporting the fatwa, Ahmad points out that Rushdie writes for an elite Anglophone audience, not his fellow working-class Britons of South Asian ancestry.

Achebe and the Defense of Conrad It is a curious omission, but Ahmad does not mention Chinua Achebe in his criticism of Said’s valorization of the cosmopolitan intellectual. This omission is notable given the acclaimed Nigerian novelist’s Chancellor’s Lecture of 1975, “An Image of Africa,” which was published in 1977 in the Massachusetts Review. Even today, Achebe’s essay remains a devastating critique of Conrad and his novella for the racist language and caricatures, the dehumanizing portrait of Africa and Africans which it features, and its prominent place as “permanent literature.” Also notable is that Achebe’s reading of Heart of Darkness is contrapuntal, as Africa is a site for Europe’s metaphysical crises and a place to stage its “comforting myths,” as well as a convenient source for the “primitive” art with which European modernism will resuscitate itself. Achebe anticipates the arguments of the novel’s defenders – that Marlow is the narrator of a framed tale which is narrated by another unnamed narrator – and points out that there must be more to this distancing machination, Conrad’s cordon sanitaire. The strongest parts of his argument, however, concern the representation of Africans in Heart of Darkness and the racist language of the text. Achebe’s recitation of references to “howling” and “rolling eyes,” “stamping” feet and cannibals is a repellant experience, while Africans are “ugly” and little more than racist caricatures.3 There is the fireman, who, though “an improved specimen,” is nonetheless a “parody in breeches” who is out of place on board the ship. And there is Kurtz’s African mistress, “savage and superb, wildeyed and magnificent,” like so many representations of non-white women in Western literature.4 There is too the repeated use of a racist epithet – “nigger” – which today we refer to as “the n-word.” Achebe points out what should be obvious,

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that Conrad seemed to like this epithet, as he used it so frequently in his fiction, including its prominent place in the title of a celebrated short story. As Achebe states directly, “I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called into question.”5 The n-word was recognized as an ugly epithet in Conrad’s time, and his friend Robert Cunninghame Graham denounced its use in terms close to those of Achebe. Orientalism is a book that is in spirit, if not word, supportive of Achebe’s criticism of the legacy of colonialism and racism in American and European literary criticism.6 Yet, as noted earlier, Said never directly elaborates his rejection of Achebe’s critique, which, given his own position, should be important. Instead there is an extended list of scholars who have defended Conrad, such as Cedric Watts, an eminent Conrad scholar, who mounted an early defense in “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad.”7 For Watts, Conrad is a “friend” of Africa while Achebe simply misinterprets Conrad’s text. Indeed, rather than making “comforting myths,” Heart of Darkness, for Watts, is a debunking of those same myths. Similarly, Achebe’s comments on the African figures are incorrect, Watts argues, as, to the contrary, the African characters are “happy” and “vital” by comparison with the colonial characters whom Marlow describes. As for the n-word, Watts contextualizes and displaces, stating that Conrad was simply a man of his time, with typical prejudices. However – and notable here – it is Achebe’s conflation of Conrad with Albert Schweitzer, and his condemnation of the latter’s brand of missionary liberalism, which bothers Watts. There are many other Conrad scholars who defended the novelist and the novel, including Hunt Hawkins and his nuanced approach in “Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness,” where he argues it is a reductive reading to over-emphasize race and the novel (and novelist).8 On the other hand, in his book Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Peter Firchow offers a legalistic defense of the writer and text, with the kind of fine definition of words in textual context, such as “ugly” and “black,” more befitting a criminal defense lawyer than a literary scholar.9 Moderating the debate in his 1985 essay “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism,”10 Patrick Brantlinger states that much in the novella is drawn from “the repertoire of Victorian imperialism and racism that painted an entire continent dark.”11 Moreover, Brantlinger notes, there is no mention of the 1891 to 1894 Belgian war with Arab slave traders and the related mutilation of corpses in Conrad’s novella. This omission allows for

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Conrad’s reference to “unspeakable rites” to be cast as African, not as part of a war between two non-African parties. The problem today is not limited to critical valuation and a scholarly dispute but rather concerns the place of Conrad’s novella in public space, specifically the classroom. Should the novella be taught at all, and, if so, in what sort of pedagogical context? In his curiously titled essay “Jungle Fever,” which appeared in a 1995 issue of the New Yorker, David Denby audited a class discussion of the novella at Columbia University.12 When Denby eventually addresses race and Achebe’s and Said’s criticism of the novella, he denounces both for their political reading, an interpretation which is sufficiently “angry to ignore fictional strategies, palpable anguish, and the many differences between Conrad’s eighteen nineties consciousness of race and our own.”13 For Denby, Achebe and Said have politicized great art and failed to recognize aesthetic accomplishment. Lennard Davis wrote a very different article about race, Conrad’s novella and the classroom for the Chronicle Review.14 It is a short article, but contrary to Denby he addresses the obvious, the racist language and imagery of the novella, and recounts distressing teaching experiences as two of his students, both women of African ancestry, found the novella offensive. Their outrage at its racist features shocked Davis, given his own thirty-year experience with the novella. During high school he was taught that it was a modern existentialist classic; later, in college at Columbia University, in a class with Edward Said, that it was a critique of empire and colonialism. For Davis, Heart of Darkness is still a complex and provocative text, though in his final comments he wonders when and how he might teach it again. His position is probably the most representative of teachers and scholars today, having moved far from the defenders of the novella and their textual and biography-based arguments. The more recent group of readers and teachers, like Davis, are influenced by Said and hold onto the novel as a complicated text about imperialism and racism; they thereby recognize its controversial features, though perhaps following Said some still insist on the irony and distancing of the framed tale form. Davis, on the other hand, nonetheless values the text for the way its aesthetic qualities intertwine with the political and historical issues in a disturbing, powerful and yet useful way, albeit suitable only for a special teaching context.

Africa So, specifically, what does Said tell us about Joseph Conrad and his work? Indeed, Joseph Conrad figured largely in Edward Said’s career, beginning

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with his first book, Joseph Conrad and his Fiction of Autobiography, and Conrad’s texts – ranging from Lord Jim and Nostromo to The Secret Agent and Almayer’s Folly – featured in Said’s work.15 Yet it is Heart of Darkness, the most famous and troubling example of Conrad’s fiction, to which Said returned, again and again. Aptly, Heart of Darkness is mentioned many times in his first book and is discussed at length in the chapter “Past and Present,” while “Conrad: Presentation of Narrative” appeared in The World the Text and the Critic16 and “Conrad and Nietzsche” was included in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.17 Interestingly Conrad is only mentioned in passing in Orientalism, and the most significant reference is a passage from Heart of Darkness that appears as the epigraph for chapter 3, “Orientalism Now,” where Said writes about racism and Orientalism in modernity. Heart of Darkness is central in “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness,” in Culture and Imperialism, where Said develops his critical terms, the contrapuntal and the “voyage in.”18 A contrapuntal reading, as Said elaborates with reference to Mansfield Park and, notably, The Stranger, recognizes the oppositions – the implicit/explicit and the absent/present – that underpin a text, for the excluded is as constitutive as that which is present.19 The “voyage in” of the third-world character into the West provides a context where the contrapuntal is realized as the critical consciousness of the third-world intellectual. For Said this is a privileged critical stance of detachment and irony, a stance which has a history, for this cosmopolitan or third-world intellectual is from “there” but “here,” yet, we must add, finally from nowhere, as with the Mustafa Sa‘eed in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.20 Again, Heart of Darkness is mentioned many times in Joseph Conrad and his Fiction of Autobiography and discussed at length in one chapter, “The Past and Present.” As the title suggests, this chapter addresses the way the present is folded back into the past, or even “engulfs” the present, while the narrative dissolves into passages of reflection. The form of Heart of Darkness, as a journey where Kurtz functions as a point d’appui, is also related, as the latter, in contrast to Marlow, is a figure of action “joined” to thought. Said comments that this dilemma, grounded in Conrad’s narrative, is an “accurate representation in fiction of the historic predicament of mind-tortured modern Europe.”21 Clearly, Said’s insights here are firmly grounded in the metaphysical and aesthetic values of the 1960s and the Cold War, which we shall explore shortly. In “Conrad: Presentation of Narrative,” many of these same points are picked up again, clearly with the influence of literary trends of the time, especially phenomenology and deconstruction, as Said focuses on the way Conrad’s texts are presented as

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oral narratives rendered visible through the written word. Writing, as Said reads Conrad and Heart of Darkness, is an attempt to transcend absence, lost utterances, and is a transcription of actions taken. Conrad’s writing, Said concludes finally, confirms his authorship, which runs contrary to his previous reading of Heart of Darkness and of the distance between the author, the narrator and Kurtz. And racism. There is a different emphasis in “Conrad and Nietzsche,” for, though published earlier, here Said moved away from his early formalist emphasis on narrative and sought to link the form, the narrative form of Conrad’s fiction, to Africa and empire. Said claims, for example, that in Heart of Darkness Conrad’s narrative [p]ries the habitual from its normal surroundings and applies it to new ones, which in turn must be apprehended and described by a language telling us that things are not so different after all: must we not remember that here is another one of Marlow’s “inconclusive experiences,” that “this also was one of the dark places of the earth,” and so on?22

It is only in his well-known chapter of Culture and Imperialism “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” that Said finally discusses the colonial and racial references and textual features of this novella. Said argues that current debates on the former colonies are caught between a position which bemoans the withdrawal and loss of empire (the colonies were better off back then . . .) and a position which blames the contemporary misfortunes and suffering of postcolonial countries on the legacy of European oppression. Naipaul represents the first position, and Said’s point is apparent, I argue, in the former’s uncritical riff on Heart of Darkness, complete with its racist imagery, and caricature of late twentieth-century African nationalist politics in A Bend in the River. While Said does not offer an example – an author or text – of the “blame Europe” position, Culture and Imperialism sets up Rushdie as a kind of man in the middle, the intellectual who writes of what he calls “interdependent histories,” taking a position both within and without, either Orwell’s “whale” or the discourse of colonialism and its legacy.23 Conrad, for Said, is also within and without, as an exilic figure in his life story and his fiction and in his aesthetic. Taking us back to his earlier work on the novelist, Said claims that while Conrad believed that Africa was incapable of independence (p. 30), the ironic distance that Conrad takes in the novel, through the narrative form of a “self-consciously circular narrative” (p. 28) and the language of the text, makes him a critic of “the empire of business” (p. 23) and colonialism. As Said reads Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s story telling

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“accentuates” the “discrepancy between the official ‘idea’ of empire and the remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa” (p. 29). Here, perhaps, the early aesthetic of distance and irony is the only way to keep Said’s contrapuntal reading (with history) from leading us to conclude that the novella is racist propaganda. It is only in passing in a later chapter that Said defends Conrad against Achebe’s charge, claiming the latter does not consider the limitations of Conrad’s worldview – and aesthetic, we might assume – given the limitations of the novel form. Said continues to praise Achebe for his own reproduction of the form of Heart of Darkness as a form of “writing back” to Europe (p. 76, p. 274) and for the writer’s point that Europe establishes Western reasons, based in a questionable claim to universality, a claim which excludes the formerly colonized world even as it purports otherwise (p. 277). Said even concedes that Marlow’s tale is about “restoring Africa to European hegemony” (p. 164), a point which does not entirely undermine his earlier claim for Conrad’s “ironic distance” (p. 25), though it suggests that this aspect of his reading of Conrad and his novella is, perhaps, tenuous.

Algeria Algeria figures prominently in Edward Said’s work, as with his interview/essay on Gillo Pontecorvo and The Battle of Algiers and his essay on the work of Frantz Fanon, as well as the many references to Fanon found throughout Said’s oeuvre. And then there is Said’s chapter in Culture and Imperialism on Albert Camus, the pied noir writer and intellectual who attained near universal status and recognition well beyond the streets of Belcourt and Oran. Said’s sustained interest in Algeria and its war of independence is understandable as he was a young man and a Palestinian during the war years, and the victory of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) excited and energized Arab nationalist and similar liberation movements across North Africa and the Middle East. Albert Camus, though a pied noir settler, opposed both the violence of the state and the insurrectionary violence, and through the 1950s until 1958 he wrote and negotiated with all parties except the FLN for a peaceful resolution to the Algerian conflict, albeit without supporting independence. Yet we remember Albert Camus today as the author of the novel L’Étranger, or The Stranger, which turns on the murder of “an Arab” on the

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beach of Algiers by one Meursault, a French citizen of Algeria, a pied noir. Here is Meursault’s account of the murder: The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.24

The murdered “Arab” is never named, while the passage describing his death – though in English translation – reads like an account from a pulp crime novel such as a shooting by Raymond Chandler’s Marlow. The victim, who earlier was described as a lizard on the beach, is now only an “inert body” – yet, this novel, like Heart of Darkness, is part of the “permanent literature” and valorized by experts as a text of universal values. Two figures on the European cultural left, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, were early champions of Camus and The Stranger. Said, however, only mentions Barthes in passing and turns instead to Algerian intellectuals, such as H’sen Derdour, and later Abdullah Laroui (notably, omitting Mouloud Feraoun, Camus’ Kabyle Algerian interlocutor), as well as the Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien. The latter wrote a sharply critical book, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa, in which he linked the murder of an “Arab” to colonial racism and the racist Algerian settler state. O’Brien contests the defense of Camus’ work and politics and especially Germaine Bree’s characterization of racial relations between Arabs and Kabyles and their working-class settler pied noir neighbors as “impervious to racial barriers.”25 Furthermore, O’Brien argues that Camus’ geographic imaginary was always firmly caught within the terms of a Eurocentric and colonial worldview, especially his notion of the Mediterranean, and so The Stranger must be read within its colonial context. For O’Brien, as Said observes, Camus was a “moral man in an immoral situation,” a position which preserves his humanist reputation and resonates with Said’s comments on Conrad and his novella.26 Camus, as Said reads his work, is not an apologist for French colonialism, nor is he simply naive or an idealist, caught between the settler and FLN extremes. Rather, the thrust of Said’s critique of Camus in Culture and Imperialism concerns the importance of Camus’ Algerian location for several important works, including The Stranger, and the relationship between Camus’ Algerian location – the land, the sea and the sun – and his “universal” themes and philosophy, as with Conrad’s Africa. Indeed,

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Said argues for three methodological points with which he will read Camus’ work, the first of which is the location, while the second is the historical context – the anticolonial war – and the third concerns the French, not Algerian, literary context for the writer’s Algerian texts. Said argues that Camus’ Algerian landscape includes only unnamed Arabs, such as the one Meursault murders on the beach, and is inseparable from his appeal to universal themes. Clearly there is much that Said does not address directly in Camus’ novel, especially the murder of an “Arab,” though his mention of the absence of an Algerian literary context is relevant here. In Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, Patricia M. E. Lorcin offers a sustained analysis of how race figured into Algerian government, justice and everyday life from the 1830s to the late twentieth century.27 Her particular focus is the Kabyle Myth, which the French colonizers developed in literary, ethnographic and anthropological texts, whereby the Kabyle was identified as the superior native. That is, while the Arab indigene was lazy, criminal, a religious fanatic and otherwise suspect, the Kabyle was a reliable worker and open to training and education. Later in her book Lorcin offers a brief overview of the popular novels such as Ferdinand Duchene’s Kamir, which is about an educated Arab woman, Kamir, and her ill-fated relationship with a settler – she commits suicide – and the novel’s message: that is, the “impossibility of relationships between indigene and colon.”28 The conjunction of melodrama and interracial sex is far from unusual and is a staple of popular culture and a racist society. Said is clear, then, that Camus’ work is linked to colonial settler politics, and he cites a well-known passage from Camus’ Algerian Chronicles where, following his translation, Camus proclaims that “[t]here has never yet been an Algerian nation” and that “[t]he French of Algeria are also natives, in the strong sense of the word.”29 Said interprets this passage as an example of the “blankness and absence of background”30 that makes so much of Camus’ work viable, just as for Jane Austen or George Eliot the colonies were a largely absent but constitutive background – or for Zionist ideology, where Palestine was an empty unpopulated land. Camus, following Said’s reading, is oblivious to the contradictions of his words, aesthetic, politics and worldview. Moreover, as a writer he is interesting for Said insofar as he replicates the ideology and self-representation of French Algeria, the social and political imaginary of French colonialism. While Said recognizes the way racism and colonialism work in Camus’ text, in the absences and across the Algerian landscape, he does not condemn or denounce the writer in the strong terms that O’Brien used earlier. Said’s reluctance to denounce this novel, or any

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literary text, is important, and we will address it shortly as an aspect of his critical method, as a reading practice and as a valuation of literature as such.

The Cold War Cultural Critique Simply put, Said’s valuation of Joseph Conrad and many other cosmopolitan writers is rooted in what I call a Cold War cultural critique, albeit with some aspects inverted. Consider, first, that Said’s intellectual formation, as a graduate student and later as a professor at Columbia University, was decisively mediated by the Cold War literary scholars in his milieu. The values of these scholars, such as anticommunism, the touting of American notions of democracy and freedom, and liberalism, are realized in a cultural program which espouses and embodies these same values, against communist tyranny and the conformism of mass culture. The key terms these scholars use are detachment (as a productive form of alienation) and the aesthetic of detachment, irony, all of which resonate with Said’s inversion for the stance of the cosmopolitan intellectual.31 In representative essays by two Cold War writers, the literary critic and scholar (and Said’s former colleague at Columbia University) Lionel Trilling and the art critic Clement Greenberg, we find the aesthetic of detachment and irony, in the same terms by which both Kurtz and Meursault are absolved and valorized. Thus, in Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling writes that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a patrician critique of European modernity and “contains in sum the whole radical critique of European civilization that has been made by literature in the years since its publication.”32 Conrad’s novella, and great art, is not political, and Kurtz, for Trilling, is not a political figure, for his struggle is not about the fantasy of “Africa” and going native but an internal existential struggle and alienation. Trilling’s artist is an alienated man, a detached man, who practices a detached aesthetic, irony. Like Trilling, Clement Greenberg, the former’s colleague at Partisan Review, in “The Avante-garde and Kitsch” compares the debased and massproduced ersatz culture of modernity, kitsch, to great art, the avant-garde. The modern artist, for Greenberg, is detached from the routines and comforts of kitsch and expresses himself otherwise. The masses, he laments, prefer the kitsch poetry of Tin Pan Alley to the work of T. S. Eliot, and the work of a kitsch artist, Repin, is preferred to the cubism of Picasso. While kitsch is mass-produced, for the masses, avant-garde art is detached, contemplative and about and for itself, thus the “imitation of

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imitating.” By contrast, kitsch is the art of demagogy: “Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the ‘soul’ of the people.”33 In addition to the insight into the hold that the Cold War cultural critique exerts on Said’s literary criticism – that is, his preference for the canonical and, perhaps, elitist, as well as the inverted link between, say, the cosmopolitan intellectual and the limits of the contrapuntal – there remains the problem of the moral mission. The anticommunism, elitism and values of the Cold War cultural critique are finally a function – moralizing – of a moral purpose and cause. Clearly, as we see in Said’s later comments on Conrad and his novella, he firmly rejects the moral aspect of the Cold War critique, which also explains his refusal of a moral critique of Conrad as a racist. Ironically, then, the tone of Ahmad’s criticism of Said marks the left return of the moral critique.

Standpoint of the Cannibal and the “Arab” After Orientalism, and against the “apolitical” liberalism of the Cold War cultural critique, Said increasingly asserts the importance of political critique, coalescing in his ideas of the contrapuntal and, especially, standpoint. In “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Said starts his chapter commenting on “[t]he tendency to view ideas as pertaining only to a world of abstractions”: a view, or standpoint, which requires the obliteration of reality.34 A bit later, he adds, “To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else’s idea, imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about Zionism are the very things that are centrally important” (p. 57). For Said, then, the Zionist narrative, as with so many other nationalist narratives, is not without counter-narratives, while the Zionist narrative is “premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of ‘native’ people in Palestine.”35 It is notable at this juncture that Said’s position on Heart of Darkness has shifted from the textualism and Cold War terms of his first book, and he returns to the novella in this essay to make his point. Such political analysis is familiar now, though it is clearly derived from Said’s literary criticism – that is, from the way he reads and values literature, first in Orientalism and later in Culture and Imperialism. In “Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French” (in Orientalism), for example, Said states that the “unbroken patch of British-held territory, from the Mediterranean to India” was known and managed as a matter of “political will, political management, political definition” (p. 169). Even travel

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literature is not innocent but a key aspect of hegemony and rule through a process of textual inclusion and exclusion. Later, in Culture and Imperialism, as Ahmad notes, Said includes several close readings of literary texts and Verdi’s Aida. In the following passage Said explains how he reads Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a colonial text, though there are few direct references to the colonial backdrop, the family plantation on Antigua and slave labor. To the contrary, Said tells us how we are to read for “what is there or not there”36 and why we read this way. Again, literature, for Said, is more than entertainment in a superficial or superstructural sense; rather, it is what makes empires cohere and function, given what is said and unsaid about race and slavery. In a 2003 interview with Chinua Achebe, published in The Guardian newspaper, the novelist Caryl Phillips revisited the former’s comments on Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness.37 In response to Phillips’ questions, Achebe repeats many of the points from his earlier lecture and essay. Though Achebe does not return to question the place of the novella in the canon of “permanent literature,” he does contest its artistic merit, for, he asks, how can such a racist text which dehumanizes others be considered great art? Phillips, himself of African descent, is still unconvinced at this juncture and asks, “Are we to throw all racists out of the canon?” Yet by the end of the interview Phillips understands Achebe’s position, the position of an African: Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad’s eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the “dark” continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe.38

Phillips’ concluding position on Heart of Darkness is, clearly, contrary to Said’s reading of the novella. Though Said concedes that Conrad’s racism limits the scope of his anti-imperialist stance in Heart of Darkness, it is only in his work on Palestine, in “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” that we find a position close to Phillips and a position which is respectful, rigorous and appropriate for our reading of the novel today, at least in the context of an ever-diverse polity. In a different and important sense, the contrapuntal dialogue between the “Arab” and Camus – Algeria and France – is updated in The Meursault Investigation, a recent novel by Kamel Daoud, who writes about the murder of Camus’ “Arab” from the standpoint of his living Arab brother, Harun.39 The novel is a literary engagement with Camus that takes place in a seedy bar in Oran; thus, it is a kind of picaresque text told by an unnamed

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person who is taking notes for another text, a novel or biography of the dead brother. Daoud’s novel combines elements of the eighteenth-century novel, sprinkled with references to Defoe’s colonialist hero, Robinson Crusoe, and the murder of his Friday/“Arab”: My brother’s name was Musa. He had a name. But he’ll remain “the Arab” forever. The last on the list, excluded from the inventory that Crusoe of yours made. Strange isn’t it? For centuries, the settler increases his fortune, giving names to whatever he appropriates and taking them away from whatever makes him feel uncomfortable. If he calls my brother “the Arab,” it’s so he can kill him the way one kills time, by strolling around aimlessly.40

Harun tells his interlocutor that “the Arab” is referenced twenty-five times in Camus’ novel, a casual use of – in context – a racist epithet: “Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes.”41 The Meursault Investigation is contrapuntal but a work in its own right. As though mimicking the modernist faulty narrator, our barroom storyteller is naive, even abject, belittled by his angry and also abject mother, with whom he lives and whose directions for revenge he follows. The revenge scene is like much else in the novel, anticlimactic, though the Frenchman has a name, Joseph Larquais, who was a member of his mother’s employer’s family whom she resented. The narrator and his mother bury Joseph Larquais under a tree, in July 1962, only days after Algerian independence. Harun is later arrested and quickly released by the authorities, with the rebuke that he – who was not an FLN militant – should have killed the pied noir earlier, prior to independence, and then it would have been a just murder. This is the Algerian absurd, and, answering Camus, Harun faces a non-trial for not fighting in the war and not murdering a settler on time. This is contrapuntal, as, for Daoud, it is more complicated than “writing back.” As Harun asks, how can an Algerian counter Western writers, and, especially here, his illiterate grieving mother, for “[h]ow can you tell the world about that when you don’t know how to write books?”42

Absolution No and Yes In answer to the question of whether the cosmopolitan writer can be absolved of racism, from the perspective of Edward Said’s literary criticism, and from a progressive position today, No! and Yes! Following the work of

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Said, and contrary to the insinuations of Ahmad, literary texts are racist that use racist language, imagery and espouse racist ideas and must be called out as such. While Said does not denounce Conrad or Camus, or even Kipling, he does not endorse their racist writing nor the complicity between their work and racist oppression, whether in Antigua, the Belgian Congo or French Algeria. Said’s position here is not absolution in any sense, given the purpose of his work and career from Orientalism forward. Nor, today, can these writers be absolved of their viewpoints. It is hard to imagine a classroom in the United States today where one might teach Heart of Darkness in the aesthetic terms – irony, detachment, existential, écriture blanche – in which it was championed for so many years. Indeed, today one might rightly refer to these previous terms as an aestheticization of politics. And yet, yes, we should not jettison these texts, at least according to Said’s valuation of literature in Orientalism and in Culture and Imperialism, as a textualization of social relations and the human imaginary. And with this valuation we can read – and teach in the appropriate context – contrapuntally even the most racist poems and novels, not as an affirmation of racism or sexism but rather as a critical analysis of how the questionable worldview, and hegemony, works in a given text. Moreover, we should press Said’s contrapuntal further and accept Ahmad’s points about class and elitism, to ensure that Algerians such as Harun’s mother – illiterate and abject – and the Sudanese intellectual Mustafa Sa‘eed, or Caryl Phillips’ returning intellectual, Bertram Francis, in A State of Independence are fully recognized with their limitations and contradictions – class – revealed. The Cold War cultural critique and some aspects of postcolonial criticism today, counterintuitively, share a moral agenda that blocks this sort of complicated contrapuntal reading. For the Cold War, and the influence thereof on Said, the moralism of anticommunism, and the valorization of the artist as an exception outside the masses and mass culture, leads to the aestheticization of politics of Greenberg, Trilling or F. R. Leavis. For postcolonialism, the problem, as with Ahmad’s reading of Said’s literary criticism, is that the denunciation of racist texts and writers only leads to a moralizing dead-end, which is also, finally, an aestheticization of politics. The contrapuntal, I believe, is derived from the dialectical tradition of the Frankfurt School, and the work of Georg Lukacs, and all engaged fascism and fascist thought in their critical practice. In our time, in the United States and in Europe, with the legacy of slavery and the legacy of the Algerian war in mind and racist political movements on the rise, this approach is an imperative.

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Notes 1. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1988), p. 257. 2. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), pp. 159–160. 3. See Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” pp. 253–254. 4. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1988), p. 60. 5. See Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” p. 259. 6. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 7. Cedric Watts, “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad,” The Yearbook of English Studies 1 (1983): pp. 196–209. 8. Hunt Hawkins, “The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 14:3 (1982): pp. 163–171. 9. Peter Edgerly Firchow. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 10. Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 27:4 (1985): pp. 363–385. 11. Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness,” p. 371. 12. David Denby, “Jungle Fever,” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Casebook, ed. Gene Moore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 243–266. 13. Denby, p. 257. 14. Lennard J. Davis, “The Value of Teaching From a Racist Classic,” The Chronicle Review 52:37 (May 9, 2006): p. B9. 15. Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 16. Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 17. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 18. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). 19. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 66–67. 20. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997). 21. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, p. 113. 22. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 81. 23. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 19–21. 24. Albert Camus, The Stranger, pp. 38–39. 25. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 6. 26. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 174.

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27. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995). 28. Lorcin, Imperial Identities, p. 219. 29. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 179. 30. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 179. 31. My position here is largely derived from Lary May’s edited collection Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War as well as Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals and Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modernism. 32. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 106. 33. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6:5 (1939): pp. 34–49, p. 47. 34. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 56. 35. Said, The Question, p. 82. Said is referring to a cited passage from Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? 36. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 96. 37. See Caryl Phillips’ website at www.carylphillips.com/out-of-africa.html (downloaded June 25, 2017). Originally published as “Out of Africa,” The Guardian, February 22, 2003. 38. Phillips, “Out of Africa.” 39. Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2015). 40. Daoud, The Meursault, p. 13. 41. Daoud, The Meursault, p. 60. 42. Daoud, The Meursault, p. 13.

part iii

Application

chapter 14

From Orientalism to Islamophobia Mahmut Mutman

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism effected a radical transformation in the social sciences and humanities in the late twentieth century by changing the meaning of “Orientalism” from the benevolent Western subject’s human interest in the East to an apparatus of knowledge and writing aligned with Western imperial power.1 Said’s coupling of Western power with knowledge was a direct intervention into the writing of the universal and transparent grand historical narrative that culminated in the modern West. Orientalism was ostensibly a discourse of Western “expertise” on the “East,” its lands, cultures and peoples; but, from Said’s critical perspective, it was about the West and its power of writing the world in accord with its own interests and rule and producing itself as the universal subject of knowledge, reason and civilization. Said’s original insight implied a powerful sense of the production of the Orient as a vast area of knowledge and governance, while at the same time he saw this production as an imaginative geography, which distorted a supposedly real Orient and created a phantasmatic idea of it. As his best critics underlined, however, Said’s analysis involved a methodological contradiction between two different concepts of Orientalism: one in which the Orient is constructed as real and another one in which its reality is distorted.2 While Said’s argument tended to reduce Orientalism to an error of representation, Orientalism (and Neo-Orientalism) might be better read as a series of political, cultural, and scientific and disciplinary practices, i.e. performative acts which “world” the Oriental world, if we employ Gayatri Spivak’s now-classic use of Heidegger’s concept of worlding.3 “Worlding” is an act that is both violating and creative of what it worlds. It assumes that the world that is worlded is uninscribed nature, i.e. not worlded before. Geo-graphy as earth-writing, i.e. the act of mapping, is an instance of this, but so are Flaubert’s travel writings, an ethnography of the customs of India or a speech by Lord Cromer, the British controller-general in Egypt. Cartography or geography always appear in articulation with a spatializing 255

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of time, i.e. history as progress, which pushes the othered native back in time. Therefore, what enables us to bring a heterogeneous material (from scientific, journalistic texts and government reports to literary and artistic products) together under the term “Orientalism” is the fact that they are all based upon and perform this spacing and temporalizing act, which was described by Said as “an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’”4 Rather than merely comparing two different cultural worlds, however, these various texts converge in producing the Orient by “making statements about it, authorizing views about it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.”5 They inscribe the East and the Eastern as given objects of interest, knowledge and governance and the West as the empty universal position occupied by a (Western) rational subject of knowledge, to whom such an object appears.

Post–Oil Crisis World: A Discursive Shift in Orientalism In 1981, Said published another book, titled Covering Islam. His particular focus was the Western media images of Islam, which had a marked intensity following the oil crisis in 1973 and the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979–1981. Although Said continued to use the concept of Orientalism and did not use the term “Neo-Orientalism” in this work, the new analysis he offered seemed to point to a new conjuncture in the West’s hegemonic relationship with the Middle East.6 He argued that what the oil crisis communicated to the Western consumer was a strong sense of disruption and loss of control, which was accompanied by the sudden appearance of a certain image of Islam in the Western media. What was decisive for Said was the lack of any causal, historical or narrative connection between the shortage of oil experienced as a loss of control and the image of rich and well-armed Muslims. The result was an “unrestrained and immediate” image of Islam, an image which functioned as a kind of “proper name which denoted a simple object to which one can refer immediately.”7 The new sense of an Islamic threat was further exacerbated with the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. The old Orientalist image of a distant despotic, primitive and static religion was imperceptibly recoded into a new technologically produced image of a violent, oppressive and fanatic religion dangerously too close to the West. The earliest systematic or methodological use of the term “NeoOrientalism” was by a critical scholar of Middle Eastern studies, Dag Tuastad.8 Through a close critical reading of contemporary neoconservative writing, Tuastad demonstrated that this literature went far beyond

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describing Islam as a fatalist, backward and despotic religion and established a specific connection between “terrorism” and the “Arab” or the “Muslim mind.” Tuastad called this the “new barbarism” thesis: “presentations of political violence that omit political and economic interests and contexts when describing that violence, and presenting the violence as resulting from the traits embedded in local cultures.”9 According to Tuastad, originated in the writings of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington and expounded by influential neoconservative pundits such as Robert Kaplan and Daniel Pipes, the new barbarism thesis resonated well with the Neo-Orientalist trend in the American academe. Tuastad’s construction of Neo-Orientalism followed the track of Said’s analysis in Covering Islam in the sense of the emergence of a new image of Islam, which precluded any possibility of reflective, narrative and causal link between the event it signified and Islam as a religion. As we shall see, this discursive shift created a new perspective and focus and was eventually transformed into what is now called “Islamophobia.”

New Orientalist Literature As the themes articulated in the new image of Islam – violence, fanaticism, terrorism – immediately evoke security concerns, we are reminded of a founding binarism of the liberal problematic of government as analyzed by Michel Foucault: freedom/security.10 The governmental concern with the security of society emerged as an effect of the liberal problematic of producing and managing freedoms in the nineteenth century. Today’s discourse of security, however, is produced as contingent on the historically singular construct of “terrorism” conceived as an aberration rooted in the problematic religious/cultural difference of Islam as a global and crosscultural phenomenon. This has restaged, as expected, the question of the management of freedoms in Western democracies on the one hand; it has given birth to a new argument for global security and the “War on Terror” on the other. In parallel to these discourses of security, we have also witnessed the surfacing of a new literary writing produced by native Muslim writers. In an influential article, Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams described this literature as “Neo-Orientalist.”11 Drawing our attention to a number of memoirs and autobiographies by Middle Eastern writers (most famous of which is Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran), Behdad and Williams have argued that this emerging popular literature contributed to the new image of Islam disseminated by the new technologies of communication.12 The new literature constructed Islam as an essentially repressive

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religion based on lack of freedoms. In a critical dialogue with Hamid Dabashi’s previous critical judgment of such writers as “comprador intellectuals” and “native informers,” Behdad and Williams delineated main features of the new Orientalist writing, emphasizing especially its appropriation and corruption of a certain kind of critical function.13 According to Behdad and Williams, the first and most striking feature of this new literature is that it is produced by native people of Muslim societies. Their writing is therefore stamped by a strong claim to authenticity. Constructing themselves as insiders, their writing strategy activates an apparently critical but actually simplifying theory of stereotype as a false image of Islam occasioned by the sheer outsider status of the European. As insiders, these native writers claim to correct stereotypes and misunderstandings and give the reader a realistic sense of how it feels to live in an Islamic society. Further, they are not only authentic natives but also educated and culturally refined people who have a mastery of Western culture and literature and the ability to produce literary writing. These aspects position them in a uniquely privileged way: while they have a “feel” of the culture and religion as insiders, they also have the necessary critical distance to it as culturally refined authors and intellectuals. They are therefore authorized to criticize a crude form of identity politics. Being marked as critical insiders also licenses them to have a direct involvement in politics without any pretension to impartiality and objectivity. The declared aim of their politics is often to liberate the Islamicate geography from the tyranny of religious regimes. Interestingly, almost all of these writers live in the West, and some, if not all, are associated with conservative think tanks or institutions. When put together with the “impartial,” “scientific” knowledge of the Middle East “expert,” their “authentic,” “internal” knowledge contributes to produce a general consensus on the essentially repressive nature of Islam, in conformity with the predominant stereotypes in the Western media. Last but not least, this new writing is characterized by a journalistic trope of truth, i.e. a writing made up of a series of isolated empirical observations mixed with empty generalizations. Behdad and Williams offer Nafisi’s discussion of veiling as an example. She rightly brings up the issue of male repression, but the question is posed in simplified terms at the expense of veiling’s historical and cultural complexity. These main features inevitably arouse a question. If this new form of native Orientalist writing is bent on the issue of freedom in the Islamicate world, what is the concept of freedom that it defends? This is a loosely employed, negative concept of freedom, according to which freedom is

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seen, in a highly restricted manner, as “freedom-from” rather than “freedom-to.” Such a received idea of freedom is considered to be a natural aspect of Western polity and culture, indicating a superior stage that the backward and oppressive Islamicate cultures have yet to achieve. This position, completely naturalized in Western political cultures and unproblematically maintained by these writers, forecloses any possibility of questioning the United States and Western involvement in the world of Islamicate societies (from US and British support to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to the United States–led invasion of Iraq in 2003, both of which curtailed freedoms and led to repression and chaos in these countries) as well as the ongoing Western support of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

Islamophobia: The Rise of an Ethico-political Concept Although the use of the term “Islamophobia” goes as far back as the early twentieth century, we owe its contemporary currency to an influential report by the London-based Runnymede Trust published in 1997, four years before the 9/11 attacks.14 Despite its national and other limitations, it is the Runnymede report that put the concept of “Islamophobia” on the global agenda as an ethico-political and explanatory category. Underlying the need for terminological and conceptual novelty in understanding and explaining the increasingly negative attitude toward Islam and Muslims in the United Kingdom, the report proposed the concept of “Islamophobia” as “recognizably similar to ‘xenophobia’ and ‘europhobia’ and … a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.”15 The term has rapidly become a legitimate category in naming a certain commonly recognizable fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims and has been extensively discussed and studied since then.16 It did not go unchallenged, however. Fred Halliday argued for instance that “‘Islamophobia’, like its predecessor ‘imperialism’, can too easily be used to silence critics of national states and elites.”17 While the possibility of abuse of such a term is always open in language, especially in today’s increasingly globalized and complex political world, it seems hard to deny the alarming popularity and currency of a highly charged negative attitude toward Muslims and Islam. Islamophobia attributes an essentially evil and specifically violent and oppressive nature to Islam in a stereotyping manner which forecloses rational, analytic and informed criticism. Despite this, however, the concept itself has been subjected to critical scrutiny, discussion and elaboration in a number of works.18

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When we speak of “Islamophobia,” we certainly do not speak of an ideology in a doctrinaire sense. In a comprehensive essay on the concept, Arun Kundnani defined it as “the lay ideology of US-led Empire.”19 I suggest that we see Islamophobia as a certain kind of psychic, discursive and political formation, which is historically part of an Orientalist Western imperial worlding and which expresses a certain performance of it under specific social, political and cultural circumstances. Edward Said’s observation of a new “unrestrained and immediate image of Islam, functioning like a proper name” in the post–oil crisis conjuncture can be read as the historical forerunner of today’s Islamophobia. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, this image was increasingly transformed by neoconservative writing and by the media (particularly following the 9/11 attacks) into one which established a specific link between terrorism and the Muslim mind, as observed by Tuastad. When we say image, here, we are talking about an “image in the mind” (an idea or notion which spontaneously arises in the mind as soon as it is signified), as well as a technologically produced image and a discursively produced set of statements or ideas. It is therefore not simply external but also internal(ized), and it is not simply visual but also associated with, or emerging out of, a flow of words as well as visual images. Kundnani suggests that we see Islamophobia as consisting of five major statements or ideas that delineate and target “Islam” and/or “Muslims”: (i) “Muslims are prone to violence” (Islamic concepts such as martyrdom and “jihad” are taken in isolation); (ii) “Muslims are extremists” (seen as intolerant of other views, full of rage and anger, and suppressing freedom and rejecting reason); (iii) “Muslim men oppress women” (who are by definition subservient); (iv) “Muslims engage infiltration” (they have hidden subversive networks, are like a virus, are disloyal and are involved in double talk); (v) “Muslims are sexually dysfunctional” (what lies behind the Muslim men’s aggressive and violent behavior is their repressed sexuality; women produce too many children, constituting a demographic threat, etc.).20 These affective ideas or statements, all of which are negative, disturbing and anxiety-ridden (violence, extremism, oppression, secrecy, perversion), are often linked to each other in a fluent, associative chain and are projected onto Muslims. (They are not necessarily articulated in a systematic and coherent argument – even though there might be attempts toward this.) Such a projection enables the projecting subject to secure a moral position with regard to the object of his/her projection, though in an entirely phantasmatic way. It is not only that the complex reality of a religion is reduced to a number of selective features. But, responding to

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internal psychic needs and never simply external evidence (which only appears once the belief is established), such distortion constructs an imaginary scenario, or fantasy, in which Muslims or Islam function as a major threat. This also implies that, in the case of the white working class, the anxiety and suffering rooted in the social and economic position is displaced onto a “racial other” seen as the cause of the problem.

Islamophobia: Culturalization and Racialization Given that Islam is not a race, is Islamophobia racism? Answering this question might actually help us to understand Islamophobia better. What is at stake in racism is always a racialization. That this racialization usually selects skin color and/or physiological features as racial markers does not necessarily mean that this will always be the case, for the border that separates nature from culture can never be fixed once and for all. In the case of Islamophobia, a number of aspects are first chosen as cultural and then treated in the same way as biological features. When examined closely, the structure of Islamophobia bears a striking similarity to the structure of other racisms such as “Negrophobia” and antiSemitism, as comparatively analyzed by Franz Fanon in his Black Skin White Masks.21 Fanon demonstrated how these different racisms repeat the same psychic structure: projection of internal, repressed and unconscious fears and anxieties onto externally chosen phobic objects (“imaginary scenario”). Fanon distinguished between what was then called “Negrophobia” and anti-Semitism: while the former constructed blackness on an “instinctual” level and biologized it directly (e.g. the myth of the black man’s excessive sexuality, hence the necessity of his castration); the latter constructed the Jewish threat in intellectual or mental terms (e.g. Jewish conspiracy). It might be argued that the construction of an “Islamic threat” is closer to the construction of the Jewish conspiracy in terms of the emphasis put on religious difference. While historically Judaism was seen by Europe as an internal and Islam as an external threat, today the latter has become seen as an internal threat.22 But the differences are also important: “Islamic threat” is part of a multicultural world in which a sense of cultural difference has acquired a special significance. Describing this phenomenon as “culturalisation of religion,” Yeğenoğlu argues that “it is the excess of the religiosity of Islam, that is, its becoming a marker of cultural identity that now contributes to the making of Islam as the internal enemy of Europe.”23 Since this religious excess is seen as originated in the backwardness of Islam (its so-called failure to separate politics from religion), it is associated with

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violence. Hence violence, oppression (especially of women) and barbarism become cultural markers which give the religion of Islam a distinct cultural identity. The culturalization of religion thus implies a radical, non-negotiable cultural difference because it refers to a culture that is the very opposite of the concept of culture. Made up of violence and oppression in its very essence, Islamophobia’s “Islam” signifies a culture – that is to say, something learned and transmitted – but what is learned and transmitted is a non-cultural culture, or culture at its most “primitive” level, the one that is closest to the violence of nature, hence intolerable, unassimilable, etc. Its persistence as culture (its backward and repressive nature via religious excess) is what makes it a threat to the civilized community of rational people. This culturalization is also the particular form racialization takes in Islamophobic racism. Depending on the phenomenological insight that the clothing is not an external object but a part of one’s corporeal schema – i.e. the way one navigates in space – and a kind of supplementary skin, Alia Al-Saji constructed the Muslim woman’s veil as the surface of racialization.24 Fanon’s analysis of racialization must be further complicated in the case of Islam, for “race and gender … rely on and function through one another.”25 Various different forms of covering the body in Islam are homogenized, and the veil of the Muslim woman is made a metonym of Muslim culture. This not only constructs the Western woman as the ideal woman, free of oppression, but it also projects the very mechanism of patriarchal gender oppression onto the veil of the Muslim woman as the means by which racialization of Islam takes place. Perceiving gender oppression in the veil allows the Islamophobic gaze to other not just Muslim women but also Muslim men, family, life and culture as oppressive and violent. The veil becomes a point of condensation of the five statements Kundnani identified as constitutive of Islamophobia. It also becomes the focal point from which a narrative of “saving the Muslim woman from oppression” can be constructed. Last but not least, Al-Saji reminds us of Fanon’s observation in Algeria: while Muslim men do not see the veiled women, the French men want to see what is behind the veil.26 The veil has produced a problem of seeing for Western subjects from the very beginning, even though it is designated as the most visible marker of Muslim identity. We can further ask perhaps whether the racialization of the Muslim veil as a darkening or blinding of the space of vision has to do with death drive.27 The choice of the veil as marker can be considered as the

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rationally (or techno-rationally) organized Western subject’s desire of bringing his blind spot into visibility and thus securing his mastery in a phantasmatic projection.

Islamophobia and Securitization We have defined Islamophobia as an ideological and psychic formation based on a phantasmatic notion of Islamic threat. But given the actual presence of jihadist movement and the actions of organizations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, is it right to call Islamic threat and the Western subject’s need for security phantasmatic? Phantasm here cannot be placed in opposition to reality, but it is indeed a constitutive part of it. Especially in situations of conflict, there is a positive feedback loop, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – even though such a mechanism is always effaced by a powerful Western inscription. “Islam” before and after the Orientalist worlding is not the same Islam but one that has increasingly consolidated and essentialized its religious difference under and through hegemonic Western worlding of the world, while such re-production is rendered unreadable by the homogeneous empty time of “progress” based on pushing the other back in time. To this we must add a salient historical point made by Mahmood Mamdani: the strong US support given to Islamist movements during the Cold War positioned Islamism in a particular way. The same “terrorists” – called “freedom fighters” then and cultivated by the US government – came back to haunt their creators.28 When, in Covering Islam, Edward Said recognized the new image of Islam, which transformed a distant backward religion into a threat, his concern was the technologically produced nature of this instant, immediate and sensational image. In a fine critical engagement with Said’s work, Tiziana Terranova underlies Said’s concern with “tele-technologies … that is, technologies, which act a distance, and on different tactical uses of information, in order to induce specific corporeal and cognitive effects.”29 For Terranova, Said realized that the irruption of Islam into the American public sphere provoked a strong affect of disruption, dependence and feeling of loss of control over a “natural,” taken-for-granted resource such as oil. In describing this image as immediate and unrestrained, Said referred to “the decline of the narrative framework that allowed the critic to speak and be understood by an interpretive community.”30 The new disorienting image made the criticism of cultural hegemony impossible.

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Terranova demonstrates how this real mutation of Orientalism was introduced by a new technology of power, which depended on publicity, communication management and opinion-making, and corresponded to a new mode of conflict, an information warfare.31 Terranova’s criticism focuses on Said’s commitment to an older form of critical narrative that aims to establish the proper causal link (for instance, between political economy of oil and terrorism), whereas the new hegemony “does not primarily operate at the level of statements, although it can take that form, but one that considers those statements as part of a primary assemblage that links together statements, images and passions in the duration of a body, whereby affect functions as a mechanism of passage between affective and empirical facts.”32 Terranova emphasizes that what is at stake now is a biopolitics, which captures and forms the public affectively by contemporary media (the public here considered as part of the continuum of population, which is the object of biopolitics).33 However, if she gives a fine description of a striking aspect of the Neo-Orientalist conjuncture, her critical engagement with Said shares something of his categorical opposition between immediate, sensational image (affective fact) and narrative mediation that establishes a causal link (empirical, causal fact). Indeed, what Terranova called the new technology of power not only consists of affective capture but also and more importantly an apparatus of security or, better put, an assemblage of securitization of social and political space. The new assemblage operates also by producing a series of statements and narratives all centered around the proper names “Islam,” “terrorism,” “jihadism”: for instance, narratives and discourses of security, or the new Orientalist literature by native writers from Muslim countries. The “War on Terror,” constructed as a police action against criminals, is a narrative which collapses the distinction between reality and fiction; the phantasm itself is maintained in and by reality, through the militarization of perception itself. Assemblage of security is a hegemonic mechanism to avoid political and social responses to global injustice. Jihadist response is a historical product of this systematic, structural avoidance, an actualization of techno-rationality, of political decisionism based on cognitive mapping, informatics and control. It is important to emphasize in conclusion that Islamophobia, as perverted and abnormal as it might sound to the good average citizen of Western liberal democracies, is essential to the contemporary assemblages and practices of securitization. What lies behind the violent world it

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created is a violent refusal of social, economic and political justice on a global scale.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003 [1978]). 2. James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 255–276; Robert Young, “Disorienting Orientalism,” in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 119–140. 3. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 212–213. 4. Said, Orientalism, p. 2. 5. Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 6. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997 [1981]). Said’s use of the concept of Orientalism after Covering Islam is not systematic, except in a reconsideration of his work and responses to it: “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985): pp. 89–107. In Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), he refers to it as a case of the general relationship between “culture” and “empire.” 7. Said, Covering Islam, p. 41. 8. Dag Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s),” Third World Quarterly 24:4 (2003): pp. 591–599. 9. Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism,” p. 592. Tuastad borrowed the “new barbarism thesis” from a previous study by Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: James Currey, 1996). His application of the “new barbarism thesis” is in consistency with Said’s emphasis on the lack of narrativization and contextualization in Covering Islam. 10. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008). 11. Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams, “Neo-Orientalism,” in Globalizing American Studies, eds. Brian T. Edwards and Dilip P. Gaonkar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 283–299. 12. Behdad and Williams read the following works as representative of the new trend: Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003); Roya Hakakian, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005); Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003); Yasmina Khadra, The Swallows of Kabul (New York: Anchor Books,

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15. 16.

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mahmut mutman 2005); Saira Shah, The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). Behdad and Williams refer to Hamid Dabashi’s “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly, June 1, 2006 (available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm). Dabashi elaborated his criticism in a later and more comprehensive work, Brown Skin, White Masks (New York and London: Pluto Press, 2011), which involves other figures such as V. S. Naipaul, Fouad Ajami and Dinesh D’Souza. He does not employ a specific category of “Neo-Orientalism” and instead sees these writers as contemporary representatives of Orientalism. For a critique of the anthropological concept of “native informant,” see Mahmut Mutman, The Politics of Writing Islam: Voicing Difference (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), especially pp. 13–57. Islamophobia, A Challenge for Us All: Report of the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, Runnymede Trust, April 1997. The Runnymede Trust’s “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia,” which produced the report, was established in 1996 and was chaired by Gordon Conway. Islamophobia, A Challenge for Us All, p. 1. Chris Allen, Islamophobia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Andrew Shryock, ed., Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); S. Sayyid and Abdoolkarim Vakil, eds., Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin, eds., Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); George Morgan and Scott Poynting, eds., Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); David Tyrer, The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso, 2014). Fred Halliday, “Islamophobia Reconsidered,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22:5 (September 1999): pp. 892–902, p. 900. Although Halliday claims to have a balanced view criticizing both sides, his approach leaves little room for criticism of systematic global inequality. Similar arguments against the use of the term are also made by Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. It is not clear in these criticisms of the term why it should not be possible to distinguish criticism of Islam from an Islamophobic attitude. In fact, this makes one wonder if the criticism itself is the rationalization of a certain feeling of panic akin to Islamophobia, for exactly the opposite of what these critics of the concept imagine is also a fact: far-right, racist groups construct themselves as defenders of liberal and democratic values against “violent, oppressive, and barbaric Islam.”

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18. A significant reference is Chris Allen’s meticulously written Islamophobia (2010). Allen particularly offered a critical reading of the shortcomings of the Runnymede report. The concept of Islamophobia has led to considerable academic productivity, which examined its several aspects in different fields, such as the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy (Tyrer, 2013), the concept of moral panic (Morgan and Poynting, 2012), radicalization thesis and the war on terror (Kundnani, 2014) and the relationship between class and empire (Kumar, 2012). There is an Islamophobia Studies Journal established by the “Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project,” at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and currently published by the Pluto Press. 19. Arun Kundnani, “Islamophobia: Lay Ideology of US-led Empire,” www.ku ndnani.org/draft-paper-on-islamophobia-as-lay-ideology-of-us-led-empire/ (accessed March 13, 2019). 20. Kundnani, “Islamophobia,” pp. 3–4. 21. Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), chapter 6, especially pp. 124–125. 22. The historical analysis of the European concept of enemy can be found in Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), and the recent transformation of Islam from external to internal threat is analyzed in Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Islam, Migrancy and Hospitality in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). This is not meant to be a comparative analysis of different racisms. I am only making a few general observations following Fanon, with the purpose of specifying Islamophobia. 23. Yeğenoğlu, Islam, Migrancy and Hospitality, p. 168. It is important to keep in mind that Islamophobia is still part of a liberal multicultural hegemonic order, which has to distinguish the good from the bad Muslim, which never blames Islam as a whole and even marks Islamophobia as a danger. Islamophobia is not the same thing as the culturalization of religion but an effect of the same system to which multiculturalism belongs (which is why Yeğenoğlu speaks of “contributing”). That this distinction becomes necessary is what distinguishes the system as relatively open in the sense of an in-built mechanism of correction without solution. 24. Alia Al-Saji, “The Racilization of Muslim Veils: A Philosophical Analysis,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36:8 (2010): pp. 875–902. 25. Al-Saji, “The Racialization of Muslim Veils,” p. 888. 26. Al-Saji, “The Racialization of Muslim Veils,” p. 885. 27. Meyda Yeğenoğlu emphasizes the aspect of desire: “The invisibility the veil secures for the colonial other is simultaneously the point at which desire is articulated and the ground upon which the scopic drive of the subject is displaced, for there is always the threat of the return of the look of the other.” Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 62.

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28. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 29. Tiziana Terranova, “Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics,” Theory, Culture and Society 24:3 (2007): p. 128. In this part I am drawing on Terranova’s admirable critical engagement with Said. 30. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” p. 129; Said, Covering Islam, pp. 36–68. 31. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” p. 130. 32. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” pp. 133–134. 33. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” pp. 139–141.

chapter 15

Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Recent Writing Peter Morey

Early on in Orientalism, Edward Said makes a crucial point about the exteriority of the Orientalist text: the fact that the Orientalist always stands outside and apart from that which he is describing. Considering Aeschylus’ The Persians as an early paradigmatic example, he comments: My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient … The things to look for are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original.1

This draws our attention to the fact that Orientalism, its more recent manifestation Neo-Orientalism and the attendant phenomenon of Islamophobia are all particular systems of knowledge production. Therefore our focus should be as much on the context in which these representations are produced, the forms they take and the means by which they are circulated as on what they tell us about Islam or the Orient. The subsequent enthusiastic elevation of Orientalism to become the defining text for global postcolonial studies means that it is sometimes forgotten that its focus is specifically on European perceptions of the Arab world. Islam is central to those feelings of estrangement, threat and cultural superiority the European Orientalist has experienced – even if that same complacency often travels with him elsewhere around the world. Said’s specific insights into Islamophobia, garnered from years in the service of the Palestinian cause, are developed further in his later book Covering Islam. In that volume, Said describes how Islam’s fate within the general structure of Orientalism “has been to be looked at first of all as if it were a monolithic thing, and then with a very special hostility and fear.”2 As a result, he observes, “malicious generalisations about Islam have become the 269

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last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West”: something that appears even truer now in our fractious post-9/11 world.3 In this chapter, I wish to consider some of the features of this revived Orientalism, or Neo-Orientalism. It is necessary to consider how it works as a mode of hegemonic knowledge production about the Muslim Other. This entails acknowledging the many stereotypes that have accrued around Muslims and Islam in both scholarly and popular discourse. Deepa Kumar has identified four key features of Orientalism that we can use to mark the parameters of modern Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia too: a civilizational view of history; an assumption that all knowledge of a civilization can be derived from its texts and languages; a particular focus on classical and religious works; and a tendency to operate through established race theories.4 Understanding this confluence of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia means considering the political utility of such assumptions, not least the fetishization of gender and its use in political rhetoric about “saving” Muslim women from Islamic patriarchal oppression – a colonial mode of thinking with particular political efficacy in the early years of the “War on Terror” but which is still prevalent today whenever the issues of supposed Muslim self-segregation or female dress codes become the focus of public debate. Perhaps the key shift in the Neo-Orientalist dissemination of Islamophobia is best seen in the wave of popular memoirs and novels by and about Muslim women and their experiences. These tend to make their appeal via a uniform litany of male abuse, justified by religion and tradition and often sanctioned by the state, and a yearning for the kind of liberated life women in the West are presumed to enjoy. This subgenre – variously termed “Pulp Non-fiction,” “New Orientalism,” “Orientalist Feminism”5 or “Muslim Misery Memoirs” – became highly lucrative in the early years of the twenty-first century, with its genre-shifting qualities and claims to truth and authenticity. I will consider one example of this phenomenon, Åsne Seierstad’s bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, both for what it tells us about these truth claims and for what it reveals about the inevitable cultural blind spots and contradictions that accompany Orientalism, old and new.6 I will then conclude with a brief consideration of the new technologies by which Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia are circulated and the extent to which they constitute a new episteme, characterized by Hamid Dabashi as “Post-Orientalism,” wherein anti-Muslim prejudice slews off its scholarly trappings and enters the viral circuits of modern communication to contribute to what has recently been termed “post-truth politics.”7

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 271 It is possible to argue that Orientalism never really went away. After the end of direct European imperialism, its supposed insights were of use to the emerging global power of the United States. Orientalist knowledge was folded into the US academy after World War II under the cover of Area Studies programs and departments. However, Islamophobia, relying on Orientalist prejudices, gained renewed traction after the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis of 1979–1981 and the increasing centrality of Israel to American strategic interests in the Middle East. Popular films from the period around the decline of the Soviet bloc – such as Delta Force (1986) and True Lies (1994) – recast Muslims as the prime enemy of America, a trend that has continued in the post-9/11 period with the popularity of television series like Fox’s 24 and Showtime’s Homeland in which the Muslim threat is ever-present. However, the seeming ubiquity of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia ought not to blind us to the extent to which they have to be constantly created, renewed and maintained. Kumar reminds us that, in fact, attitudes to Islam and Muslims in the West have changed across history: from an early, baffled curiosity; the comparative harmony of La Convivencia in Moorish Spain; the hostility of the crusades; and the Romantic-era fascination with the “Gorgeous East” through to the most recent phase in which US policies toward Muslim countries have often been pragmatic and varied. (The United States famously feted and used the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s, at the same time as it was warning of the threat from Iran.)8 Kumar points out that anti-Muslim prejudice has been constructed and promoted by elites for political reasons, a process we can still trace today in the fulminations of politicians, journalists and bloggers in search of an enemy to blame or a distraction from other intractable problems.9 During the War on Terror it was necessary to create a “spectacle of fear” around Muslims and Islam to bolster support for an illegal imperialist foreign policy.10 Continuing this mission into the Obama and Trump years, a highly organized network of Islamophobic opinion-formers – many with direct links to the corridors of political power – have ensured that an avalanche of suspicion and invective continues to flow.11 One of the central implications of Orientalism that continues to hold sway is the notion that Muslims’ behavior is directly attributable to something in their religion and culture. It is common to hear claims that Muslims are violent because their holy book sanctions jihad – along with a host of other nefarious, antisocial practices such as lying, polygamy and paedophilia. In their modern manifestation on the Internet and social

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media, these insults can be seen for what they are. However, even among the more ostensibly respectable proponents of academic Orientalism, there is still a tendency to assume the existence of an “Oriental mind” or a “Muslim mind,” the characteristics of which are shared by all adherents of the faith and which causes them to conduct themselves in certain ways. This kind of collectivist branding – which would be entirely unacceptable if applied to the white Western world, where individualism is assumed to be a kind of birthright – indicates a marked tendency to reify culture when it comes to Islam: to suggest that culture causes certain behavior. Thus, it becomes both a one-size-fits-all explanatory system and a predictor of future behavior. In the name of this putative predictability, all sorts of sweeps, round-ups, registers and persecution of Muslims have been justified. The double standard by which, in Wendy Brown’s terms, “we have a culture while they are a culture” is justified in the work of figures such as the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis and the political scientist and policy adviser Samuel Huntington, whose works “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order give a veneer of scholarly respectability to ways of looking at the world which are totalizing and divisive.12 The production of Orientalist knowledge takes place through the construction and delimiting of certain types of discourse that have epistemological and political dimensions. As Usma Jamil puts it, “the politics of how Muslims are situated in the war on terror in relation to the west is linked to the construction of knowledge about Muslims and the possibilities for how they are and can be known in the west.”13 At heart, this is about narrative and power: who gets to speak for and about Islam and Muslims, and how are the categories constructed by which such speech is legitimated? Orientalism arrogates to itself the capacity to organize the terms in which the Orient is discussed. This means that only certain perspectives that conform to known and sanctioned topics and viewpoints are recognized as legitimate. As Said puts it, Orientalism can be seen as a “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”14 This is as much a case of what Michel Foucault would call “incitement to discourse” as it is of censuring or censorship.15 Certain kinds of speech about the Islamic Orient are encouraged, and Muslims who would address the debate about themselves in any way are effectively obliged to take on the discourse and operate within these parameters.

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 273 Central among the discursive assumptions of Orientalism is the absolute difference between the individualist West and the collectivist East. We have already seen how this binary distinction plays out when it comes to the understanding of motivation and behavior. Its totalizing tendencies also mean that all Muslims are, in effect, held collectively accountable for acts of terror and required to repudiate them, whereas other groups are not. In the terms coined by the sociologist Erving Goffman, Muslims are obliged by Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia permanently to “bear the stigma” of their outsider status.16 The difference between a “good Muslim” and a “bad Muslim” therefore often has less to do with his or her political propensities and more to do with their willingness to engage in a kind of group mea culpa, by denouncing terrorism in a way no other group is required to do, so as to satisfy and legitimize the judgments of a Western audience. In this way, a kind of tacit agreement or discursive frame is placed around Muslims and what can be said about them.17 According to Dabashi, the knowledge produced is then objectified via its circulation in the mass media and legitimized by the power that announces and enunciates it and subsequently internalized as truth, and thus not just generates collective consensus about Islam or “the Middle East” but in fact defines the terms of occasional or accidental dissent and contestation of them.18

In other words, a particular reality is discursively constructed, which Muslims are then required to inhabit. The West’s privilege to define the terms of any discourse about Muslims is, then, at the heart of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia as hegemonic discourses. Along with a view of Islam as an inherently violent religion that blinds its adherents to reason and thereby tends to make them incapable of self-rule, the other persistent myth drawn upon in these discourses is that “Islam is a uniquely sexist religion.”19 The combination of religiously sanctioned resistance to reform and long-standing, regressive patriarchal power is taken to mean that Muslim women bear the brunt of the failings of Islamic culture. Once more, this is an attempt to freeze not just Islamic societies but also ways of looking at them. Mohja Kahf has shown that, far from being essential or static, the image of the Muslim woman in Western culture evolves and shifts across time – from the medieval queen or noblewoman who could transgress Western norms of female behavior to the more familiar Orientalist image of the helpless damsel sequestered in the seraglio of later centuries. This latter image emerged with the Romantic sensibility of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and

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accompanied the spread of European colonialism.20 The veil and segregation as the epitome of Islamic culture’s victimization of women becomes what Leila Ahmed has called the “framestory” within which Western understandings of Muslim women are played out.21 It is significant that this frame story is continually revived as a feature of contemporary Neo-Orientalism. In the lead-ups to both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the plight of the woman in Muslim lands was repeatedly invoked to justify military action. Miriam Cooke notes how neo-imperialism invokes women’s rights in order to universalize the view that Muslim women need saving (and that Western intervention is the way to achieve this). For example, the then–US president’s wife, Laura Bush, took to the airwaves in November 2001 and spoke of the need to save Afghan women from the Taliban: “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror – not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.”22 Cooke wryly observes: “Here we see the return of the civilizational binary that structures the logic of empire … The US government’s fight against brutality, the First Lady assures her listeners, is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity.”23 The direct appeal to the values of women’s rights used in these campaigns aims to bring contemporary feminism to bear to underwrite what is still, after all, a male Western political order in its dealing with cultural Others. We seem in danger of once more entering a realm in which “white men are saving brown women from brown men,” as Gayatri Spivak famously declared.24 (While there was assent from some more conservative quarters, it ought to be noted, however, that this attempt to pressgang feminists was viewed with skepticism by anti-imperialist feminists who recognized the ruse for what it was and who were schooled in the necessities of understanding women’s struggles in their respective contexts.) Although it may have met with limited endorsement from more politically aware feminists, this polarizing rhetoric of saving Muslim women did find a ready outlet in the tide of popular novels and memoirs that hit the shelves in the early years of the twenty-first century. Lila Abu-Lughod describes the main features of this “lurid genre of writing on abused women” she terms “Pulp Non-Fiction”: The recurrent and defining themes of this genre are force and bondage. At one end are gentle memoirs like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, journalistic accounts like Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, and

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 275 polemics like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin and its sequels … At the less respectable end are books with an even wider readership. … Here we are plunged into dystopic worlds of violent abuse, our guides the Muslim girls who have suffered and escaped.25

This kind of book tends to underwrite the human rights/women’s rights mix used to justify empire, flavoring it with the spice of (often highly fictionalized) personal testimony. The age-old tropes of imprisonment and emancipation are wheeled out again, only this time often told in the firstperson voices of the victims themselves rather than through the gaze of the Orientalist rescuer. Fatemeh Keshavarz has distinguished between what she calls “New Orientalist” and “Old Orientalist” texts by pointing out that in conventional Orientalism we are presented with an outside perspective by a foreign “expert,” whereas the new form has a “native,” insider tone. However, New Orientalism “replicates the totalizing – and silencing – tendencies of the Old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through unnuanced narration, the complexity and richness in the local culture.”26 As Dohra Ahmad has observed, these texts speak the language of Western feminism, recounting tales of free liberal subjects waiting to emerge from under the yoke of Islam. Yet they all omit, almost as a matter of policy, any account of the structural connections between the oppression the protagonists suffer and the historical meddling of the United States – which is, on the contrary, often painted as a sort of utopia – and those strategic interests that have worked to sustain the kinds of authoritarian regimes of which the writers complain.27 What is of particular interest in the more complex of these narratives – what I have elsewhere called “Muslim misery memoirs” – is their generic hybridity.28 Keshavarz sums up the qualities that make such “New Orientalist” texts successful: They often have an informal tone and a hybrid nature that make for an accessible read. Most of them blend travel writing, personal memoir, journalistic reporting, and social commentary. They show an awareness of the power of the personal voice, nostalgia in exilic literature, the assurance that comes with insider knowledge, and the certainty of eyewitness accounts.29

The position of the journalist Åsne Seierstad, as an “outsider” to the culture of Kabul she is describing, makes the Neo-Orientalist bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul a somewhat different creature in the manner by which it establishes authenticity and authority. Likewise, narrative power is, in effect, predicated on the very conventional, old Orientalist device of the

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unchanging, silent Other who cannot speak for herself and who must therefore be represented by the more privileged Western female narrator. Nevertheless, I will argue that its particular quality of journalistic immediacy coupled with novelistic focalization works both to underscore the text’s truth claims and, at the same time, to draw our attention to the artifice by which these claims are staked. Once more, the main objects of sympathy in this text are the oppressed Afghan womenfolk. However, for all its sense of feminist outrage and seemingly confident moral prognoses, the text also displays an unexpected level of anxiety about the project of “unveiling” the East to the West and in particular about the legitimacy of writing as a mode of conveying another culture with which it has a problematic relationship. In the end, it is not so much a case of generic transgression as of generic incompatibility, where contending elements in the narrative undermine and pull away from the central ideological message. Indeed, in the real world outside the text, making certain truth claims got Seierstad directly into trouble. Between 2003 – shortly after the publication of The Bookseller of Kabul – and 2011, Seierstad found herself the subject of a lawsuit filed by the book’s central figure, accusing her of defamation.30 Shah Muhammad Rais, the real-life bookseller on whom Seierstad’s Sultan Khan is based, expressed outrage at the way he and his family had been depicted, having opened their home to Seierstad in the spring of 2002, as the country (and the family) began the process of reconstruction after five years of Taliban rule. Seierstad had been given special access to many areas of family life, following both male and female members into what are usually gender-segregated spaces. However, it was her somewhat free use of a narrative voice that claimed access also to their innermost thoughts – and which was used to articulate feelings of acute victimhood, especially among the women – that raised eyebrows among other writers on Afghanistan.31 It also raised ethical questions about appropriate journalistic practice, as well as the larger matter of the comparative levels of material and representational power enjoyed by the two parties in the arrangement. Bookseller in effect aspires to something more than journalistic status, employing fictive strategies to bolster claims that are anthropological in nature. As with many other examples of textual Orientalism, readers and reviewers were encouraged to interpret the book as an accurate, insightful and indeed penetrating account of life in Afghanistan. In the light of our concerns here, Seierstad’s response to Rais’ accusations – “It’s a total clash of civilizations” – might also give us pause.32 For all these reasons, the book and the debate around it

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 277 encapsulate those continuities between Orientalism and Islamophobia that are central to my concerns in this chapter. Seierstad’s story of Sultan, the eponymous bookseller, and his extended family is framed by the presence of the visiting Western narrator. With its omniscience and eye for the pathos of individual aspirations and thwarted lives, Bookseller is more novelistic than one might expect of a more neutral journalistic portrait. As Amelia Hill says of Seierstad: “Having lived with the family for so long and questioned them so closely, she says she felt justified writing from inside the head of each character, attributing thoughts and feelings to them without the filter of her own voice – as if she were writing a novel.”33 Once more, it is the generic slippage that takes place, between the impression of objective veracity implied by journalism and the fictional devices deployed to create a deeper sense of experiential empathy, that causes tension. In the text we are introduced to the self-made bookseller, a contradictory figure espousing enlightened political views but practicing domestic tyranny: his sons, each frustrated with his lot yet tied down by traditions of patriarchal deference, taking their frustration out on those weaker than themselves; the womenfolk, whose lives, circumscribed by rigid codes of family honor and shame, seem hardly to have improved since the recent ousting of the Taliban; and especially Leila, Sultan’s youngest sister, the household drudge, whose hopes of escape through employment or marriage are constantly thwarted. They take the stage with an assortment of brothers, sisters and cousins, all trying to get by in war-torn Afghanistan after the 2001 American invasion. Seierstad recycles many of the usual Orientalist clichés about Islamic nations – their misogynistic patriarchy, hypocrisy, corruption and tribalism. For the most part, the book’s truth claims are fortified by the scrupulously “absent” presence of an apparently objective visitor, standing back from events and relaying her discoveries to us without fear or favour. However, even a cursory critical interrogation throws up the impossibility of Seierstad having the claimed insights into the innermost thoughts and emotional lives of those she describes. In fact, the manipulation of perspective is quite overt, matched by shifts in tone and clear editorial interventions that are highly directive. Indeed, it is those points at which its mask of studied neutrality drops that are most revealing. The way the story is set up is highly significant. It is the War on Terror that brings the narrator to Afghanistan in the first place, traveling with the Northern Alliance as they move down through the country chasing the Taliban from power. In the Foreword, Seierstad remarks upon meeting

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Sultan: “I realised that he himself was a living piece of Afghan cultural history: a history book on two feet … When I left I said to myself: ‘This is Afghanistan. How interesting it would be to write a book about this family’” (p. 2). The naivety in this sentence is indicative of that lack of consideration for questions of power that led Seierstad into such legal labyrinths. Sultan Khan and his family are mere raw material, curiosities for a literate observer with the necessary cultural capital and contacts to exploit in order to construct an international bestseller. Yet, Seierstad needs to get closer than the normal limits of externally descriptive journalism would allow. Therefore: I have written this book in literary form, but it is based on real events or what was told to me by people who took part in those events. When I describe the thoughts and feelings, the point of departure is what people told me they thought or felt in any given situation. Readers have asked me: “How do you know what goes on inside the heads of the various family members?” I am not, of course, an omniscient narrator. Internal dialogue and feelings are based entirely on what family members described to me. (pp. 3– 4) [emphasis added]

The effect of this disclaimer is, of course, precisely to call our attention to the way in which the narrator appears to be able to enter her characters’ consciousness: whether that is to eavesdrop on whispered asides about a “third-rate wedding” (p. 106) or to report on the nocturnal scene of sleeplessness and lamenting in the house of a man accused of stealing postcards from Sultan’s bookshop (p. 209). Moreover, although the narrative mimics scrupulous neutrality, in fact the use of omniscience that tips the book over into a novelistic form also serves to position us silently but clearly in respect of what we are witnessing. This is particularly true when the topic is women and culture. Before stepping back, Seierstad has already told us that “I have rarely been as angry as I was with the Khan family … The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which men treated women” (p. 5). Likewise, the chapter titles editorialize a preferred response. A chapter about women’s love lyrics is called “Suicide and Song,” while “Billowing, Fluttering, Winding” sees its female protagonists metonymically reduced to walking burqas as they visit the local market – the final word, “winding,” is also, of course, redolent of restriction and the winding sheet of death, further emphasizing the stifling conditions endured by women. Seierstad approaches the territory of those other well-known female antagonists of supposed religiously sanctioned gender oppression, Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in fixing on a single garment to evoke restriction, while

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 279 divorcing it from all historical and cultural explanation. The phrase “Do You Want My Unhappiness?” – which gives another chapter its title – could have been uttered by either Shakila, Sultan’s attractive younger sister, as she contemplates marriage to an unappealing older widower, or by his disabled and unmarriageable leftover sister, Bulbula, whose prospects are even bleaker. In fact, neither character utters this phrase. It descends from the heavens as another piece of editorial nudging, an effort to make sure we understand that the lives of these women are both typical and relentlessly constrained. Seierstad is always concerned to make us, first and foremost, experience her rage at what she witnesses. Indeed, in spite of the pseudo-objectivity and numerous passages offering guidebook-style accounts of various customs and traditions, this is what makes her text differ most from more measured approaches that are concerned to understand social practices culturally and historically. In her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has emphasized the need for specific knowledge of local social structures to challenge universalizing and therefore neocolonial “rights” discourses, the value of contextual knowledge and the professional expertise resulting from prolonged exposure in fieldwork. When Western liberals look at oppression, especially in Muslim countries, she says, “[w]ithout the contextual information we draw on to judge similar stories of abuse and violence in North America or Europe, we are led to attribute those abuses to the culture at large.”34 At the heart of Seierstad’s indictment of Afghanistan is gender oppression sanctioned and perpetuated within the family by fathers and mothers. In Seierstad’s omniscient account, Sultan becomes a slightly creepy figure when, on his journey home from a business trip, he is made to contemplate with relish the “delicious child-woman” (p. 71) he has taken as his second wife. The narrative is concerned to depict his polygamy as especially demeaning to his first wife, but the narrator – whose powers supposedly give us access to the wife’s feelings of pain and humiliation – has no sense that an important principle of discretion is likely to be violated by parading them for the world to see. Or at least, the project of cultural exposure takes precedence. Seierstad’s viewpoint is entirely culturally conditioned, and she blunders about like an insensitive tourist, spilling confidences like litter on a beach. Even so, there is no awareness here that her own perspective may be partial and Eurocentric, even in those moments where, for example, she adopts Western (and Orientalist) cultural paradigms to describe women washing in the hammam: “The sun’s rays creep in through two peepholes in the roof, bathing bottoms, breasts and thighs in a picturesque

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light … In two large halls women scrub themselves … Some are Rubenesquely fat, others thin as rakes with protruding ribs” (p. 161). However, the book is not entirely without a sort of self-awareness, one that may or may not be intentional but which acts temporarily to open up another perspective on the world described. In the late chapter “My Mother Osama,” there are interesting voice shifts and momentary perspectives that arguably cause the framing clichés to jostle with genuine but fleeting insights. In this chapter, one of Sultan’s nephews, Tajmir, finds himself traveling as translator for an American magazine journalist, Bob, who is following the hunt for Osama bin Laden. We learn how the war has brought a burgeoning market for local translators as journalists scramble for the best stories. As they journey into the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tajmir unfolds his life story to a somewhat less-than-riveted Bob, telling how his domineering mother – the second Osama of the title – has arranged everything for him, including his marriage. Tajmir describes how he tells everyone that he wants a daughter: “So that if we did have a daughter no one would say, how sad, because after all that is what I had wished for, and if we got a boy no one would say anything because then everyone would be pleased no matter what”. “Hm,” says Bob and tries to understand the logic of it all. (pp. 243–244)

Here, as the peculiarities of Afghan marital and reproductive priorities are laid bare, Bob becomes a sort of substitute for the narrator or for the Western reader: looking on from outside and embodying our bemused disorientation. However, Bob is not simply a narratorial surrogate. The text criticizes him for the careerist self-interest behind his determination to take himself and Tajmir into one of the most dangerous areas in the world: “Bob wants violent action in print; like a few weeks ago when he and Tajmir were nearly killed by a grenade … Even though he is dead scared, those things make Bob feel he is doing an important job” (p. 247). It would be going too far to suggest that Seierstad is here offering a reflection on her own status as one whose occupation is recklessly parasitic on conflict or that she is launching an open broadside at her colleagues. Even so, there is a tacit acknowledgement of the profligate drives of Western interest in Afghanistan. (By contrast, Tajmir just wants to get home in one piece.) A further intrusion pulls us one step back from full identification with Bob and his mission and throws into relief the real tactics at work in ways that call into question many of the Western civilizational assumptions advanced previously. We learn of Bob’s employers:

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 281 The magazine is interested because of the American forces in the region, the secret American Special Forces who are impossible to get close to, the secret agents crawling around in the mountains hunting for al-Qaida. Bob’s magazine wants an article, an exclusive article on “The hunt for alQaida”. Most of all the young reporter wants to find Osama bin Laden. Or at least Mullah Omar. And cover the hunt. The Americans hedge their bets and work with both sides in the local conflict. The Americans give both sides money … [B]oth sides are given weapons, communications equipment, intelligence equipment. They have good contacts on both sides; on both sides are former Taliban supporters. (p. 251)

Even as it announces the quasi-imperial mission in Afghanistan in terms redolent of Rudyard Kipling and the Great Game, so too the text records the expediency and double-dealing that undercut the moral absolutes elsewhere propounded. For all its apparent objectivity, The Bookseller of Kabul’s deployment of novelistic techniques takes it beyond the realms of normally accepted journalistic practice. Likewise, it is the fruit of a brief visit – as opposed to the lengthy periods living and working with human subjects, bolstered by years of academic training, which characterize reputable anthropological endeavors – and its argument is conducted in precisely the totalizing and moralizing language criticized by actual anthropologists such as Abu-Lughod. Bookseller advances, but in the end cannot sustain, its tone of cultural superiority, based as it is on the unexamined preconceptions of a quite privileged northern European with access to the means to disseminate them. Abu-Lughod warns: “We should be suspicious of anyone who asks us to gaze on the sufferings of ‘other’ kinds of women, as if they are not connected to us and what we do, including our governments and our financial institutions, and as if those women do not share any of our humanity.”35 For her, humanity means complexity, and complexity requires an understanding both cultural and – perhaps more importantly – historical. It is just this historicity that Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia try to screen out. In the end, Seierstad’s urge to tell the truth results in a conflicted narrative that on one level replicates the cultural prejudices by which Muslim countries are homogenized and found wanting. Yet, at the same time – and through the unwitting effects of its use of novelistic tools such as omniscience, indirect speech and shifting focalization – it exposes as much about the priorities and opportunism of Westerners as about those in Afghanistan for whom war has become a permanent state of mind. Thus, Orientalism remains alive and well as a conditioning set of cultural prejudices. Its new variant is distinguished mainly by the recourse

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to a universalized discourse of rights that act as cover for the neo-imperial agenda – most noticeably the discourse of women’s rights – and by the contemporary technologies through which it is transmitted. Hamid Dabashi has posited the exhaustion of Orientalism as an effective system of knowledge in which the colonizer speaks endlessly and only acknowledges replies that operate within his hegemonic discourse, citing the 2011 Arab Spring as marking the moment when Middle Eastern voices finally shook off its influence.36 Even with what little hindsight the intervening years afford, this conclusion seems hopelessly premature. More salient to our present moment – in which the Brexit vote in Britain has seen a spike in anti-Muslim hate crime, and the 2016 US presidential election was won by a candidate running on an explicitly Islamophobic platform – is the suggestion that something fundamental has shifted in modes of knowledge production and circulation. Dabashi notes how what he calls “interested knowledge” is now produced away from academia by bodies such as think tanks. Such “knowledge” is tailored to the demands of those who commission it, resulting in a sort of privatization of knowledge leading to a shortterm, disposable product: “fast-knowledge produced on the model of fast food.”37 Add to this the power of the Internet, where any theory, no matter how extreme, can take root and find an audience, and you have all the conditions for that kind of “post-truth” politics recently identified as marking contemporary democracy: that hodge-podge of rumor, innuendo and personal grouse with which unscrupulous politicians can build a support base.38 If there is no longer even the pretence of objectivity in knowledge production – and if experts are scorned and marginalized – then the field lies open to demagoguery where the most successful exponent of politics will be the one who can cater to most prejudices. As Dabashi puts it, the heterogeneous nature of knowledge production of the last few years points “to a degenerative meltdown where the Hegemon cannot produce a single legitimizing idea that in fact sustains any claim to authority beyond what brute and vile power can generate and sustain.”39 When it comes to Islamophobia, populist modes of knowledge production and opinion formation allow open season on Muslims to be declared. The justification of torture, belief in conspiracies, institutionalized racism, Islamophobic policies and scapegoating all become legitimated. It may seem counterintuitive to end an essay about Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia – two knowledge systems that have contributed greatly to this predicament – with a degree of nostalgia for the models of scholarship that played a large role in their propagation. Yet, the nihilistic anarchy and cutthroat hyperindividualism threatened by a world governed by devalued information,

Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 283 personalized pseudo-data and normalized distrust can only impact most on those already marginalized or declared aberrant. The paradigms may change, but, when it comes to combating Islamophobia, the struggle must continue.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 21. 2. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, rev. ed. (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 4. 3. Said, Covering Islam, p. xii. 4. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), p. 30. 5. “Orientalist Feminism” is the coinage of Roksana Bahramitash and refers to “a modern project and a type of feminism that advocates and supports particular foreign policies toward the Middle East.” See Roksana Bahramtiash, “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14:2 (2005): pp. 221–235. I will define the other terms here as they are addressed later in the chapter. 6. Åsne Seierstad, The Bookseller of Kabul (London: Virago, 2004). All subsequent references are to this edition. 7. Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015). 8. Kumar, Islamophobia, pp. 63–80. 9. Kumar, Islamophobia, p.3. 10. Kumar, Islamophobia, p.154. 11. For details of these professional Islamophobia networks, their funding, and their leading personalities, see Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 12. See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 151; see also Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic, September 1990; and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 13. Usma Jamil, “Reading Power: Muslims in the War on Terror Discourse,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 2:2 (2014): pp. 29–42, p. 30. 14. Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 15. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 17–35. 16. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963). 17. See Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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18. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. 221. 19. Kumar, Islamophobia, p. 44. 20. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). 21. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 244. 22. Quoted in miriam cooke, “Islamic Feminism Before and After September 11,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 9 (2002): pp. 227–235, p. 235. 23. Cooke, “Islamic Feminism,” p. 235. 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 92. For a consideration of the limitations of Western feminists’ engagement with other cultures, see also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse, pp. 196–220. 25. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 86. Other books in the pulp non-fiction subgenre glory in such titles as: In the Name of Honour; Married by Force; Daughters of Shame; Latifa: My Forbidden Face; and Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia. 26. See Fatemeh Keshavraz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 3. While this is an important distinction, which would certainly be true of a text such as Reading Lolita in Tehran – Keshavarz’s main target – in my reading of Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul I wish to point out how multiple features of the text actually pull it in different directions at the same time. 27. Dohra Ahmad, “Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature,” Social Text 27:2(99) (2009): pp. 109–111. 28. Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 95–125. 29. Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, p. 4. 30. Tim Judah, “The Bookseller of Kabul, the Famous Reporter, and a ‘Defamation’ of a Nation,” Observer, September 21, 2003, www.theguar dian.com/world/2003/sep/21/books.afghanistan (accessed August 31, 2013). An initial ruling in 2010 deemed that Seierstad had invaded the privacy of the Rais family, and negligence was cited. However, this judgement was overturned on appeal. 31. As Conor Foley pointed out, The biggest conceptual weakness of Seierstad’s book is that she does not seem to have understood the absolute centrality of the concepts of “hospitality” and “Namos” (literally the “status, chastity, purity, virtuousness, and nobleness of female members of the family”) to Afghan Society. The idea that you could accept someone’s hospitality and then spy on them to violate their namos is completely shocking and makes a mockery of all her other claims of insight into the society in which she was living.

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32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

Conor Foley, “Bookseller of Kabul Author Can’t Plead Cultural Immunity,” Guardian, July 30, 2010, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/30/ norway-afghanistan (accessed August 31, 2013). Judah, “An International Bestseller.” Amelia Hill, “Bookseller of Kabul Author Asne Seierstad: ‘It’s Not Possible to Write a Neutral Story,’” Guardian, July 30, 2010, www.theguardian.com/th eguardian/2010/jul/31/bookseller-of-kabul-interview-asne-seierstad (accessed August 31, 2013). Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, p. 90. Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women, p. 225. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. x. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. 213. See Alison Flood, “‘Post-truth’ Named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries,” Guardian, November 15, 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-y ear-by-oxford-dictionaries (accessed 7 December 2016). See also William Davies, “The Age of Post-truth Politics,” New York Times, August 24, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/opinion/campaign-stops/the-age-of-post-trut h-politics.html?_r=0 (accessed 7 December 2016). Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. 280.

chapter 16

Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle Eastern American Writing Carol W. N. Fadda

The Legacies of Orientalism The effects of Edward Said’s analysis of the West’s myopic representations of the East in his seminal work Orientalism (1978) has had long-lasting reverberations on Easterners themselves, particularly in the ways they respond to such Orientalist depictions and rearticulate themselves in the process. Given the centrality of literary studies to Said’s project of delineating and analyzing Orientalist thought, this chapter explores the ways in which literary narratives written by Middle Eastern American writers navigate stereotypes about Easterners circulated through Orientalist discourse. Rather than engaging with Orientalism as a static or unchanging discourse, however, such literary narratives address what can be described as the evolution of colonial Orientalist discourse into Neo-Orientalist representations of Easterners (particularly here Arabs and Muslims), especially as shaped by twentieth- and twenty-first-century imperial and militaristic US projects in the Middle East, starting with the post–Cold War period up until the present so-called US-led War on Terror. Said’s emphasis on the centrality of literary and cultural texts in the dissemination of Orientalist tropes has had a great impact on the development of literary studies and the humanities more generally.1 By underscoring “the interrelations between society, history, and textuality,”2 Orientalism links the literary and the political in ways that have become essential for understanding how power, knowledge production and representation are closely interconnected. With Orientalism being partly “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident,’”3 Said’s analysis of cultural and literary texts by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists and writers affirms how European colonial countries like Britain and France asserted their dominance and power by constructing the “inferiority” of the Eastern 286

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Other through essentialist and damaging representations. Such representations depict the Easterner Other as backward, uncivilized and barbaric, framed by static and unchanging religious, historical and cultural structures. Like Said, other scholars have pointed to the ways in which Orientalist thought is premised on the denigration of the Eastern Other, with particular attention given to the demonization of Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners more generally.4 The stringent continuation of Orientalist discourse into the present historical moment, what some scholars refer to as Neo-Orientalism,5 is made evident by pervasive and intersecting forms of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. Arab American scholars such as Steven Salaita, for instance, argue that anti-Arab racism is a more apt descriptor of the US mainstream’s pushback against and denigration of Arabs and Muslims, primarily in the way this term captures and implicates racial and racist constructions of the Other, most notably as they occur at the intersections of race, nationality and religion. In other words, replacing (or at the very least studying) the concepts and practices of Orientalism, Neo-Orientalism or Islamophobia with the term anti-Arab racism compels us to “examine how racism alternately informs and inspires . . . the essentialization or frequent misrepresentation of Arabism by Americana.”6 Other scholars point to the importance of defining Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism “to more accurately reflect the intersection of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building.”7 It is through such discourse, then, as primarily shaped by the rise of US power and its imperial reach after World War II, that the Arab and Muslim Other is deemed antithetical to Western thought and practices, thus relegated to the realm of the “forever foreign.”8 These depictions serve to prop up and in turn are themselves substantiated by US imperial logics that rationalize military and political interventions in the Middle East by asserting Western cultural and religious superiority. As Nadine Naber and other scholars have pointed out, US imperial logics construct new Orientalist discourse through an array of cultural, gendered and religious narratives. Some of these narratives include, for example, depictions of Arab and Muslim women, queers and minorities, for one, as in need of being rescued into Western civilization and away from the “backward” practices of the Arab and the Middle Eastern world. Whether we want to label it Neo-Orientalism, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim or anti-Arab/Middle Eastern racism, it is the shared logics of these outlooks that dictate stereotypical representations of Middle Easterners and portray militarism and violence in the Middle East as necessary and justified, even if they entail the

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loss of huge numbers of Arab and Muslim lives, the displacement of millions from their original countries and the plunging of many Middle Eastern countries into devastating conflicts.9 Even though Orientalist representations of Arabs permeated US discourse well before the 1950s, the neo-imperialist agenda of the United States after World War II has had major repercussions on Middle Easterners. The role of the United States in the Middle East since the 1950s has had particular impact on migration movements, exile and dispossession. Major crises during the period resulting in such upheavals include the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Arab–Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the 1970s Arab oil embargo, the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, the Lebanese war from 1975 to 1990 and its aftermath, the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively, and the ongoing War on Terror. The geopolitical shifts resulting from such watershed historical moments have resulted in overwhelmingly negative mainstream representations of Middle Easterners, ones that are premised on the binary logics of Orientalist discourse.10 Such stereotypes include representations of Middle Eastern men as oppressive, violent, fanatic and terrorists and Middle Eastern women as exotic, oppressed, silenced and lacking in agency.

Imaginative Geographies and Immigrant Passages from the Middle East Foundational to understanding and critiquing Orientalist representations of the Middle East is Edward Said’s discussion in Orientalism of what he calls the “imaginative geographies” of the Near East. Discussing the power of colonial and neocolonial histories and practices to produce knowledge about Muslims and Arabs, Said writes: “For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.”11 Such a geographically mediated formulation is relevant here to discussions of how Middle Eastern identities (whether existing in the Middle East or in the United States) are constructed in the US national unconscious. As I discuss later on in the chapter, the imaginative geographies that the West (and specifically here the United States) construct of the Middle East play an important role in shaping Middle Eastern American writers’ work, especially in their negotiation of the pressures of assimilation, racialization and in-betweenness to which their communities are subjected. As Leti

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Volpp notes, “American Orientalism historically referenced North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey, as well as East Asia. Collectively, and often indistinguishably, these regions have functioned as the ‘East’ to America’s democratic and progressive ‘West,’” serving as “phantasmic sites on which the U.S. nation projects a series of anxieties regarding internal and external threats to the coherence of the national body.”12 The type of American Orientalism that developed after World War I was reinvigorated after 9/11, with the Middle East seen as encompassing what is hegemonically constructed “as the barbaric regions of the world that spawn terror.”13 For after 9/11, the “phantasmic” body of Arabs, Middle Easterners and Muslims (which get all collapsed into a homogenous and indistinguishable entity) is depicted as infiltrating the US nation’s border, so that what was previously perceived to occupy esoteric zones “over there” is suddenly recognized as an alarming and fearsome presence “over here,” in the immediacy of what is perceived to be a vulnerable USA under attack. It is important to point out that the Middle East as a geopolitical category located “over there” (and always juxtaposed with the familiarity – and the safety – of an “over here”) is one that has undergone shifts and reformulations (depending on colonial outlooks, imperial investments and national crises). Initially identified in Eurocentric terms as the geographical area located midway between the British empire and its colonies in Asia (propagated by the British as well as Americans such as naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan), the Middle East as a geographical entity typically encompasses the Levant and the Arabian peninsula and includes Arab as well as non-Arab countries such as Turkey, Iran and Israel, while the broader category of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) extends to the Arabic-speaking North African countries that are part of the Arab League. Moreover, the geographical parameters informing definitions of the Middle East often shift depending on authorial perspective and historical context. After 9/11, for instance, the Middle East as a geopolitical category was reconceived and broadened to include countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan that had previously often fallen outside traditional mappings of the Middle East. Ella Shohat and other postcolonial scholars have rejected definitions that conceive of the Middle East as a “unified category of analysis.” The challenge, Shohat asserts, “is precisely to avoid a facile additive operation of merely piling up increasingly differentiated groups of women, men, or transgenders from different regions and ethnicities – all of whom are projected as presumably forming coherent, yet easily demarcated entities.”14

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Along with remappings of the Middle East, the period after September 11, 2001, then gave rise in the United States to “the consolidation of a new identity category that grouped together persons who appear to be ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’. . . What has solidified this identity category is a particular racialization, wherein members of this group have been identified as terrorists, and disidentified as citizens.”15 In this way, such racialization redefined the presence of Middle Easterners in the United States as a recent phenomenon, thus accentuating their homogenous foreignness and in turn defining their presence as a threat to the nation and to hegemonic US identities. Moreover, such racialization not only placed Middle Easterners outside the bounds of US national belonging: it also produced a mainstream discourse that collapsed the distinctions among the identity markers Muslim, Arab and Middle Eastern, conceiving them as homogenous and threatening in their enactment of national, cultural, religious and political difference. In attending to the specificities of Middle Eastern identities in the US, I focus later on in this chapter on Arab American identities and how they intersect with Muslim and other Middle Eastern ones. To do so, I highlight how collectives like Arab Americans have historically engaged with Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist tropes. Moreover, such a focus undercuts the facile conflation of labels like Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern to highlight the complex histories and multiple outlooks and positionalities encompassed by the Arab American label itself and the ways in which it intersects with other identity formations. Rather than being a recent phenomenon, Middle Eastern immigration to the US in fact dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, with the different legislative restrictions placed on immigrants allowed to enter the United States having a direct impact on the makeup and number of immigrants arriving from the Middle East. Arab immigration, for one, is divided into roughly three phases: the first one extends from the 1880s to 1924, the year the Immigration Quota Act was passed, which limited the number of immigrants to the United States based on their nationality. The end of World War II and the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 ushered in the second wave of Arab immigration, which lasted until the late 1960s. The third and last phase, facilitated by the passing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, extends to the current period.16 Other immigrant passages from the Middle East include Iranian immigration, which started between the late 1940s to the late 1970s, whereby individuals were traveling to the United States for work or educational purposes. The second phase of Iranian immigration to the United States

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was prompted by the Iranian revolution in 1979, followed by a third phase, starting from the mid-1990s onwards.17 Even though the immigration routes and histories of these different communities are heterogeneous and distinct, the overwhelming erasure of such specificities and the mainstream’s myopic insistence on lumping together different groupings and national identities point to the dominance of an overarching national narrative that insists on binaristic definitions of self and other. To resist such binaristic representation and the conflation of rich and complex identities, I turn to delineate some ways in which literary and cultural production by Middle Eastern American writers have served to engage the problematics raised by Orientalist representations of Middle Easterners as Other.

Diasporic Narratives: Writing Middle Eastern Identities in the USA The rise of US political and military power in the Middle East after World War II has had a direct effect on the formation of Middle Eastern identities in the United States. Even though Middle Eastern immigration to the USA dates back to the late nineteenth century, the changes in US immigration laws and the multiple post–World War II conflicts and wars in several countries of the Middle East (many of which the United States had a direct hand in) drove Middle Easterners to emigrate to the USA in increasing numbers from the second half of the twentieth century onward. In this way, Middle Easterners in the US, whether immigrants themselves or descendants of immigrants, have found themselves in a host land that was often the perpetrator or at least a major player in the conflicts and wars back in their original home countries. Reflecting a certain diasporic experience that encompasses dispossession and loss brought about by US imperial and military projects, these communities embody what Nadine Naber aptly refers to as “diasporas of empire.”18 Defining Middle Eastern communities in the United States as diasporas, and in many cases specifically as diasporas of empire, complicates their immigrant and/or transnational experiences and positions them in the context of larger geopolitical factors that extend beyond a dominant discourse around immigration in the USA, which often seeks to uphold the construct of the American Dream. Several bodies of literary and cultural production by Middle Eastern American writers address the conundrum of being American while also possessing a sense of transnational belonging to an original homeland that is at best politically at odds (as in the case of Iran) or at worst the target of US

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military invasions and interventions (as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, among other countries in the greater Middle East). This conundrum brings with it the added burden and responsibility, shared by a majority of Middle Eastern American writers, of countering, through their cultural production and their role as community spokespersons, the negative and Orientalist portrayals of their communal, religious, national and cultural backgrounds by a mainstream US media. Of course, the perspective of these writers is far from being uniform, for they occupy a vast array of positionalities and outlooks that are shaped by different factors, including national background, ethnicity, gender, racial self-identification, class and connections to original homelands, as well as ties to their communities in the United States. Some identify as immigrants, having arrived in the USA as children or as adults, or they identify as exiles, without the ability to access or return to an original homeland. Others resist being marginalized as hyphenated writers, while even others challenge the fixity of a US identity, hyphenated or otherwise, by claiming a shifting transnational, global or migrant identity that exceeds the geographical and ideological boundaries of a nation-state. Whichever positionality these writers claim, when writing within and from a US space, they ultimately succeed in altering the US cultural, literary and even political landscapes. They do so not merely by virtue of having their voices included in national conversations about art, literature, politics and knowledge production but more importantly by raising questions about how American identity is defined and what constitutes American literature and culture. Yet the ways in which Middle Eastern American writers (who identify with or lay claim to a “diaspora of empire”) position and articulate themselves in the United States are far from being uniform. Such diasporas are widely varied, with different immigration pathways, histories, struggles and literary lineages, while writers within each Middle Eastern American community differ in their personal histories and artistic investments. For instance, Arab Americans have a long history of immigration and literary output that well precedes the USA’s dominance on the global political scene post–World War II. By virtue of such long histories, one cannot refer to a singular Arab American experience, especially given the various conditions that Arab Americans have faced in the United States and the shifting approaches to racial, ethnic and national selfidentification, narrative choice and political outlook among Arab American writers from the first wave of immigration in the late 1880s onward. The case of Iranian American writings, for instance, follows a historical and literary trajectory that differs from the Arab American one,

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emanating from a specific history of immigration to the United States that is primarily shaped by the 1979 Iranian revolution, the toppling of the Shah, the hostage crisis and the ensuing tense USA–Iran relations. Moreover, with memoirs being the dominant genre in the inception of Iranian American literature, more recent efforts focus on highlighting literary contributions in the field that extend beyond the memoir, including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, etc.19 Iranian-American writer Persis Karim, for one, insists on showcasing in her work “how rich, diverse, and complex the encounter between Iran and America truly is . . . [and that] there is no uniform view of Iran or of what it is to be Iranian American.”20 She has edited numerous anthologies that exemplify such diversity, with her more recent anthology Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers (2013), which she coedited with Anita Amirrezvani, portraying a wide array of genres and viewpoints to tell “the stories and people that Iranians left behind after the revolution and those that were created in the experience of diaspora.” Karim states, “The writing in this collection reflects a new sensibility, perhaps even a new generation of voices and a new language,”21 thus pointing to the constantly evolving landscapes of literary production framing the experiences of different diasporic and immigrant US communities.22 Even though the denigration and demonization of Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners permeated US discourse and media well before 9/11, the reductive collapsing of these identities into a homogenous and indistinguishable whole after 9/11 (and in the context of the ongoing “War on Terror”) has shaped strong radical, anti-imperial, anti-racist and feminist responses by Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern writers in the United States. Such responses, by challenging the “mistaken identity” discourse that constructs visible difference in dress, skin color, accents, religious attire etc. as aspects of a monolithic Muslim and Middle Eastern identity that denotes foreignness (and therefore un-Americanness), create powerful narratives of cross-racial, interreligious, intra- and interethnic, and transnational solidarities. Such narratives refute binaristic constructs of us vs. them, here vs. there, turning simplistic reductions that conflate difference with US unbelonging into a revisionary understanding of Americanness. Anthologies and edited collections that speak to these kinds of discursive, activist and anti-Orientalist solidarities include texts like I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (2011), edited by Maria M. Ebrahimji and Zahra T. Suratwala; Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (2004), edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan; Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (1977), edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima

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Q. Bezirgan; and Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (2005), edited by Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur; among others. Transnational feminist readings of Middle Eastern, Arab and Arab American cultural texts can be found in the work of Ella Shohat, Amal Amireh, Nada Elia, Lisa Majaj, Therese Saliba, Joe Kadi and Sarah Husain, as well as other feminists whose work is included in the edited volume Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2010). Despite such transformative and revisionary texts, the bulk of literary economies in the United States determining publication selections, marketing of books and readers’ choices are shaped by deeply ingrained Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist impulses. Such impulses are premised on limited understandings and depictions of the Muslim and Middle Eastern woman as in need of being rescued from patriarchal and violent societies in the Middle East. Such depictions, whether portraying women as victims living in an oppressive Middle East or as escapees who have successfully been saved from their culture and religion, are often internalized and replicated in narratives written by Middle Eastern and Muslim women. Of course, the book publishing industry has a major role in the success of such narratives, with the proliferation of these books being shaped by (and at the same time shaping) a Western and Neo-Orientalist public appetite for stories that affirm the way in which it imagines and constructs the Muslim and Middle Eastern Other. In her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Lila Abu-Lughod writes that these books were “published by trade presses, reviewed widely, and adopted by book clubs and women’s reading groups, a lurid genre of writing on abused women – mostly Muslim – [that] exploded onto the scene in the 1990s and took off after September 11.”23 Examples of such books include Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (2007), The Caged Virgin (2006), Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic (2015) and Because They Hate (2006); Norma Kouri’s Honor Lost (2000), which turned out to be a hoax; Asra Q. Nomani’s Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam (2006) and Standing Alone in Mecca: A Pilgrimage into the Heart of Islam (2013); and many others. The prevalence of these books increased after 9/11, driven by a culture of fear on the one hand and an impetus to justify US military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq (as well as the perpetuation of the “War on Terror”) on the other hand. However, as pointed out by Arab and Arab American feminist scholars and activists, the narratives offered in these books are direct continuations of an older Orientalist discourse that pits the West as morally and culturally superior to backward and barbaric Eastern

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cultures.24 The logics of such discourse often hinge on Arabs and Muslims themselves affirming such cultural divisions, with what is construed as the “authentic” voices of the likes of Norma Kouri, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and their like affirming Orientalist premises. Many other Arab and Muslim American writers, however, reject such premises, positioning and representing themselves in direct opposition to the stereotypes depicting them as perpetual Others. The following section focuses on the ways in which Arab American writers have further negotiated and addressed Orientalism and its attendant strategies of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, forging in the process their positionalities as racialized and minoritized Arabs and/ or Muslims in the United States.

Arab Americans and Literary Representations Around 3.6 million Arab Americans are estimated to be currently living in the United States, with the Census Bureau categorizing them (along with others of Middle Eastern and North African background) as white.25 With origins in the twenty-two countries of the Arab League, a large majority of Arab Americans are from the Levant area, which encompasses Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. As already mentioned, Arab immigration to the United States started in the late nineteenth century and is divided roughly into three main periods (1880s to mid-1920s, 1950s to 1960s and 1960s to the present). The first wave was dominated by Christian immigrants (reaching one hundred thousand by 1914), coming from the Ottoman provinces of Syria, Mount Lebanon and Palestine and initially classified as Syrians or even Turks. The waves that followed consisted of both Muslim and Christian immigrants (with an increased number of Muslims) fleeing from wars and conflicts in their Arab homelands (including the Israeli occupation and the Lebanese war, as well as the wars in Iraq, among others). These immigrants, with their geopolitical awareness, are generally less invested in assimilating into the US social and racial structures (with its privileging of whiteness) and are perceived and treated as nonwhite in the mainstream national imaginary. Arab American literature reflects the contexts determining Arabs’ experiences in the United States, including immigration laws, the pressures of assimilation, and the political and military role of the USA in the Middle East. The development of Arab American literature is marked by three distinct stages: an “early” stage extending between 1900 and 1920, a “middle” stage extending from the 1930s to the 1960s, and a third and ongoing stage starting in the 1970s up till the present.26 The period starting from the 1990s onward, however,

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marks a shift toward different forms of anti-Orientalist Arab American selfrepresentation, by which Arab American writers have been increasingly turning to literary and cultural production to situate themselves and their communities within an increasingly hostile US landscape, challenging in the process the redeployment of tired Orientalist stereotypes, albeit in the new political and racial contexts of US empire. Arab American writers’ attempts to write and rewrite themselves into a US national landscape insistent on safeguarding Orientalist tropes about the Arab Other, however, well precede the current and latest stage of Arab American literature. As Waïl Hassan notes in Immigrant Narratives, “writing in English has been, for Arab immigrants, always a politically charged translational task, heavily invested in discourses of cultural identity, and gravid with ethical and epistemological considerations.”27 Such a task is evident in the works of the early mahjar writers from the early twentieth century, including Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani,28 who are recognized as the founders of Arab American literature. Along with fellow writers from the literary collective Al-Rābita al˙ Qalamiyya (or the Pen League), such as Mikhael Naimy, and Elia Abu Madi, Gibran and Rihani were extremely conscious of their role as disseminators of knowledge about the Arab world in the United States. Writing in both English and Arabic, they (along with other writers from that same period such as Abraham Rihbany) negotiated their role as “cultural translators,” translating the East to the West and vice versa,29 while “maintain[ing] a solid transnational outlook in their physical and intellectual negotiations of Arab and American identities.”30 It could be argued that these writers’ attitudes toward Orientalist discourse did not challenge it per se. Gibran, for one, often drew on Orientalist stereotypes to self-fashion himself as the Eastern mystic or sage (while depicting the East through a predominantly fantastic lens), and Rihani, with his constant transcultural efforts through his writing and activism to negotiate between the East and the West, often ended up reaffirming their binaristic construct.31 According to Waïl Hassan, As cultural translators and members of an embattled minority, Arab immigrant writers pick their stances toward Orientalism along the discursive spectrum broadly defined by [scholars like Antoine] Berman and [Lawrence] Venuti: domesticating (understood as conforming to, and thereby confirming, the dominant representations of Self and Other, or “East” and “West”) and foreignizing (challenging readers’ expectations, undermining stereotypes and idealized self-images, and proposing what Venuti calls reformed models of cultural identity) . . . [but these strategies are neither] simple . . . [nor] straightforward . . . [for] very few writers can be classified with such either/or clarity.32

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Such intersecting “domesticating” and “foreignizing” stances have been evident not only in the works of first-generation Arab American immigrant writers in the United States but also in the works of second- and thirdgeneration Arab American writers. In the period between the 1930s and 1960s, defined as the second phase of Arab American literature, the predominant articulations of Arab American identities asserted a predominantly assimilative (or domesticating) approach to US culture, as reflected in the few texts published during this period. These texts include autobiographical and biographical narratives such as Salom Rizk’s Syrian Yankee (1943), George Circus (1950), Vance Bourjaily’s Confessions of a Spent Youth (1960) and William Blatty’s Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (1960). In many of these texts, most of which are written by children of Arab immigrants, the urge to be accepted into US culture is informed not only by a critique of original Arab homelands (albeit one that is sometimes mixed with yearning and nostalgia) but one that is shaped by a sense of shame and embarrassment about being Arab.33 Even though, as Hassan notes, it is neither simple nor straightforward to categorize writers and their works along clear-cut “domesticating” and “foreignizing” lines, it is nevertheless noteworthy that Arab Americans generally became more and more politicized in the second half of the twentieth century (especially after the 1967 Six Day War). This politicized outlook led to a more entrenched identification with an anti-assimilative (or foreignizing) Arab American label that ultimately shaped Arab American literary production in terms of content, perspective and focus. Such an affirmation of Arab identity and heritage among Arab American writers that developed in the period between the late 1960s to the 1980s is exemplified in the works of writers such as Samuel Hazo, D. H. Melhem, Sam Hamod, Eugene Paul Nassar, Jack Marshall and Joseph Awad. The continued military and political involvement of the United States in the Middle East created an additional catalyst for a full development of a critical Arab American consciousness, one that partly manifested itself in a full-blown development of Arab American literature from the 1990s onward. Such a critical consciousness developed out of an urgent need to respond to and combat the increasingly negative reactions of a US mainstream toward Arabs (whether in the USA or in the Arab world), especially, for instance following the First Gulf War in the early 1990s and the 1993 bombing of the US World Trade Center. Both events resulted in a severe backlash against Arabs in the United States, which of course reached new heights after 9/11 and the “War on Terror.” Not all Arab American writers

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directly address in their work US–Arab political contexts and the increasing demonization of Arabs and Muslims in the United States. However, it can be argued that Arab American writers, by virtue of their positionings within the US racial anti-Arab and Islamophobic structures, are in fact automatically engaging through their writing with negative, Orientalist and reductive representations of Arabs, whether addressed directly or not. In other words, given the entrenched persistence of Orientalist, anti-Arab and Islamophobic stereotypes permeating the US imagination, the production and circulation of Arab American literary texts becomes one way to directly or indirectly address such restrictive and dangerous representations. Such a stance nevertheless places on Arab American writers what Nada Elia describes as “the burden of representation,” by which self-identifying Arabs and Muslims are relegated to the role of spokespersons constantly having to rectify damaging stereotypes and represent their communities in ways that are legible to a US mainstream, often at the risk of simplifying and homogenizing Arab and Muslim identities.34 Rather than turning to individual Arab American literary texts and writers, then, to pinpoint the ways in which they translate Arab cultures and undercut Orientalist stereotypes, we can think of contemporary Arab American literary works as collectively complicating a dominant discourse about Arabs, a discourse that draws on the intersecting logics of Orientalism (or Neo-Orientalism), antiArab racism and Islamophobia. The complexity and variety of Arab American literary themes, foci and representations across different genres become a way to combat the reductive impulses of a US mainstream to define Arab and more generally Middle Eastern identities as the Other. Nevertheless, we can still identify certain themes, topics and viewpoints developed in various Arab American literary texts that exemplify the ways in which literature becomes a means for addressing simplistic and stereotypical representations of Arabs. Such themes and topics extend, for example, to explorations of religion and more specifically the articulation of Muslim American identities; the representation of war and conflicts in Arab homelands and how they shape Arab American experiences within the US; and the interrogation and negotiation of concepts such as home and belonging within transnational as well as translocal US contexts. In the process, complex and multilayered Arab experiences are portrayed in ways that ultimately undercut the uniform story that Orientalism narrates about Arabs and Middle Easterners.

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Intersections of Religion, Nationality and Race in Contemporary Arab American Literature The themes of religious and national/transnational identities are explored in varied and complex ways in Arab American literary production. This complexity is made evident in the range of strategies, genres, approaches and perspectives that Arab American writers develop to address and go beyond Orientalist mandates of representation (us/them, here/there, good/ bad). In the rest of the chapter, I will briefly discuss and give examples of each of the sample themes I have just outlined (religious identity, wars and conflicts in original Arab homelands, and US belonging) in order to elucidate how Arab American literary texts provoke in myriad ways antiOrientalist understandings of Arab American identity formations. As already mentioned, one of the major tenets of Orientalist depictions of Arabs involves a conflation of Arab and Muslim identities, one that asserts the backwardness ascribed to what is often described as a violent and extreme Muslim and Arab culture. A variety of Arab and Muslim American texts push against such conflations and binaristic thinking, emphasizing the religious variety of Arab identities as well as the multiplicity of racial, ethnic and national affiliations among Muslims in the United States. The works of Syrian American writer Mohja Kahf, for one, assert the complexity and variety of Muslim American identities and the way they intersect with Arab American ones. In many of the poems included in Kahf’s Emails from Scheherazad (2003), we repeatedly encounter a speaker confronting the Orientalist stereotype of the silent and oppressed Muslim (American) woman. In the poem “Hijab Scene #7” (one in a series of other “Hijab Scene” poems in Emails from Scheherazad), we encounter a speaker responding to what can be described as interrogations that question and undercut her Americanness by virtue of her hijab: No, I’m not bald under the scarf No, I’m not from that country Where women can’t drive cars No, I would not like to defect I’m already American (1–5)35

In this and other poems by Kahf, the trope of the hijab becomes an entryway into questioning hegemonic Western impulses to rescue Muslim women from the hijab (and the Arab and Muslim cultures that enforce the hijab). With the speakers’ responses in many of these poems refuting a mainstream discourse that pits the hijab, and in this case specifically Muslim American identity, as antithetical to and irreconcilable with

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Americanness (read as white and Christian), the speaker resists racialized and Orientalist depictions of Muslim American bodies that render them either invisible or reductive. An insistence on depicting Muslim American identities as neither static nor homogenous is also made evident in Kahf’s novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), a coming-of-age novel depicting the protagonist Khadra Shamsi’s negotiation of her Muslim identity in multiple, transnational, cross-racial and multiethnic contexts. Even when not handled directly within religious or faith-based frameworks, Muslim identity is often portrayed in Arab American literary texts as a point of contention around which the otherness of Arab American identities is constructed. This becomes evident, for instance, in the works of playwrights such as Yussef El Guindi, including his plays Back of the Throat (2006) and Language Rooms (2010), in which the main characters are rendered automatically suspicious due to their Muslim identity, especially (but not solely) in the context of a hypervigilant political landscape of post-9/11 and the “War on Terror.” Similar depictions of Muslim scapegoating are taken up by Laila Halaby in her novel Once in the Promised Land (2007), in which a Muslim Jordanian couple, Jassim and Salwa Haddad, get caught up in the frenzy and paranoia characterizing the strong Islamophobic impulses permeating the United States, particularly after 9/11. Another recurrent thematic trope in various Arab American literary texts involves portraying connections to and experiences of original Arab homelands, ones that are often embroiled in conflict and war. Many Arab American texts in fact are set primarily in an Arab country or in strongly transnational settings, depicting the realities or lingering effects (and aftereffects) of war within these spaces. Examples of such texts include Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose (1977); Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001); and Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003), all of which focus on the Lebanese war (1975–1990) as a traumatic period for Lebanese and Lebanese Americans. Other texts focus on Palestinian lives within the geographical contexts of Israeli occupation, such as Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010), Susan Muaddi Darraj’s A Curious Land: Stories from Home (2016), Lisa Suhair Majaj’s Geographies of Light (2009), Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996) and breaking poems (2008), Naomi Shihab Nye’s Habibi (1997) and Words under the Words (1994), Deema Shehabi’s Thirteen Departures from the Moon (2011) and Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic (2008). The effect that such a thematic focus on war and conflict in an Arab setting has on upending Orientalist tropes is that it blurs the

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boundaries of “here” (the United States) and “there” (the Arab world) as well as the binary of “us” and “them” (here specifically Americans and Arabs), boundaries that constitute one of the central tenets of Orientalist, Islamophobic and anti-Arab logics. In upending these rigid boundaries, then, these texts emphasize the fluidity of identities constructed around race, nationality, gender and religion, emphasizing the multiplicity and simultaneity of belongings that defy rigid and unchanging conceptualizations of place and lived experiences. In her poem “First Writing Since,” written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Suheir Hammad rejects the ideological rigidity informing the binaristic separation of “here” and “there” at the heart of Orientalist logics: if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip. ... ... ... over there is over here (91–93; 126)36

By insisting that “over there” is “over here,” Hammad collapses the emotional and ideological boundaries that separate and hierarchize pain, trauma and loss into separate and distinct spheres. The replacement of rigid Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist boundaries with fluid identity formations and transnational configurations of belonging are evident too in the works of other Arab American writers, including, for instance, the works of Randa Jarrar, Hayan Charara, Khaled Mattawa, Nathalie Handal, Laila Lalami, Laila Halaby and Alia Yunis, to name a few. In Jarrar’s novel A Map of Home (2008), for instance, the young Nidali Ammar learns to negotiate her multiple identities (Palestinian, American, Muslim, Egyptian, Greek) through her movement across multiple gendered, racial, religious and national boundaries and borders. In addition to asserting a solidly transnational Arab American outlook, a novel like A Map of Home, as well as the works of the aforementioned writers, trouble simplistic configurations of US belonging that privilege, if not demand, assimilative forms and articulations of US identities. In other words, such works, in addition to challenging binaristic constructs of here/there, us/them, also reconfigure homogenous and mainstream understandings of US belonging, especially as they pertain to minoritized and racialized communities like Arab Americans and Middle Eastern Americans more generally. Such interrogations of dominant forms of national belonging, as demanded from Arab American communities, are examined in the works of Joseph Geha, for one, whose book Through and Through (1990) is one of

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the first collections of Arab American short fiction. Kahf also showcases in her work a critique of a mainstream’s assimilative mandate that leaves little room for the articulation of heterogeneous and interrogative forms of Muslim and Arab identities. Moreover, the rich heterogeneity of Arab American identities that cross religious, political, national and generational divides is showcased in the fiction of Diana Abu-Jaber, whose novels – including Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent (2003) and Birds of Paradise (2011), among others – depict a whole range of Arab and non-Arab characters, exemplifying the nuances and variety of Arab American experiences and cultural production. Needless to say, it would be too simplistic to state that Arab American or Middle Eastern American literature’s function is to directly address, denounce or challenge Orientalist tropes. Such a statement ultimately reduces the multilayered facets of these literatures to a one-dimensional or didactic cause. However, the ways in which Middle Eastern American literature intervenes to disrupt or at least lay bare the reductive portrayals of Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist discourse, as well as their attendant ideologies of Islamophobia and antiArab racism, remain important facets of such literary articulations. Such interventions are complex and, again, multiple, with the end result being the questioning rather than the affirmation of the binaristic thinking at the heart of Orientalist perspectives.

Notes 1. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard and David Attwell, eds., Debating Orientalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 1. 2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 24. 3. Said, Orientalism, p. 2. 4. See Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Sunaina Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 5. Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams, “Neo-Orientalism,” in Globalizing American Studies, eds. Brian T. Edwards and Gaonkar Dilip Parameshwar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 283–299. 6. Steven Salaita, “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6:2 (2006): pp. 245–66, p. 247. 7. Abdul Khabeer Su’ad, et al., “Islamophobia is Racism: Resource for Teaching & Learning about Anti-Muslim Racism in the United States,” https://islamo phobiaisracism.wordpress.com/ (accessed October 2, 2016).

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8. Ella Shohat, “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies,” in Taboo Memories: Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 1–16, p. 6. 9. Nadine Naber, “Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and AntiOrientalist Feminisms,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, eds. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), pp. 78–90, p. 81. 10. For an analysis of mainstream representations of Arabs and Muslims in the United States, see Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northampton: Olive Brach, 2001); Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney, eds., Middle Eastern Lives in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 11. Said, Orientalism, p. 55. 12. Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” in September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?, ed. Mary L. Dudziak. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 147–162, p. 152, p. 153. Here Volpp draws on Lisa Lowe’s discussion of the anxieties projected onto the phantasmic Asian immigrant body in US national contexts. See Volpp, “Citizen,” p. 161, note 16. 13. Volpp, “Citizen,” p. 153. 14. Shohat, “Gendered Cartographies,” p. 2. 15. Volpp, “Citizen,” p. 147. 16. For more details on Arab American immigration, see Gregory Orfalea, The Arab Americans (Northampton: Olive Brach, 2006), and Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985). 17. For immigration patterns and histories of other populations from the greater Middle East, including Turks and Pakistanis, see Marvasti and McKinney. See also John Tehranian, Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 18. Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 60. 19. Memoirs by Iranian American writers include Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003); Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (2003) and Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen (2008); Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again (1999); Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky (1999); and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad (2005). This focus on the genre of the memoir has been critiqued by scholars such as Hamid Dabashi and Persis Karim for their covert and often overt participation in what Karim describes as the Western impulse of “‘rending the veil’ of Iranian women [that] has been part of the impulse of publishing these memoirs” (quoted in Wilson). See Dabashi’s essay “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly (June 1, 2006), in which he critiques Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, calling it a “contemporary case of yet another attempt at positing English literature yet again as a modus

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

carol w. n. fadda operandi of manufacturing trans-regional cultural consent to Euro-American global domination,” http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm. See also Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2011). Quoted in Sara Wilson, “New Windows into the Iranian American Experience: An Interview with Anita Amirrezvani & Persis Karim,” World Literature Today (May 15, 2013), www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/inter views/new-windows-iranian-american-experience-interview-anita-amirrez vani-persis-karim (accessed October 2, 2016). Wilson, “New Windows.” Karim’s works include the anthologies A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999) and Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006). Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 87. Examples of feminist scholarship that critiques such narratives that depict the West as a savior of oppressed Arab and Muslim women include Mohja Kahf’s essay “The Pity Committee and the Careful Reader,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), pp. 104–23. See also Amira Jarmakani, Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), in which she analyzes the history of Orientalist representations of Arab woman in Western discourse since the turn of the twentieth century. A proposal was put forth for including a Middle East and North Africa (MENA) category on the US Census for 2020, but was rejected. Evelyn Shakir, “Arab-American Literature,” in New Immigrant Literatures in the United States, ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 3–18. Waïl Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab-American and Arab-British Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 29. In addition to The Book of Khalid (1911), which is considered to be the first Arab American novel, Rihani’s prolific literary output in English includes the poetry collection Myrtle and Myrrh (1905), the play Wajdah (1909), and The Chant of Mystics and Other Poems (1921). Gibran’s numerous publications include the much-touted collection The Prophet (1923), written in English and translated into more than fifty languages. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives, p. 5. Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 17. See Hassan, Immigrant Narratives, p. 42; see also Geoffrey Nash, The Arab Writer in English: Arab Themes in a Metropolitan Language, 1908–1958 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), for an analysis of Rihani’s literary

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35. 36.

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output as exemplifying a bicultural perspective that “foreground[s] the Arab constituency” rather than an immigrant or US ethnic identity (p. 18). Hassan affirms Rihani’s US immigrant experience as a central aspect of this writer’s acts of “cultural translation” (p. 39). Hassan, Immigrant Narratives, p. 37. Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Of Stories and Storytellers,” Saudi Aramco World 56:2 (2005): pp. 24–35, p. 27; Shakir, “Arab-American Literature,” p. 7. See Nada Elia, “The Burden of Representation: When Palestinians Speak Out,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), pp. 141–158. Mohja Kahf, “Hijab Scene #7,” E-mails from Scheherazad (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 39. Suheir Hammad, “first writing since,” in Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), pp. 90–94.

chapter 17

New Orientalism and the American Media: New York Cleopatra and Saudi “Giggly Black Ghosts” Moneera Al-Ghadeer

It is hard to fathom how a part of the world that produced Cleopatra – who perfumed the sails of her boat so men would know she was coming and ruled with elegant authority, signing one tax decree “Make it happen” – could two millenniums later produce societies where women are swaddled breeders under house arrest.1

The New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd conjures up the ancient past in her dramatization of the situation of women in the Arab and Muslim world, comparing the “swaddled breeders” of the modern era with an imagined Cleopatra, who “perfumed the sails of her boat” to signal her arrival in a display of power, seduction and grandeur. Dowd sees Muslim and Saudi women through Roman and American eyes. Instead of Julius Caesar or Shakespeare’s Antony, Dowd’s title suggests that it is Osama bin Laden who escorts the imaginary Egyptian queen as she sails into the contemporary world. Without the turbulent historical events, the lure and the betrayal dramatized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen appears as an unspectacular product of stagey associative thinking that intends to convey menace.2 The New York Cleopatra is about to be assailed by Osama bin Laden, the orchestrator of the September 11 attacks. Cleopatra, a single fleeting discursive device, engenders uncontainable associations in Dowd’s op-ed column. Cleopatra is not an unproblematic figure who can be rendered without the infinitely varying fleet of images and interpretations of Egypt and the racialized other. The allusion is baffling in the way that it flows from an archival Orientalist rendering of the East, its cultures, people and women, always generalized and scrutinized to show the urgency of modernizing interventions and imperial mobilization. Arthur Little, in his Shakespeare Jungle Fever, explains the Western discursive figuration that we find in Dowd’s description. He writes: “Simply put, ethnographic allegory represents the culture of an 306

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Other as a way of redeeming or chastising the self. When the Other is imported into western mythologies, it functions primarily as a way of visualizing the chastity of western imperialism.”3 Having failed to distance the previous association from the American neo-imperial vision, Dowd exploits common and well-analyzed Western allegory, affirming that the discourse of Orientalism has not completely vanished. This Orientalist repertoire acts as an aid to the imagination in moments of conflict, especially in the context of the volatile conditions of the Middle East in the twenty-first century. Ironically, the argument Edward Said formulated in 1978 in his Orientalism opens with a passage in which a French journalist collapses Beirut with an old portrayed Orient, comparable to Dowd’s series of descriptions in her 2001 op-ed column: Rome and Egypt, New York and the Arab world. Said draws the reader’s attention to the relentless theatrical manifestation of the West on the stage of the East in which it can neither identify nor perceive itself without its infinite mirroring and appropriation of the latter. Said underscores the untheorized identification found in the words of a French journalist: “On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975–1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to … the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval.’”4 As we shall see, a similar fictional Orient persists in the representations of the American media, indicating not only that the West and the East are interdependent but that the fictionality of the Western view of “the Orient” emerges from tragic events that command lamentation and appropriation. Said emphasizes the history of this fictionality: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”5 This invented Orient continues to emerge in the twenty-first century through depictions of violence, injustice and ruins, but it is also associated with a throng of trivial portrayals that are devoid of aesthetic value. This reductive imaginary East manifests itself in the trivialization of women and their causes, especially in Saudi Arabia.6 In recent years, there has been increasing debate centered on the portrayal of Arab and Muslim women and prompted by Western media reporting in conjunction with a reconsideration of the politics of gender and Orientalism in the neo-imperial era.7 Undeniably, Said’s Orientalism and the debates it has generated in the new millennium complicate our discussion of the ways in which the American media describes, mystifies and sometimes trivializes Arab and Muslim women without understanding key cultural differences or the formation of gender in the Middle East. In this essay, I explore the digital assembly initiated by Saudi women and their

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microblogging attempt to destabilize two critical concepts that are important subjects of investigation for this volume – American Orientalism and new Orientalism in social media. In so doing I also examine the relation to the politics of gender, and I ask, who is the Saudi woman in both spaces? The first section of this chapter addresses the representation of Saudi women in the US press, especially in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and explores how such coverage was intensified after the Arab Spring in 2011 and during the period of difficult relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia that arose during the Obama administration. An argument can be constructed that the new geopolitical order and the volatile American relation with the Gulf region have affected reporting about women in the Gulf states, leading to the appropriation of women as tokens of political pressure and providing a justification for nondiplomatic interventions, such as military action. By contrast, the second and third sections of this chapter examine how Saudi women’s digital assembly and microblogging disrupt the new American Orientalism and its representational mode of their activism, creating a mirroring between the misunderstanding they encounter at home and that in the American media. Both spheres fail to portray the causes these women advocate for without appropriating them: the local resistance tries to disavow the causes based on reductive cultural arguments, while the American media’s depiction conflates them with a long Orientalist repertoire of misrepresentations of Arab and Muslim women. At this juncture, it is necessary to highlight how Edward Said identifies the locus of American Orientalism in the media, since he thinks that it has replaced the British novel in the nineteenth century: “Yet before the media go abroad so to speak, they are effective in representing strange and threatening foreign culture.”8 He emphasizes: “Historically the American, and perhaps generally the western, media have been sensory extensions of the main cultural context.”9 Thus, Orientalist depictions of distant cultures and foreigners populate the American media discourse, continually reproducing and recycling the European manifestations of Orientalism as theorized by Said. Also, he notes the disappearance of the word “imperialism” in the discussions of the Gulf War and subsequently argues for reading the American imperialist discourse as it is incorporated and dissimilated in the media.10 My approach is informed by Said’s argument and extends to explore an overlooked area of comparative studies, the representation of Saudi women and their microblogging in the American media. Alongside the flow of headlines and editorials about oil prices and arms deals, editorials about the suppression, and the grievances, of Arab and

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Muslim women are also on the rise in the American media. The extent of this phenomenon can be seen in the New York Times putting out a call for Saudi women to get in touch, summoning them via its website and Twitter in conjunction with the release of a documentary about Saudi women. This call generated controversial responses and debates in social and conventional media.11 This surge of interest in women in Saudi Arabia has led to the publication of a number of studies, including books, articles and graduate theses that are underpinned by Orientalist propositions.12 Do we see a more realistic and diverse mode of reporting about the different faces of Saudi women in the American media that can modify the previous misperception of Arab or Muslim women, the portrayal of whose condition urges that they be rescued and saved? Recently, the Saudi woman has become a protagonist whose narrative has almost identical discursive characteristics to those found in media stories about Arab and Muslim women. How frequently after the attacks of September 11, 2001, does the category of “Saudi women” appear in articles and editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and to what extent does the media coverage increase after the Arab spring? To answer this question, I conducted a LexisNexis search, using the words “Saudi women” and focusing on dates that were populated by international crises and protests related to the Middle East. From September 11, 2001, to April 30, 2003, the Washington Post produced fourteen articles and the New York Times published thirteen, while from June 1, 2011, to December 30, 2015, the New York Times published 103 stories and editorials and the Washington Post another 82. A final search focused on more recent media reporting, from January 1, 2016, until April 30, 2017, and identified twenty-seven articles in the New York Times and a further nineteen in the Washington Post. The results of these searches indicate a clear rise, starting with the Arab Spring in 2011, in the American media’s interest in Saudi women, especially in the wake of women-led digital campaigning, as I will discuss later in this chapter. What characterizes most of these editorials are the inextricable links between Saudi women, oil, premodernization, the Arab Spring and Western moralism. These values become the yardstick against which Saudi women are asymmetrically measured.13 Despite the immediate responses and transnational proximity that the new communication engendered, I will argue that both the conventional and electronic media outlets still deploy and incorporate some of the prevalent Orientalist conceptual framework, which presupposes that women in Saudi Arabia “are oppressed, discriminated against and kept apart – excluded from many

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of the activities that for men would be normal.”14 Oil and wealth appear to be utilized to frame and typify women without any nuanced reflection on the critical cultural and social differences: “All those billions did little to erase the repression of Saudi women.”15 Granted, restrictions on Saudi women do exist, but they cannot be taken to describe or present a diverse society and the wide-ranging experiences of its women, and explaining these restrictions culturally negates diversity. When unemployment is on the rise, one cannot identify the problem as a cultural problem, as one headline suggests: “Limited Female Participation in the Work Force Is Ingrained in Gulf Culture.”16 What it means to be a woman from Saudi Arabia is ceaselessly scrutinized, misconstrued and misidentified through these editorials and the images that accompany them, advancing a very specific representation of their experiences, predicaments and aspirations. The attempted unveiling of Arab women, developed during the period of high imperialism and its Orientalist discourse, recurs time and again in recent writing and reporting about Saudi women. This can be seen in the titles of several features, opinion pieces, editorials, op-eds and other interactive media postings in the American media.17 Some of these editorials attempt to “unveil” Saudi women, who are generally presented wrapped in black in these contexts. “Saudis in Bikinis” is an opinion piece laden with sensationalist and awe-inspiring adjectives, written by Nicholas Kristof, one of the New York Times’ most prominent writers.18 The scene in Riyadh overwhelms the journalist, who struggles to capture what he sees: On my first evening in Riyadh, I spotted a surreal scene: three giggly black ghosts, possibly young women enveloped in black cloaks called abayas, clustered around a display in a shopping mall, enthusiastically fingering a blouse so sheer and low-cut that my wife would never be caught dead in it.19

Saudi women appear as “giggly black ghosts,” “enveloped in black,” a sight that can only evoke anxiety and anticipation, despite the caricatured staging which is conveyed in a rather jocular tone. These apparitions arouse the imagination by “fingering a blouse so sheer and low-cut” that it is so revealing that a respectable American woman would not wear it even if “dead.” Despite their invisibility and the tradition of surveillance by which they are constrained, the implied promiscuity of the Saudi women here is reminiscent of Cleopatra the Temptress in Dowd’s op-ed column.20 Editorial titles about the related topic of allowing Saudi women to work in lingerie shops continue this unveiling process with a play on idiomatic expressions that are laden with tones of mockery and trivialization: “Saudi Women Shatter the Lingerie Ceiling” opens by describing the regulation

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that permits women to sell lingerie as “A SOCIAL revolution” and is illustrated with a sketch of car keys and a tossed-out bra.21 Similarly, titles such as “Lingerie Challenges for Saudi Women”22 carry an air of condescension and pose many cultural challenges for a Western readership. The striking contrast between America and Saudi Arabia always underscores and reveals a presumed clash between the two worlds: “Saudi Arabia is a bizarre place. It has McDonald’s restaurants that look just like those at home except that there is one line for men and one for women.”23 Kristof adds: “Is it paternalistic of us in the West to try to liberate women who insist that they’re happy as they are? No, I think we’re on firm ground” (emphasis mine).24 Kristof fails to truly engage with the reflective mode briefly hinted at by his fleeting question and instead affirms that people in the West are indeed liberating Saudi women, even if these women mistakenly claim to be happy with the way they are. His words clearly convey the neo-imperial vision and confirm the repression of these women: “I kept asking women how they felt about being repressed, and they kept answering indignantly that they aren’t repressed.”25 The representation of women from Saudi Arabia in the American media relies on, and is enmeshed in, cultural and moral value judgments. The portrayal that results is not, then, completely devoid of Neo-Orientalist tropes even though reporters try to capture something new about Saudi Arabia and its women. These tropes arise, rather, from a renewed astonishment about what lies within, from the fact that “[v]isitors to the kingdom are often struck by the weird combination of modern and pre-modern.”26 When major American newspapers set forth descriptive formulations about how women are living and struggling in their other worlds (i.e. worlds that are not like the West), or prescriptions as to how they can be “saved” from their culture, religion and the “brown men” who oppress them, we still hear the echo of attitudes that Gayatri Spivak described as being concerned with “white men saving brown women from brown men.”27 Likewise, Lila Abu-Lughod argues forcefully that “Western representations of Muslim women have a long history. Yet after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the images of oppressed Muslim women became connected to a mission to rescue them from their cultures.”28 Western media tends to depict Saudi women as invisible, marginal, suppressed and, more importantly, in need of saving by the West. This salvific approach is not limited to the language of the media coverage itself but also appears in many interviews with the academics and experts who flock to the country for consultancy gigs. In addition to the editorials by its staff journalists, the New York Times has a flair for quoting scholars and

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experts who tend to trade in metaphors of astonishment and cultural shock. Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin described her trip to Saudi Arabia as a science fiction journey, exploiting a metaphor of alienation: “I think of it as being on ‘Star Trek,’” Goldin writes. “I’m helping another planet, but I’m having nothing to do with their culture. I’m accepting of their culture.”29 This othering gesture and conscious alienation combined with an attempt to accept the foreign culture is clearly shaped by the Orientalist underpinnings that inform the coverage of Western women leaders’ visits to Saudi Arabia. Still, the media presents these women leaders as “modeling liberation,” since they often deliberately choose such a role for themselves.30 Asma T. Uddin describes an example of this staging: Prior to her visit, [Theresa] May stated that she would be a role model for oppressed Saudi women, hoping to inspire these women to consider all that “women can achieve” and their ability to hold “significant positions.” Her dress choice was then framed in the context of her statement about empowering “oppressed” Saudi women.31

It is worth noting that these articles are frequently adorned by images, sketches and cartoons of completely veiled females opening luxurious car doors, holding the latest phone devices, standing passively next to gold shops.32 These images display and accentuate a significant contrast between a highly modernized world, the West, that is clashing with tradition, the East. This juxtaposition remains one of the most undecipherable cultural concepts, rendering them incomprehensible to Western audiences. It is precisely here that female bodies are penned in by this allusive misconception. Of course, the images discussed provoke a throng of other associations, such as wealth, invisibility, leisure and mystery. These images compel the viewer to recall Orientalist pin-ups that have not faded away in the digital age but stand out as a parody of “Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement.”33

Digital Assembly and Women Microblogging Saudi women blogging and tweeting have engendered a new form of narration and retelling that tests the limits of postcolonial studies as well as engages the indispensable attempts to revisit and analyze Orientalism, such as those pursued in this volume, due to the return of Orientalist modalities and enduring effects. Women’s microblogging narratives exemplify a new form of the political and expand our reading of the nonWestern feminist movement, extending it to include other communities,

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such as human rights activists and Western media outlets, sometimes without intending to do so. Digital assemblies transcend the geographical and generic categories to such a degree that the very idea of a West–East encounter is called into question, contested and debated in streaming, tweets, scores of mentions and the American media’s participation. Arguments, confrontations and accusations occur instantaneously in a dramatic staging that reaffirms the lingering cultural disconnect between the American media and Arab audiences on Twitter. How do the American Orientalist representations of Saudi women in print media outlets differ from the portrayals of their cyberspace microblogging? How do Saudi women form assemblies? The lack of street or organized assemblies in which to voice one’s resistance or protest has compelled women to seek out new and uncharted spaces that are democratic and open to everyone, regardless of class, gender or political orientation. Digital spaces offer the freest platform to scream, call for a protest or gather at a hashtag, the symbol that links tweets and speakers together, assembling interactive narratives of abuse, protest and demands for legislative reform. Judith Butler addresses the fact that the street may not be available for assembly or mobilization: “So the street cannot be taken for granted as the space of appearance, to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the space of politics, since there is, as we know, a struggle to establish that very ground.”34 Butler’s articulation of the notion of the street and the formation of assembly can be read in relation to the virtual streets that Saudi women enter and occupy as a platform for the discussion and destabilization of sociopolitical and legal limitations and as a place from which to call for legislative interventions. Butler writes: “So the street is not always the site that we can take for granted as the public ground for certain kinds of public assemblies.”35 For women in Saudi Arabia, the street is almost the space that cannot be occupied or populated by any assembly. Instead, digital networks turn into the virtual gathering space that allows women to evade political and social restrictions. Restriction and gender segregation are no longer the defining boundaries of how women mobilize or voice their protests or grievances. Butler highlights the fact that the street, as a public space, may not exist: “Of course, we have to consider as well that some forms of political assembly do not take place on the street or in the square, precisely because streets and squares do not exist or do not form the symbolic centre of that political action.”36 Digital activism took off in Saudi Arabia with a campaign that began as a Facebook post and a hashtag on Twitter, starting the first digital assembly, Women2Drive, on June 17, 2011. This was followed by another campaign

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launched on Twitter, Oct26Driving, in 2013.37 These attempts at digital mobilization in support of women driving continue to this day and, at the same time, encourage other forms of online activism to emerge. These women activists are digital natives and are aware of the effect of hashtagging and the power that they have achieved in support of several causes after the first campaign, reaching “Trending Topics” on Twitter in Saudi Arabia on a number of occasions.38 Likewise, women activists realize the power of going viral and trending on Twitter, not only for reaching their target audiences but also for mobilizing the international media and international organizations, from which they came to distance themselves in order to avoid appropriation and the spreading of misconceptions. Online deliberation, advocacy and mobilization characterize these digital assemblies. Philip Tschirhart describes this “blogosphere, as a public sphere of deliberation, [which] facilitates a forum for dialogue and discourse previously denied to women’s emerging perspectives.”39 The restricted public sphere available to Saudi women, along with the many state-mandated and conventional restrictions placed on women, are increasingly manipulated and exploited by political and religious authorities, who instigate countless heated debates and discussions.40 Women are aware of the multidimensional trap they are caught in and are compelled to confront and challenge their traditional confines. By mid-2016, Saudi women’s rights advocates had started another digital assembly to end the system that prevents women from making decisions without the permission of their male guardian – identified by the law as a father, husband, brother or even a son. They began tweeting under Arabic and English hashtags, such as #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen and #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship. Digital activism has evolved since the Women2Drive campaign and has come to encompass many different causes. Digital activists advocate for women’s rights to vote, to travel alone and to have authority over their bodies without the permission of the male and state guardianship systems. Each of these campaigns has generated local and international media coverage along with a prominent presence on Twitter. It is at these political and legislative frontiers that Saudi women have organized and intensified their activism, which attempts to subvert Orientalist media tropes and preconceptions. The formation of digital assembly functions as a call for solidarity that is absent in other physical and social spaces and becomes a site for contesting Western media reporting as well as for the virtual engagement with Saudi society, which often triggers confrontations and attacks.41 A mis-encounter occurs between the international media perception and the local reactions:

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the American media staging does not exhibit an understanding of the complexity of cultural and gender implications while, at the same time, the local virtual resistance displays its own opposition to gender. At times the public sphere has correlated with the blogosphere, and at others they have been disintegrated. It is in the space between these binaries that subversion operates. Women are aware of this reality, which pushes them to fight on so many fronts: claiming their rights, defending their causes against accusation, warding off hateful speech and distancing themselves from any Western ties, especially after the appropriation of their first digital campaign, Women2Drive. Thus, women find themselves constantly framed by misconceptions that force them to negotiate, translate and clarify what they are campaigning for. Philip Tschirhart claims that “[t]he emerging Saudi Arabian feminist perspective is most reflective of the Islamist feminists,” which overshadows other liberal and secular feminist discourses that are charting their way in the blogosphere.42 For women’s digital assembly, Twitter becomes a textual gathering space in which a live feed of tweets conveys, describes and reports many events that are developing by the second. The topics might be domestic violence, a case at the court, an arrest or a travel ban, all of which are monitored by many tweeps on connected, vigilant screens in Saudi Arabia and ultimately around the world. The participants in these digital assemblies are witnessing, reporting, warning and mobilizing, which makes their tweets into hypertexts situated somewhere between the genres of the detective story and the slasher film. The role of digital media in organizing the mobilization of women cannot be denied. However, its role in setting off a transformative change has been widely contested. The first digital assembly, the Women2Drive campaign that began on June 17, 2011, coincided with the Arab Spring movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, generating debates identified with progressive discourse and the movement toward women’s liberation as reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post.43 Directed to young women of middle-class backgrounds and those who associated themselves with a cultural elite, Women2Drive attempted to depoliticize the movement and soon after to distance themselves from Western press coverage in order to avoid social repercussions, state sanctions and imprisonment. Rather than uncritically adopting the pre-digital era construct of a political movement, Women2Drive – like the Arab youth in their conceptualization of reform – demanded change and criticized the traditional views and assumptions that characterized the debates about women and divided

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the public sphere into binaries: conservative and liberal, secular and religious, or West and East.44

Social Media and the New American Orientalism Can we argue for another, distinct, Orientalism in social media? Do the twentieth-century Orientalist images of Arab women migrate to cyberspace and, if they do, are they presented and viewed differently there than they are in print media? What type of contradictions do we find in the presentation of images of Saudi women as, on the one hand, deprived of their rights yet, on the other, able to speak up and mobilize to improve their condition? I do not want to advance a generalized argument about the recasting of Orientalism in social media or to claim that the concept can be discussed interchangeably across different types of media. Rather, I seek to call attention to the transfer of the Orientalist mode to the digital sphere and to the growing presence of those who are classified as others, responding to and refuting the engendered misconceptions. A key difference is that Saudi women are present, active and forcibly visible in the virtual space, and this is in contrast to their lack of presence in the print media, in which they are spoken about and defined by others who pass off their own assumptions in place of direct knowledge. Comparing the two media approaches reveals that women’s advocacy is frequently subjected to appropriation and misreading and faces disruption, attack, accusations and mockery.45 This implies, of course, that the resemblance between the output of the American media, on the one hand, and the online resistance to Saudi women’s digital assembly at home, on the other, rests on the fact that women are misconceived by both groups, paradoxically destabilizing their advocacy for reform or change. More specifically, the ways in which editorial titles induce vulnerability and reliance on the West as emancipator are underscored and mediated through clear commanding statements or descriptive generalizations that tend to cause negative reactions from readers in Saudi Arabia: “We want to hear from Saudi women about their lives, aspirations and views on Saudi society”;46 “‘I Live in a Lie’: Saudi Women Speak Up.”47 These are just a few examples of titles predicated on emancipatory fervor and the collapsing of the conditions of Saudi Arabian women with Western values and ideals that continues to mark the digital sphere. The New York Times posted a tweet highlighting its success in receiving women’s stories and this was re-tweeted, “liked” and mentioned by thousands of readers: “We asked women in Saudi Arabia to tell us about their lives. Thousands responded.”48 Such a tweet has generated what can

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be described as a digital cultural conflict that contrasts Arab and Islamic values with Western norms about gender. The responses to this tweet exemplify the cultural chasm between the American media and its readers in Saudi Arabia, demonstrating a clear misunderstanding of the diversity and complexity of each society as well as of gender roles. The reincarnation of Orientalist rhetoric that has pervaded and altered the new Orientalist discourse since 9/11 has restaged portraits of a vulnerable Saudi woman in an American media fraught with similar clichés that typify the depiction of Arab and Muslim women. One needs a conceptual grasp of the geopolitical order to see the critical influence that the US– Saudi relationship has had in engendering a new Orientalist modality in the treatment of Saudi women, as can clearly be seen in relation to the New York Times and the Washington Post.49 This type of reporting recycles the inability of the media to come to terms with the diversity of Arab and Muslim women, presenting a challenge not only to postcolonial and gender studies but also to our understanding of global communication and comparative cultural debates in general.

Notes 1. Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; Cleopatra and Osama,” New York Times, November 18, 2001, p. 13. 2. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995). 3. Arthur L. Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 4. 4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 1. 5. Said, Orientalism, p. 1. 6. See Moneera Al-Ghadeer, “Cannibalizing Iraq: Topos of Orientalism,” in Debating Orientalism, eds. David Attwell, Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 117–133. 7. In the context of this discussion, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27:1 (Spring 2001): pp. 101– 113. Also, see Deepa Kumar, “Heroes, Victims, and Veils: Women’s Liberation and the Rhetoric of Empire Post 9/11,” Forum on Public Policy: Journal of the Oxford Roundtable (2008): pp. 23–32. 8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 353. 9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 357. 10. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 357. 11. Mona El-Naggar, “‘I Live in a Lie’: Saudi Women Speak Up,” New York Times, October 28, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/world/middleeast/s audi-arabia-women.html?_r=0 (accessed March 13, 2019).

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12. A recent study devotes a chapter to “Driving While Female: Protesting the Ban on Women Driving.” See Loring M. Danforth, Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). Also, consider Smeeta Mishra, “‘Liberation’ vs. ‘Purity’: Representations of Saudi Women in the American Press and American Women in the Saudi Press,” Howard Journal of Communications 18:3, (2007): pp. 259–276. 13. The link between women and oil prices is highlighted in media reporting on Saudi Arabia. See Yu-Ming Liou and Paul Musgrave, “Here’s Why Saudi Arabia Is Loosening Its Restrictions on Women: Check the Oil Prices,” Washington Post, June 27, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/ monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/27/heres-why-saudi-arabia-is-loosening-its-res trictions-on-women/?utm_term=.f5d8da2dc51d (accessed March 13, 2019). 14. Macfarquhar, Neal, and Robert Mackey, “Saudi Women Defy Driving Ban,” New York Times, June 17, 2011, https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/1 7/saudi-women-protest-driving-ban/ (accessed March 13, 2019). 15. See Colbert I. King, “Saudi Arabia Is No Friend to the United States,” Washington Post, May 29, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/saudiarabia-is-no-friend-to-the-united-states/2015/05/29/64f24bac-0588-11e5-8b da-c7b4e9a8f7ac_story.html?utm_term=.60140be9fe5b (accessed March 13, 2019). Also, consider Vongai Mlambo, “Western Discourse on Saudi Women Ignores Cultural Differences: How Can We Navigate the Tension between Universalism and Cultural Relativism?,” Gazelle, November 19, 2016,www.thegazelle.org/issue/100/commentary/nyt-saudiwomen (accessed March 13, 2019). 16. Sara Hamdan, “Saudi Arabia Signals Openness to Women Seeking Work,” New York Times, September 6, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/world/ middleeast/saudi-arabia-signals-openness-to-women-seeking-work.html (accessed March 13, 2019). 17. For a theoretical analysis of the unveiling of Arab women as a colonial motif, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich and W. Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). This recurring interest in veiled Arab women can also be seen as “a metaphor for the mystery of the Orient itself, which requires a process of Western unveiling for comprehension.” See Ella Shohat, “Gender in Hollywood’s Orient,” Middle East Report 162 (1990): pp. 40–42, www.merip.org/mer/mer162/gender-hollywoods-ori ent (accessed March 13, 2019). 18. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis,” New York Times, October 25, 2002: p. A35, www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/opinion/saudis-in-bikinis.html (accessed March 13, 2019). 19. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis.” 20. Of course, Kristof’s description of Saudi women recalls the seduction of the Egyptian queen: “Cleopatra is the great harlot, mistress to three kings, the Apocalyptic harlot,” cited in Yashdip S. Bains, Antony and Cleopatra: An Annotated Bibliography (Routledge, 1998) p. 124, note 448. See also statements such as “Muslim women are oppressed,” which is a stereotype as misleading as

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22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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“Western women are promiscuous” and tends to create the divide without understanding the cultural ramification. See Sakdiyah Ma’ruf, “Want to Talk about Oppressed Muslim Women? Let’s Talk about Kendall Jenner First,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 16, 2016, www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/ne ws-and-views/opinion/sakdiyah-maruf-how-to-spot-a-muslim-20161115-gspo h0.html (accessed March 13, 2019). The editorial displays a sense of bewilderment and moves to a capitalist comparison of lingerie brands in the United States, deploying the same approach of measuring social conditions and women’s experiences in Saudi Arabia against those in the West. See Thomas W. Lippman, “Saudi Women Shatter the Lingerie Ceiling,” New York Times, January 21, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/saudi-women-break-a-bar rier-the-right-to-sell-lingerie.html (accessed March 13, 2019). Donna Abu-Nasr, “Lingerie Challenges for Saudi Women,” Washington Post, November 3, 2002, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/11/03/li ngerie-challenges-for-saudi-women/3c72291a-f336-44fa-b1a2-90f0c8b4d427/? utm_term=.bfcf4bbb99cf (accessed March 13, 2019). Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis.” Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis.” Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis”. Consider Ignatius’ opinion article, which sets out the binary opposition between the modern and the premodern, as represented by Bedouin tradition. He writes: “These Saudis might wear Bedouin robes, but their hearts often seem to be in the West.” See David Ignatius, “A 30-year-old Saudi Prince Could Jump-start the Kingdom – or Drive It off a Cliff; Mohammed bin Salam Has a Bold Vision for the Kingdom. Can He Pull It off?” Washington Post Blogs, June 29, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ global-opinions/a-30-year-old-saudi-prince-could-jump-start-the-king dom–or-drive-it-off-a-cliff/2016/06/28/ce669a3e-3c69-11e6-a66f-aa6c1883 b6b1_story.html?utm_term=.66ccbf50afc5 (accessed March 13, 2019). G. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313, p. 296. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 6–7. Dionne Searcey, “A Conundrum for Saudis: Women at Work,” New York Times, November 28, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/business/a-conun drum-for-saudis-women-at-work.html (accessed March 13, 2019). For a response to the holding up of Western women leaders as role models for Saudi women, see Asma T. Uddin, “Theresa May Is no Feminist Hero. Her Decision Not to Wear a Headscarf in Saudi Arabia Was Not Brave,” Washington Post Blogs, April 7, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/ac ts-of-faith/wp/2017/04/07/theresa-may-is-no-feminist-hero-her-deci sion-not-to-wear-a-headscarf-in-saudi-arabia-was-not-brave/?utm_ term=.1d58139ea6f8 (accessed March 13, 2019).

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31. Uddin, “Theresa May.” 32. Rod Nordland, “Cellphones in Hand, Saudi Women Challenge Notions of Male Control,” New York Times, April 21, 2017, www.nytimes.com/20 17/04/21/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-women-male-guardianship-acti vists-social-media.html (accessed March 13, 2019). Other photographs show women awkwardly sitting in or standing in front of luxurious cars. Examples include Neil Macfarquhar and Dina Salah Amer, “In a Scattered Protest, Saudi Women Take the Wheel,” New York Times, June 17, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/world/middleeast/18saudi.html?action=cli ck&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage® ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article (accessed March 13, 2019). See the photo in Ben Hubbard, “Saudi Women Rise Up, Quietly, and Slide into the Driver’s Seat,” New York Times, October 26, 2013, www.nytimes.com/20 13/10/27/world/middleeast/a-mostly-quiet-effort-to-put-saudi-women-indrivers-seats.html (accessed March 13, 2019). Similarly, cartoons and sketches convey themes of mockery and concealment of Saudi women and their causes. See Patrick Chappatte, “Cartoon: Saudi Arabian Roadblock,” New York Times, December 15, 2015, www.nytimes.com/ 2015/12/15/opinion/cartoon-saudi-arabian-roadblock.html (accessed March 13, 2019). Also, see the sketch of an entirely veiled woman whose eyes are showing a country landscape: Farzaneh Milani, “Saudi Arabia’s Freedom Riders,” New York Times, June 12, 2011, www.nytim es.com/2011/06/13/opinion/13Milani.html (accessed March 13, 2019). 33. See Djebar’s reading of Delacroix’s painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement in Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992). 34. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 127. 35. Butler, Notes, p. 126. 36. Butler, Notes, p. 126. 37. Kay Hardy Campbell created a blog, “Saudi Women Driving,” to document international news, reports, and any development relevant to the topic, starting from December 12, 2009. The name of the blog is suggestive, as it asserts driving. See http://saudiwomendriving.blogspot.com (accessed March 13, 2019). 38. The young generation in Saudi Arabia is in command of digital literacy and has adapted to the use of non-traditional media. See “Social Media in Saudi Arabia: A Virtual Revolution,” Economist, September 13, 2014, www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21617064-why-social-me dia-have-greater-impact-kingdom-elsewhere-virtual (accessed March 13, 2019). 39. Philip Tschirhart, “The Saudi Blogosphere: Implications of New Media Technology and the Emergence of Saudi-Islamic Feminism,” CyberOrient 8:1 (2014), www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8864 (accessed March 13, 2019).

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40. See Naomi Sakr, “Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 35:3 (2008): pp. 385-404. Sakr “examines the process of renegotiating women’s personal and political status in the kingdom as it has been played out in recent years in the Saudi media.” 41. What women confront is another resistance in the form of hate speech, which attempts to disparage women, halt their liberationist efforts, and bring women to the position of subjection discursively. At such a point, women recognize that hate speech is directed at them to undermine their digital lobbying, compelling them to develop discursive strategies to avert aggression. Hateful messages, name-calling, and the harassment of women activists online, as well as the consequences that follow, require a separate discussion. 42. Philip Tschirhart, “The Saudi Blogosphere,” p. 6. 43. Women driving attracted international media coverage, especially in the American newspapers. See, for example, Mackey and Macfarquhar, “Saudi Women Defy Driving Ban”; Isobel Coleman, “Women’s Driving Protest May Signal Changes in Saudi Arabia,” Washington Post, June 24, 2011, www.washing tonpost.com/opinions/womens-driving-protest-may-signal-changes-in-saudi-ara bia/2011/06/23/AGNwOZjH_story.html?utm_term=.b8c92e159589 (accessed March 13, 2019). Women2Drive was characterized as a protest in the American media, generating a backlash against women who drove their cars. See Max Fisher, “Saudi Women Set to Drive in Protest – and to Show Their Rising Clout,” Washington Post, October 25, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wo rldviews/wp/2013/10/25/saudi-women-set-to-drive-in-protest-and-to-show-theirrising-clout/?utm_term=.94cd01fe829f (accessed March 13, 2019). For extensive documentation of the Western media coverage of Saudi women driving, see Kay Hardy Campbell, “Saudi Women Driving,” http://saudiwomendriving.blog spot.com (accessed March 13, 2019). 44. In a footnote, Amélie Le Renard captures the event: “In 1990, 47 women drove in Riyadh, challenging a social norm prohibiting female drivers. Since then, a fatwa and a law have forbidden women from driving.” See Amélie Le Renard, “Only for Women: Women, the State, and Reform in Saudi Arabia,” Middle East Journal 62:4 (Autumn 2008): pp. 610–629, www.jstor.org/stable/ 25482571 (accessed March 13, 2019). 45. “Over the past few days, the hashtag # (#IwilldrivemycarJune15th) has trended across social media, scoring tens of thousands of mentions on Twitter and other platforms, according to BBC Arabic.” See Adam Taylor, “A Social Media Campaign to Get Saudi Women Driving Finds Support but also Mockery,” Washington Post, May 11, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/n ews/worldviews/wp/2016/05/11/a-social-media-campaign-to-get-saudi-wome n-driving-finds-support-but-also-mockery/?utm_term=.101a79807a32 (accessed March 13, 2019). 46. “How Has Your Life as a Saudi Woman Changed?,” New York Times, October 21, 2016,

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www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-women.html? smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur (accessed March 13, 2019). 47. Mona El-Naggar, “I Live in a Lie: Saudi Women Speak Up,” New York Times, October 28, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/world/middleeast/saudi-ara bia-women.html?_r=0 (accessed March 13, 2019). 48. See tweet posted on November 1, 2016, which deserves another discussion because of the conflicting ideas it engendered: https://twitter.com/nytimes/ status/793209947127439363?lang=en (accessed March 13, 2019). 49. See F. Gregory Gause III, “The Future of U.S.–Saudi Relations: The Kingdom and the Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2016, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-06-13/future-us-saudi-rel ations (accessed March 13, 2019). Also, consider C. Chanin and F. G. Gause III, “U.S.–Saudi Relations: Bump in the Road or End of the Road?,” Middle East Policy 10:4 (2003): pp. 116–125.

chapter 18

On Orientalism’s Future(s) Anouar Majid

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, it seems, to me, at least, that the postcolonial urgency its thesis engendered has long been overshadowed by global transformations that have scrambled the geography of oppression. The Chinese have already acquired significant chunks of Hollywood, one of the major producers of Orientalist images;1 the skylines of certain oil-rich Arab cities are dwarfing the aging ones in Manhattan and Chicago; the best soccer teams in the world are sponsored by Arab sheikhs; and every human being on earth covets an American or West-European lifestyle. Middle Eastern and African refugees, like their Mexican and Latino counterparts, are gambling with their lives, choosing between barbarism at home or a life of hope in the West. Said may have objected to Karl Marx’s support of British imperialism in India, but Marx knew (through readings immersed in an Orientalist mindset, Said would complain) that the archaic customs of that country were impediments to the kind of freedom he imagined and only served the deeply patriarchal and oppressive agenda of the local ruling class. Not that Marx had any affection for imperialism or capitalism, but he knew that no precapitalist order could seriously withstand the revolutionary powers of capitalism and that a better future for all of humanity can only come into existence under hitherto unknown socio-economic conditions.2 Said’s objection to Marx, in fact, highlights the ideological flaws of his theory and explains, to a large and heartbreaking degree, the current impasse the world of the presumed “Orientals,” or postcolonial subjects (a category that, of course, includes me and may include a few of the contributors to this volume), find themselves in today. Whether a postcolonial transplant in the West is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, university professor, world-renowned novelist (like Salman Rushdie) or prosperous professional, we know that we owe our success to the efficient and rewarding systems of the West, not to the dysfunctional institutions of our native countries. Given his exceptional Palestinian background and his equally 323

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unusual privilege, Said may have experienced his homelessness somewhat differently from other unremarkable postcolonials in the West, but his theory has become so entrenched that it has turned into the default sign of bien pensant academics and intellectuals. Said’s Orientalism acts as a false redemption mechanism for those of us who benefit from the West’s largesse and still feel obligated to stand up for the subalterns left behind. To me, Orientalism was part of a protest movement against the West’s arrogant overreach, a concept that was redefined and popularized by a man schooled in the best cultural ways of the imperial West. Edward Said went to great and not infrequently exaggerated lengths to show us how the Orient is a Western fabrication, a discursive trope that has disempowered Orientals and left them without agency on the stage of history. It’s hard to disagree with this thesis, albeit Said’s limited focus impelled me to expand the notion into one of post-Andalusianism, a title I had proposed to my publisher but, since it didn’t exist in the English language, ended up in the subtitle of Freedom and Orthodoxy,3 a book that enlarges the scope of the West’s encounter with the Other to the late fifteenth century, even though the clash of civilizations (a misnomer that nevertheless captures a historical truth), stretching back to the mists of time, is an inexorable fact of human history. Let us then say that Said’s protest is well justified, that Western scholars have no moral right to misrepresent Orientals in order to allow mal pensants imperial governments to act on them with impunity. And even if allowing that such a nefarious scholarly activity had always been the norm, that Western scholarship was always deployed for conquests and domination, we are not any more enlightened by such discovery, since the cultures and religions that have come to be associated with the West today (such as Christianity) have always been at war or, at the very best, in a state of low-intensity conflict with Islam. Robert Irwin was right when he opened his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents by reminding readers of this often-forgotten fact. There had been mutual respect, even admiration, between West and East (such as the Greeks and Persians), acknowledgements of debt to the superior Egyptian or Phoenician civilizations, and frequent interaction between these civilizations. But the emergence of Islam in the seventh century and its aggressive, expansionist ambitions also led to a conflict that is with us still. Islam was seen as a heresy, Mohammed as a false prophet, and when Europeans learned Arabic, they did so to understand – and eventually defeat – this conquering religion. Inspired by the fabulous riches of Asia, the wonders of Egypt or the never-ending menace of Islam,

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Europeans undertook the study of ancient languages, deciphered dead ones, translated the Quran and literary classics, published the first encyclopedia of Islam, invented what we now call Islamic studies, printed in Arabic script – the list goes on. If this is Orientalism, as defined by Said, it is unquestionably of a kind that has enriched us immensely.4 By the time Europeans occupied the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they had a far better understanding of the region’s history than its inhabitants, toiling as they were in the same general environment of “Oriental despotism” Marx condemned. Even the Arab nationalism that emerged to fight colonialism was the West’s poisoned gift to a people who had never thought of themselves as Arabs. What Edward Said may have done is give a language to people who feel oppressed by the superiority of Euro-Americans and to our colleagues in the academic professions who sympathize with the West’s Others. Said, who by virtue of his upbringing and education may be closer to the Orientalists he condemns than to the downtrodden he presumably defends, has managed, in a brilliant literary coup, to reify his own struggles with the issues of Palestine into a global theory that has ensnared generations of scholars and militants, including those in the Arab-Muslim world, the sphere of his native culture. It is this Arab-Muslim sphere that will be my focus as I think about the futures of Orientalism, since the Other is too broad a metaphor to ground our thinking in the concrete here and now. The question, one that is arguably of pressing importance today, is what to do with Said’s theory as we try to act on an unstable present and decipher the outlines of an elusive future. Is Orientalism helpful in finding a workable formula for the emancipation of Arabs and Muslims, or is Marx’s unsentimental approach a better guide in this regard? Asked differently, what do we do after we have been heard and our pain acknowledged? Said is mostly silent on what comes after protest (or critique, if you want), and it is here that he falls short and reveals the limits of his ambiguously privileged status. Those of us who want to see Muslims be more active participants in the making of a better civilization, not chronic complainers about the ills (real and imagined) that continue to befall them, have no option but to shelve Said’s theory and move on to newer and bolder paradigms. It is by now a well-rehearsed fact that ever since Muslim-majority nations were awakened to the overwhelming superiority of Europe in the late eighteenth century, they have been struggling to reconcile their inherited belief in their God-given superiority and even chosenness with their increasingly impotent status in relation to the West and, of late, other

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nations around the world. The paths taken to deal with this traumatic revelation – claiming that Islam has no issue with democracy or recovering the undiluted faith of the ancestors – are both strategies of self-deception that have led to endless turmoil, suffering and shocking cruelties. As the gap between Muslims and others widened in the last two centuries, Muslims, unable to break out of the iron cage of their religious narrative, fought their domination and humiliation (whether real or merely perceived) with more of the same, clinging tenaciously to their conviction that their economic backwardness is the result of a diabolical strategy foisted on them by coldhearted, voracious and immoral Westerners. Secular Marxists in Muslim-majority nations also condemned Western capitalism and colonialism, but they did so in the name of an international agenda of liberation, not because, as Muslims do, they believed that they were God’s chosen people, the loyal followers of a prophet who had been given the last word from Allah. Said’s theory of protest added to the Muslims’ sense of helplessness and, what’s worse, allowed liberal and progressive scholars from both sides to come to their rescue, armed by a sophisticated language that allowed for little nuance and almost no genuine progressive critical thinking. The Muslims, one could hear, are the victims of an imperialist and hegemonic West. No thought was given to the oppressive regime produced by a vast and varied canonical literature that allows no elbow room for any meaningful form of autonomy, let alone a full culture of human rights. Shaped by their own civil rights struggles and partisan battles, liberal Western scholars became the self-appointed defenders of a tradition that, they claimed, was being distorted before their very eyes. Muslims welcomed such concern with open arms and exhibited almost no ability to make sense of how they were being liberated by the very West they like to denounce. The result was the perpetuation of failure and its nagging consequences on the Muslim side as well as the transformation of entire academic fields into hagiographic tributes to a forgotten Muslim past. Western scholars of Islam, motivated by a desire to right wrongs and defend what they think is a long-maligned tradition, have thus become unwitting collaborators of a religion that has stifled freedoms, delayed emancipation and inflicted incalculable damage on the Muslims who are trapped in Muslim-majority societies. Speaking from well-endowed universities and places of freedom, they trade in a scholarship that only entrenches academic fields with no practical relevance to the Muslims who want to have the same privileges in their home countries. One might say that writing the history of fifteenth-century Egypt has nothing

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to do with the turbulent conflicts of our time, but this routine act of historiography turns into an ideological move when such historians dissociate their project from those who seek change in Muslim-majority societies and culture through a hard-nosed critique of the Islamic tradition. I have attended high-level conferences where scholars started their talks or presentations with the Quranic bismallah (the opening verse of the Fatiha, the first chapter in the Quran), thereby blurring belief and scholarship and making it hard for critics to operate in such a mosque-like environment. In the United States, members of the local Islamic community are sometimes invited to symposia (where hummus is invariably served) and encouraged to participate. Such experiences have led me to see such departments as inadvertent promoters of a sort of academic Wahhabism since they preclude the option of any vigorous criticism of the Islamic tradition. Highquality journalism is not much better. When the New York Times made the historic decision to dedicate an entire issue of its Sunday magazine to the “fractured lands” of the Arab world on August 14, 2016, Islam, as a cause of these fractures, was studiously avoided, leaving the impression that religion simply has nothing to do with what ails Arabs. To what extent this culture is indebted to the legacy of Said’s Orientalism is hard to tell, but it does prove that Orientalists (if this is the term we are applying to those Western scholars who specialize in Islam, the Middle East or the Arabs) are most decidedly not cut from the same cloth. Many have contested Edward Said’s flippant use of the term precisely on these grounds. I already mentioned Robert Irwin. Daniel Varisco, in a different vein, has done an autopsy of Said’s work and discovered egregious oversights and simplifications that prove that Said had no interest in scholars who didn’t fit into his theory.5 In Muslim-majority nations, like Morocco, for instance, local scholars who are schooled in cultural and postcolonial studies resort to the same vocabulary deployed in American universities in the 1980s to dismiss any attempt at criticizing Islamic traditions, making those of us who are committed to a philosophy that condemns all oppressive systems, including indigenous ones, agents of the imperialist West. In this milieu, where Saidian Orientalism and Islam become natural allies, to be critical is to court rejection, loss of funding and, basically, public ostracism. This is intellectual terrorism at its best, but one would never guess so by the looks of the hallways and faculty doors in departments of Middle East studies, English or cultural studies. In such corridors, perfectly convenient for defenders of Islam and the Other, villainy starts and ends with the West. (Incidentally, African studies tend to fall into the same epistemological and ideological traps, building an entire academic

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field on the premise that Africa is the land of black-skinned folk, not a continent of many diverse cultures and traditions, including Islam and Christianity, in which skin color is not a central fact of the African experience. It is also telling that, while we have departments of African studies, one would be hard pressed to enroll in a department of European studies or assume that such a field is based on the whiteness of Europeans).6 This may sound a bit harsh to those of us who have been committed to defending those who can’t defend or speak for themselves (the subaltern), but, as noble as this mission is, we are also called upon to reexamine our investment in such projects and tease out the threads of self-interest (employment, publications, promotions) that prevent us, in the end, from truly sympathizing with freedom seekers living in Muslim-majority nations or even those in Muslim-minority enclaves in the West. I am not saying that doing historical, anthropological or literary work is not a worthy enterprise, and maybe I should not be expecting much from scholars who are not interested in theory and its consequences; but my point here is that if these scholars want members of Islamic societies to have their same social and professional freedoms and privileges, then they should at least make a deliberate effort not to museumify the Islamic tradition and remove it from the currents of contemporary life. My native Morocco, where I have spent almost half my time in recent years, could be said to have been a significant regional power in the eleventh century, but it has fallen precipitously since the rise of Europe as a global power and is now scrambling to catch up to the benefits of modernity. Salafi Islamists may denounce this approach as a race to embrace the ungodly ways of the West, but no serious thinking person wants to live in the caves and wastelands of seventh-century Arabia. One way for progressive scholars who are inclined to brandish Orientalism as a badge of struggle for social justice is to join hands with a number of beleaguered colleagues who are contesting the traditional Islamic narrative that has turned difference with orthodoxy into a major crime. Muslims may have created good things in the Middle Ages, but they are now living in some of the most despotic cultures in the world, denying rights to all sorts of minorities and independent thinkers, while demanding that other nations and cultures accommodate their beliefs and choices or else be damned with the racial epithet of Islamophobia (even though Islam is not a race but a religious manifesto) or even attacked violently if they think Western literature or art are defaming their religion. I was one of thirty Moroccans who contributed to a book titled Ce Qui Nous Somme in response to the atrocities of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, titling

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my chapter “Mohamed, Peut-il Être Français?” (Can Mohamed be French?) at a time when there was a good deal of handwringing about whether the Charlie cartoonists were insensitive to the Muslim lumpenproletariat of the French banlieues.7 Inspired by a perfectly canonical edict to kill anyone who dares insult the prophet of Islam, the assassins took down some of the most progressive people in France, including an editor who had spent a life defending illegal immigrants. Charlie Hebdo was not available online for anyone to be offended by the cartoons, was not distributed in the Muslim world and was published in a country where such satire is legal. By the time more terror attacks hit French and American nightclubs, there was nothing left to say except more of the same denunciations. In the meantime, no major progressive voice in academia rose to condemn this form of Islam. All we kept hearing is what the French call the “langue de bois” (wooden language) of the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, exonerating Islam on the spot from the mayhem its people are perpetrating and incompetently pointing the finger at deranged extremists who, we are solemnly told, have no relation to the religion they ostensibly defend. Despite the powerful current to dismiss anyone who criticizes Islam as an Islamophobe, it is beginning to dawn on intellectuals in and from Muslim-majority nations that a traditional understanding of Islam is the cause of many ills besetting Muslim societies and communities around the globe. While a certain piety toward the discipline of Middle East or Islamic studies envelops American universities, scholars in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere are beginning to poke at the false sacredness of these beliefs, daringly depicting the prophet, as depicted by canonical narratives, as a regular Arab enmeshed in the squabbles of his tribe and community, not a superhuman being cleansed of all human flaws. Writing from his native Algeria, the journalist and writer Kamel Daoud has reached the English-speaking world with his fearless denunciations of the morbid effects of Islamic traditions and his refusal to play into hands of Western liberals.8 Small but brave groups of Arabs and Muslims are choosing to leave Islam (whether for another religion or not) and are beginning to ask for equal rights, or, at least, the right to their own conscience, without suffering the fate of apostates. Western liberal institutions, such as human rights organizations, government agencies or even academics, often make the point of defending the rights of Arabs or Muslims persecuted for their different views by putting pressure on their governments, but they practically have no language to address the societal oppression that

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emerges from tradition and which local governments manipulate for their own ends. In fact, the governing elites in Arab and Muslim countries can be far more liberal than the people they govern, and it is they who introduce measures (such as progressive family laws) against the deeply ingrained wishes of their people. It may be convenient to blame autocratic governments (are they a latter-day expression of the “Oriental despotism” that still defines political life in Arab and Muslim lands?), but how is one to aim the same critical firepower at social regimes that are equally, if not more, oppressive than the governments they give birth to? Critics of Orientalism simply avoid this treacherous terrain, mostly, I suspect, because it remains impensable but also because there is no cultural theory that allows bon pensant progressives to find fault with people and their traditions. The subaltern can only be the sacrificial lamb of history; it is beyond the pale to see him or her as a villainous agent of an oppressive regime. Much has been said about American white men without college degrees in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, but nothing can be said about the Indian, Egyptian or Iraqi subaltern as a perpetrator of repressive, even genocidal, actions. This Western anthropological approach to the Other has led to the folklorization of Muslim cultures, not to their emancipation. It is in this sense (for which, of course, Edward Said is not fully responsible) that one might say that Saidian Orientalism, while opening new venues for analysis, has become counterproductive, if not outright disabling for a form of scholarship that matters, one whose goal is not just to interpret the world (albeit this act alone is vitally important) but also to change it (as Marx rightly pointed out).9 I have never understood the Westerner’s perpetual refuge in the mea culpa of guilt, as if a harmless scholar in some rural campus in the United States feels duty-bound to answer to all the sins of the Europeans who conquered, massacred, colonized and dispossessed most of the world’s peoples. Such a conviction has always struck me as utterly unconvincing, reducing the complex and bloody pathways of history to an inventory of national sins. How could a Minnesotan of Swedish descent in St. Paul be accountable for the genocidal policies of Spain in the New World, the German depredations in Africa or British cruelties in India? A person is, legally and spiritually, accountable only for his or her actions, and to tie one’s moral fate to what a band of pale-looking desperadoes and savage opportunists have done to darker-skinned people is, quite frankly, a way to avoid dealing with

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the kinds of obligations I am about to argue are necessary for any selfdefining progressive intellectual to undertake. Edward Said may be right when warning us to be careful when speaking of broad categories. To me, this means avoiding at all costs the assumption that theory allows us to make sense of complex and varied histories and cultures, as if by merely conjuring a concept from the halls of academia we can do away with the irreducible singularities of each period, nation, city or village. I have long ceased calling myself an Arab or Muslim, or accepting such categories as meaningful in any material historical way, and only use them to the extent that they allow me to make sense of a well-defined community, such as my native country Morocco and the United States, my adopted homeland. I have the language, some degree of social capital and a sense of these two countries’ histories, enough to make a difference (however minuscule) in both. It is, indeed, to praxis that we must now turn, since, at heart, the scholars who are concerned about the fate of the (Muslim) Other and who often grow indignant at the slightest criticism of Muslims are assumed to be motivated by a progressive worldview, a form of liberalism that refuses to discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin and, among many other things, religious identity. It is the latter category that concerns me here. The critics of Orientalism see themselves as engaged in a battle for social justice and as upholders of diversity in a world which the so-called ‘white’ Europeans have dominated with an iron fist for far too long. This position, in fact, gained momentum during the presidential campaign and eventual election of Donald Trump in 2016. Critics of the real-estatemogul-turned-celebrity-turned-president condemned his shocking statements about women, Mexicans, war veterans and Muslims, among others. But once again, as in the case of scholarship, the collective liberal thinking about Muslims was lacking in rigor, downplaying, mostly out of a lamentable ignorance, the ideological dimensions of the Islamic faith. In that case, we heard much about protecting American values, but what, exactly, are these values? I once asked this question of a group of retired US intelligence officers in the state of Maine. What are we defending when we go after the reactionary types? It is this question, this unspoken corollary of critique, this assumption that dares not speak its name that, in my opinion, future scholarship needs to tackle, away from the glare of the demonic ghost of Said or any other thinker who wields a crippling influence on the young scholar’s thoughts. I suggest that, in different expressions, what Said, most of the contributors to this volume, and many Western progressives are committed to is a

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worldview that was shaped by the Enlightenment, a world where the autonomy of the individual, the freedom of expression and the right to live in dignity are assumed to be desirable, universal values, not malicious Eurocentric ploys to ensnare the hapless Muslim Other. To be sure, most of these values, as conceived and articulated, are of Euro-American provenance, but an obsession with origins should not undercut the truisms of history, that wherever ideas may first appear, they end up traveling and diffused spatially and geographically until place of birth (if such thing could ever be located with any reliable degree of accuracy) becomes meaningless. By the way American preachers speak these days, one could be forgiven for assuming that Christianity was born in the American South, not in the tragic lands of the Middle East. There comes a time when a foreign idea turns native. Such is the case of American Christianity, and such is the case of most ideas that shape the modern world: they may have been born in Europe, but countries like China and Japan are not about to revert to a medieval order just to remain authentic. The insistence on purity is, to me, far more problematic than the fear of Euro-American ideas that have now become (for better or worse) the unavoidable norm anyway. The eruption of Islamic extremism and the return of populism in the decades preceding the publication of this book are faces of the same coin: they reflect the failure of a liberal order that has reduced bold, revolutionary Enlightenment concepts into a Disneyfied concern with a narrow and distorted notion of diversity, elevating the doctrine of coded speech above the robustness of free expression and championing false notions of authenticity over the universal values that gave us both the American and French revolutions as well as the new, dynamic world they engendered. Those who prefer to protect Muslims-as-minorities while glossing over or ignoring the oppressive elements of the Islamic faith appear, in the end, as unprincipled progressives, supporting an ideology that is antithetical to the Enlightenment and what it stands for. One needs to combine the humane instinct of protecting the dignity of Others with an uncompromising critique of belief systems that are divisive and, indeed, dehumanizing. For in the monotheistic mindset, the Other is always a fallen being, a misguided human who needs to be rescued from his or her backward ways and baptized into the only truth. Muslims may be nice people, just like rapacious capitalists or imperialists may be in person, but the kindness of an individual shouldn’t obscure the ideology that stands behind him or her. If Thomas Paine could be clear-eyed about the fantastical claims of monotheism in the late eighteenth century,10 there is no reason why we shouldn’t adopt the same attitude today and in the indefinite future.

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Islamically inspired terrorism has stymied most progressives, but a few, like Zineb El Rhazoui, the Moroccan-French Charlie Hebdo journalist, are pointing the finger at confused liberal thinkers and accusing them of being collaborationists and accomplices of Islamic fascism. To her, the fascistic religion of Islam has accomplished what no other form of fascism has managed to do, namely seducing the Western left to defend it and even, as the case is in France, criminalize anyone who insults it. By conflating the criticism of Islam-as-ideology with racism (a biological fact), Islamophobia has handicapped all serious thought about Islam and basically made the denunciation of Islam a culturally and legally unacceptable act. By conjuring the “semantic ruse” of Islamophobia, Muslims and their unwitting allies (“useful idiots,” El Rhazoui calls them) have, in effect, shielded a religion that promotes sexism and violence against infidels, punishes freedom of conscience and expression, rejects democracy, banishes all difference as unholy and reveres a prophet whose documented record in later Islamic writings (there is scant evidence of Mohammed-as-Prophet during his assumed lifetime) is that of a conquering warlord with the sexual prowess of thirty men. To be sure, it may be easy (but intellectually problematic) to confine our ire to the fringe Muslim groups that have flashed across television screens with numbing regularity in the last few decades, but few progressives (unlike right-wing movements) have dared point out that both the terrorists and their mainstream coreligionists draw from the same canonical well. This is why El Rhazoui calls the so-called average moderate Muslim a “jihad reservist.” Part of the problem is that the left has been unable to find a language, not to mention a theory, that addresses the complex issue of Islam without falling into the trap of false consciousness or relying on a self-satisfying humanitarianism that does little to improve the conditions of Muslims-asOthers. In his Le mépris civilisé (Civilized contempt), the Swiss Israeli psychologist and writer Carlo Strenger accuses the European left of failing to stand up for the values of the Enlightenment, which was kick-started by the likes of Spinoza in the seventeenth century. With the failure of Communist and Maoist ideologies in the twentieth century, many of these leftists chose self-flagellation over critique and found refuge in identity politics or political correctness. Just like Islamophobia has stymied all genuine critique of Islam, the charge of Eurocentrism is no less disabling to liberal thinkers. The latter find it difficult to state that Western civilization, despite its innumerable flaws, is the most advanced in world history, that the world’s free states today are mostly Western states, or that Abrahamic religious accounts, like the order to sacrifice Isaac (or Ishmael

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in Islam) for the sake of God are just too offensive to be taken seriously. A progressive cannot be racist, of course, but he or she can at least express a “civilized contempt” for archaic practices that do nothing to emancipate the locals whose colorful cultures enchant us out of our minds.11 In a similar vein, the French intellectual Jean Birnbaum expresses puzzlement as to why the Left can’t understand that Islam and Islamism are fundamentally and implacably hostile to any secular, liberating vision. In his Un silence religieux, Birnbaum traces the French Left’s deliberate avoidance of Islam all the way back to Algerian revolution against French colonialism, for, although there were many clues that the Algerian Liberation Front, acting like an anticolonial liberation movement, was, in fact, engaged in a jihad against the infidel occupier, there was almost a willed blindness to this reality.12 Many years later, when Michel Foucault was sent to Iran by the Italian newspaper Correre della sera to cover the upheaval against the Shah in that country, none of the people he interviewed mentioned anything about a revolution. To his question “What do you want?” the Iranians in the street simply replied “Islamic government.”13 It is, therefore, not for no reason that Karl Marx, as his friend Moses Hess noted in an 1841 letter, took religion extremely seriously. For Marx, “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Religion may offer solace and even happiness to the oppressed, but such comfort, Marx adds in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” is a counterproductive illusion that doesn’t truly relieve suffering or lead to true emancipation.14 We are back to Karl Marx’s views on India, which Said finds “puzzling,” since they are not mindless expressions of any run-of-the-mill nineteenthcentury English writer but the considered thought of a man committed to fighting injustice and rescuing long-enslaved humans from the clutches of exploitation in whatever shape it appears. Perhaps Marx’s central view on the subject, and from which Said quotes at some length, is his “The British Rule in India,” published as an opinion piece in the New-York Daily Tribune on June 25, 1853.15 Reading it more than a hundred and fifty years later, and replacing India with Islam, may help us understand why the argument is still valid today, and why, in my opinion, there is no real alternative to Marx’s position, if the goal is, first and foremost, the emancipation of Muslims. Marx is aware of India’s rich history, but, given his teleological view of world history, he understandably doesn’t share the belief in an Indian “golden age,” since the vast majority of Indians have lived in a state of misery since long before the Christian era. Despotic central governments

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ruled over a “village system” that was already being dissolved by the introduction of modern technology and free trade. For those who believe in cultural diversity, the dissolution of a millennial system may feel like a tragic loss, but Marx harbored no illusion about the deeply oppressive practices associated with Indian village life. He asks us “not to forget that these idyllic villages-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.” One could use the same language today to describe the condition of reliably exotic Muslim-majority nations, where unexamined medieval doctrines are violently opposed to modern concepts of autonomy, freedom and human rights. Marx knows that the West, like England in India, may be driven by the “vilest interests” and “stupid” ways of executing them, but that, he adds, “is not the question.” To replace, once again, India with Islam, one would have to ask whether humanity can “fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state,” of Muslim-majority nations or even major Muslim-minority communities elsewhere. Obviously, when I speak about Islam needing to be subjected to the same protocols of critique applied to other facets of intellectual and cultural life, my main motivation is the development of Homo islamicus, the person who is subjected to conflicting and ultimately disabling social and moral demands, a person torn between loyalty to blind faith and the irresistible lure of modern life. This is, quite simply, a personal matter to me. I want my fellow Moroccans to experience the fulfilling freedoms available to, say, the Spaniards, Italians, South Koreans and Argentines and not be beholden forever to medieval dictates whose ultimate goal is a form of austere absolutism that reduces life to joyless rituals whose goal is to avoid punishment in the hereafter. In short, if Western-style critics truly care about the condition of people in Muslim-majority nations, a first step would be not to patronize them through counterproductive acts of understanding but by subjecting their beliefs to the same scrutiny Christianity, Judaism and other religions have endured for a while now. If a reluctance to do so is motivated by fear of retaliation, then the case only proves my point. Oriental despotism has to dissolve under the merciless march of capitalism before the world emerges together from the ruins of blind profit to build a more humane civilization, one in which squabbling over what’s authentically Western or Islamic will be seen as an archaic relic of a dangerous illusion.

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Notes 1. See Mathew Ingram, “This Chinese Billionaire Has His Sights Set on Buying Hollywood,” Fortune, November 4, 2016. 2. Edward Said’s discussion of Karl Marx on British imperialism is in his Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 153–156. I will return to this polemic at the end of my chapter. 3. Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the PostAndalusian Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 4. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006). 5. See Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 6. See my chapter, “The North as Apocalypse,” in Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 73–98. 7. “Mohamed, Peut-il Être Français?,” in Ce Qui Nous Somme: Réflexions Marocaines Après les Événements des 7 au 11 Janvier 2015 À Paris, ed. Abdelkader Retnani (Casablanca, Morocco: La Croisée des Chemins, 2015), pp. 241–249. 8. Hespress, the best-read electronic Arabic daily in Morocco, and one of the most-read in the Arab world, publishes regular essays that infuriate its readers. For an excellent recent treatment of Mohammed that is yet to be translated into English, see Hela Ouardi, Les derniers jours de Muhammad (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016). For an overview of the Kamel Daoud work and thought, see the French weekly Le Point, February 9, 2017. 9. Karl Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 1: pp. 13–15, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wor ks/1845/theses/theses.htm (accessed March 13, 2019). 10. See, for example, Thomas Paine, “The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology,” in Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 2006), pp. 665–830. 11. See Carlo Strenger, Le mépris civilisé, translated from the German (Montreal: Éditions Belfond, 2016). 12. Jean Birnbaum, Un silence religieux: La gauche face au djihadisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016). 13. Quoted in Birnbaum, Un silence religieux, p. 103. 14. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Marx on Religion, ed. John Raines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 171. 15. Kark Marx, “The British Rule in India,” Daily Tribune (New York), June 25, 1853, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm (accessed March 13, 2019). See also “Articles by Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 1852– 61,” www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/new-york-tri bune.htm (accessed March 13, 2019).

chapter 19

“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism Patrick Williams

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall, I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, but love’s the only engine of survival Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

Introduction: The Insufficiency of Edward Said A constant in the forty-year life of Orientalism is that it has been judged variously unsatisfactory, flawed, insufficient, unnecessary and unacceptable from a wide range of political, religious, ethnic and academic positions. What, one wonders, is so wrong with it, that people are queuing up to condemn it, and, if it is so wrong, how has it managed not only to survive but to flourish – translated into more than thirty-five languages by the early years of this century? Looking at the phenomenon from a slightly different angle, one could ask: “What is it about Orientalism that so frightens or disturbs so many different groups and individuals?” Even from within departments of literary theory, which might have been assumed to contain the strongest natural allies for the book’s project, the 1980s witnessed a scramble to critique Orientalism, to correct it or to “go beyond” it. (Even today, that curious desire for transcendence and hope to “go beyond” still drives books with titles like Re-Orienting Orientalism that continue to appear.) Above all, perhaps, Said’s productive use of Foucault and Gramsci was deemed theoretically unworkable, neither “high” nor “pure” enough in its typically Saidian freewheeling linkage of poststructuralism and Marxism to satisfy partisans of either school. Simultaneously, a different kind of rejection came from departments of literature, where Orientalism’s argument threatened a very different form of transcendence – the traditional claim for the ability of the work of literature to rise above the messy and the mundane, especially anything 337

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that smelt of real-life politics. (There is, no doubt, a study to be made of why, or when, Orientalism has been deemed to fail, the various conjunctural, strategic, disciplinary or other needs – including, no doubt, the unfortunately self-promotional – served by its repeated rejection.)

Refighting the Good Fight There is a strange repetitiveness in the cycle of attack on, and defense of, Said: a critic pops up, voices objections; a supporter emerges, attempts a defense or rebuttal; little seems to have been learned, as the same or similar dissatisfactions reappear, perhaps from a slightly different direction, some time later. While Marxists – above all, Marx himself and Gramsci – were very aware that victories were no guarantee of a stable future state and that the same battles were likely to be refought, it can be hard, in a context such as the discussion of a work like Orientalism, not to think, “We’ve been here (so many times) before. Can’t we at least find a new source of disagreement?” Accordingly, if readers feel they are experiencing a Groundhog Day moment, I can only apologize for an unavoidable repetition and take some comfort from the fact that Said’s great friend, the activist-intellectual Eqbal Ahmad, was firmly of the opinion that repetition in these areas is essential: “truth has to be repeated. It doesn’t become stale just because it has been told once. So keep repeating it. Don’t bother about who has listened, who has not listened.”1 (It is worth pointing out, however, that, repetitions notwithstanding, no claim to “truth” as such is being made here.)

“Criticism before Solidarity” The phrase, and the principle, was one of Said’s watchwords. It is one that is particularly difficult to hold on to when you yourself are being criticized by someone who you would normally expect to show solidarity. One of the more egregious examples in Said’s case was the ad hominem attack launched on him by Aijaz Ahmad in his book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. It is a principle I wish – somewhat hesitantly – to invoke here. Although my chapter questions a number of the claims made by Anouar Majid in his Chapter 18 of this volume, I believe we are on the same side: the starting point for both of us is secular; we both have grave doubts about the workings of institutionalized religion; we would like to see a critical, oppositional, intelligentsia; we would both love to see the Marxist vision of emancipated humanity made real. All of that notwithstanding, Majid’s contribution to this volume certainly invites, or incites, a response.

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Getting It Wrong The aim of Anouar Majid’s Chapter 18 is to interrogate Orientalism, with a view to establishing its current and future utility. The aim of this chapter is to debate with Majid, also in order to establish the future utility of Orientalism. Although his contribution is entitled “On Orientalism’s Future(s),” Majid is one of those who find Said and Orientalism insufficient, and this chapter will examine some of the issues he raises, particularly the variety of ways in which Said is seen to be getting it wrong. The opening paragraph, it has to be said, is not auspicious – Said falls at the first hurdle, indeed at the first sentence: As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, it seems, to me, at least, that the postcolonial urgency its thesis had engendered has long been overshadowed by global transformations that have scrambled the geography of oppression.

The point is relevant: the world of the final quarter of the twentieth century is in many ways not that of the second decade of the twenty-first, and one of the important changes taking place may indeed be in “the geography of oppression.” Majid goes on to elaborate: The Chinese have already acquired significant chunks of Hollywood, one of the major producers of Orientalist images; the skylines of certain oil-rich Arab cities are dwarfing the aging ones in Manhattan and Chicago; the best soccer teams in the world are sponsored by Arab sheikhs; and every human being on earth covets an American or West-European lifestyle.

The first three points are certainly correct; the fourth is at the very least debatable. What is not at all clear, however, is how this relates to oppression. However much we may deplore the very best of our football clubs being swallowed one after another by oil sheikhs (or dodgy Russian oligarchs), the impact on oppression – local or global – is not obvious. Similarly, although some may feel diminished in personal or national terms by having a smaller skyline than the Arabs, a shift in oppression does not seem to be the most obvious cause or effect here. There is perhaps more relevance in the Chinese acquisition of parts of Hollywood, which might indeed result in some Orientals (above all the Chinese) being better represented but, equally, might have little effect on the images of Arabs Hollywood typically trades in. (Do the Chinese care about how Arabs and Islam are represented when blockbuster revenues are at stake? We have yet to find out.) Finally, “every human being on earth covets an American or West-European lifestyle.” If that is the case, does that make them, as

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aspirants to our array of Western benefits, less oppressed, or, conversely, are they more oppressed, living lives whose dreams may never remotely approach fulfillment? A second failure on the part of Said is found in the same paragraph: his objections to what he sees as Marx’s Orientalist representation of colonized India. Said’s notorious lèse-majesté has been one of the most frequently criticized aspects of Orientalism, and Majid joins in that criticism: “Said’s objection to Marx, in fact, highlights the ideological flaws of his theory and explains, to a large and heartbreaking degree, the current impasse the world of the presumed ‘Orientals,’ or postcolonial subjects … find themselves in today.” Unfortunately, the key elements in this are not clear. Firstly, what exactly are “the ideological flaws of his theory,” and how are they instantiated in his objecting to the perceived Orientalist position adopted, on this occasion, by someone whose political and analytical approach was, typically, entirely other? It may be that Said is not Marxist enough for Majid’s liking, but even if that is taken to be the case, is it sufficient to render his entire theory ideologically flawed? The lack of clarity is even more of a problem in relation to the second half of the sentence, where Said’s failure “explains … the current impasse [in] the world of the presumed ‘Orientals,’” where we neither know what the impasse consists of nor how Said’s failure explains it. Shortly after this, Majid goes on to say: “Edward Said went to great and not infrequently exaggerated lengths to show us how the Orient is a Western fabrication, a discursive trope that has disempowered Orientals and left them without agency on the stage of history.” He then adds, “It’s hard to disagree with this thesis …” This admission is interesting, if slightly confusing, given that strongly voiced criticism of the way in which Orientalism has created an unhelpful position of permanent passive victimage for Orientals forms the centre of his chapter’s argument. Returning to the quotation, we are again in a position of uncertainty: what are the “great and not infrequently exaggerated lengths” to which Said went? What exactly was he exaggerating? More importantly, Said is in fact not arguing that Orientals have been disempowered and “left … without agency on the stage of history.” Orientalism is – scandalously for some – concerned above all with the power of the Western nations and not with the powerlessness of the Orientals they colonized, ruled and exploited. The production of forms of knowledge about the Orient, and the many ways in which these representations are actively supportive of, passively complicit with, or co-opted and manipulated by, the institutions and power systems of the West (regardless, in the latter case, of any active intention or aim on

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the part of the authors), is what Said is interested in – the oppressed Orientals (and other Others) will have to await their turn and other books. At certain moments, it can seem as if Said is not getting too much wrong: Let us then say that Said’s protest is well justified, that Western scholars have no moral right to misrepresent Orientals in order to allow mal pensants imperial governments to act on them with impunity. And even if allowing that such a nefarious scholarly activity had always been the norm, that Western scholarship was always deployed for conquests and domination, we are not any more enlightened by such discovery.

The problem here is that this is not what Said is saying. Firstly, he says nothing at all about the moral rights of scholars; although he carefully dissects their Orientalism, he avoids questions of morality. Secondly, and even more importantly, he categorically does not suggest that “such a nefarious scholarly activity had always been the norm, that Western scholarship was always deployed for conquests and domination.” As briefly mentioned in the previous paragraph, the relationship of writers to Orientalism, and to colonialism, was very varied and certainly not what Majid is claiming. Even the most erudite and scholarly works, unrepentantly Islamophile or Sinophile, full of praise for the richness of Oriental culture, could find themselves co-opted in the project of dominating that culture. Most striking of Majid’s comments here, however, is the assertion that “we are not any more enlightened by such discovery.” This is really rather strange, given that it was precisely Said’s demonstration of the complex network of connections between Western texts and Western domination of other cultures that enlightened many and outraged some. Perhaps Majid is suggesting that “we” are no longer enlightened by such information because we know it all anyway now. It would be wonderful if that were the case. Another problem with what Said may or may not be saying has wider implications. Majid says: Edward Said may be right when warning us to be careful when speaking of broad categories. To me, this means avoiding at all costs the assumption that theory allows us to make sense of complex and varied histories and cultures, as if by merely conjuring a concept from the halls of academia we can do away with the irreducible singularities of each period, nation, city, or village.

“Broad categories” is, however, not something that Said has any problem with – empty, essentializing generalizations, yes, but anyone who can, as Said does, talk about “universalizing the struggle” has no difficulty with

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breadth. More broadly, it is not clear how one can dismiss theory’s ability to help us “make sense of complex and varied histories” and still claim to be a Marxist. Surely, Marxism is premised on its ability to understand and analyze wide-ranging historical, cultural or economic phenomena through its particular deployment of theory. In addition, the idea that, thirty years after Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a nation can be understood as an irreducible singularity seems very strange indeed. The most serious of Majid’s accusations relate to Said’s impact on Islam. Majid suggests: “What Edward Said may have done is give a language to people who feel oppressed by the superiority of Euro Americans.” These people are above all Muslims, and they apparently use their newly acquired language to complain endlessly about “their increasingly impotent status in relation to the West” and the many ways in which they are victimized. This is taken to be the fault of Said. For Said, however, the many (unfortunate or deliberate) misinterpretations and misunderstandings of his own position and that of Orientalism with regard to Islam were at the forefront of the seemingly endless process of errors to be repeatedly addressed. In the Preface to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Orientalism, brought out shortly before his death in 2003, Said wrote about how he had addressed misreadings of his work a decade earlier in the 1994 “Afterword” and how they still kept coming round. Orientalism, for example, was read as a wholesale denunciation of the West in support of Islam, while Said was taken to be a champion of the Muslims in their downtrodden state. These and other such claims are, of course, a long way from the truth. At the risk of stating the very obvious, Orientalism was not written in support of Islam, nor to portray Muslims as victims, nor to encourage victim mentalities on the part of anyone; Said is not pro-Islam as such; he is anti-misrepresentation and anti-oppression, whatever the culture, community or religion being subjected to them; he is not putting forward a simplistic model of the (wicked) West endlessly oppressing the (downtrodden) East. If people choose to misread and misuse Said, that is hardly his fault: to blame him for others’ choice of perpetual victimage would be akin to blaming Marx for Stalin’s purges, executions, gulags and famines (though no doubt some might feel inclined to do just that). In fact, Majid goes on to suggest that Muslims’ “clinging tenaciously to their conviction that their economic backwardness is the result of a diabolical strategy foisted on them by coldhearted, voracious and immoral Westerners” is part of a process stretching back at least

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two hundred years, and as such their sense of victimization is not logically attributable to Said’s influence.

Bad Islam, Bad Intellectuals It is not just Muslims who have been misled by Said, however. Intellectuals and academics, both in the West and in postcolonial countries such as Majid’s native Morocco, all of whom ought to know better by virtue of their practice and profession, have apparently allowed themselves to be ensnared to such an extent that his theory has become so entrenched that it has turned into the default sign of bien pensant academics and intellectuals. Said’s Orientalism acts as a false redemption mechanism for those of us who benefit from the West’s largesse and still feel obligated to stand up for the subalterns left behind.

In addition, Said’s theory of protest added to the Muslims’ sense of helplessness and, what’s worse, allowed liberal and progressive scholars from both sides to come to their rescue, armed by a sophisticated language that allowed for little nuance and almost no genuine progressive critical thinking.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that a “theory of protest” was not what Said thought he was producing: he did not regard Orientalism as a theory as such, and “protest” was not the aim. On the other hand, the problems posed by theory’s increasing rareification, political disconnection, lack of “worldliness” (in Saidian terms) and (over-)sophisticated language already concerned him. While deconstruction and poststructuralism in particular exemplified these problems for Said, the suggestion that “almost no genuine progressive critical thinking” emerged from the area of postcolonial studies inspired by Orientalism is very strange indeed and, given the lack of detail or supporting evidence in Majid’s claim, difficult to debate satisfactorily. One source of Majid’s unhappiness with intellectuals is their failure to criticize Islam appropriately: “No thought was given to the oppressive regime produced by a vast and varied canonical literature that allows no elbow room for any meaningful form of autonomy, let alone a full culture of human rights.” In addition, “few progressives … have dared point out that both the [Islamist] terrorists and their mainstream coreligionists draw from the same canonical well.” Majid’s general categorization of Islam as monolithic, unchanging, oppressive and productive of a culture inferior to that of the West oddly

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echoes the original definition of Islamophobia formulated by the Runnymede Trust in 1997,2 as well as, of course, the dismissals offered by everyone from innumerable Orientalists to contemporary racist politicians such as Geert Wilders. Given that context, as well as Said’s repeated arguments against essentialism and his efforts to put forward a view of Islam as varied, changing (sadly not necessarily for the better) and possessed of genuine positive potential, such as in its tradition of ijtihad, or critical debate, it would be unusual to expect anyone drawing on Orientalism to come out with a simple blanket dismissal. This is not to suggest that Islam, any more than any other religion, is above criticism. Quite the reverse: repressive practices need to be challenged, whoever is responsible, and Islam certainly has had, and continues to have, its share of them. Further, it is not my intention to debate Majid’s analysis of Islam, nor Islamist violence; however, given his view of the unremittingly negative impact of Islam on its followers, the “incalculable damage” it has inflicted, it is perhaps interesting (though not statistically hugely significant) to observe that in the years I spent as lecturer at the University of Marrakesh in Majid’s native Morocco, the tangibly restraining, sometimes brutally repressive, even murderous, force in society was not – for anyone I came across – Islam but the supposedly Westernizing, modernizing, socially improving regime of King Hassan II. The regime’s vicious crackdown on anything resembling dissident intellectuals – in one case, students at the University of Marrakesh who, in the early 1980s, were subject to mass arrests, show trials, outrageous prison sentences and, in some cases, death in custody – indicated that a desire to copy the “superior” West was no guarantee of any lessening of repression. Having addressed just a few of the issues Majid raises, it is time to turn to the central question of this chapter: the future, or not, of Orientalism.

A future for Orientalism? Obstacles It would be easy to come away from Orientalism with a pessimistic view of the relationship of texts and certain dominating, even globalizing, forms of power. Western manipulation of Orientalist knowledge has continued undiminished for several centuries and is not looking like it is ending any time soon, as Said somewhat gloomily admits in the final chapter: “It is equally apparent, I think, that the circumstances making Orientalism a

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continuingly persuasive type of thought will persist: a rather depressing matter on the whole.”3 In those “circumstances,” it may not be clear what the future for Orientalism might look like. Although Majid says that he wants to think about “the futures of Orientalism,” by the end of the paragraph where that comment appears, it is clear that as far as he is concerned Orientalism in fact has no future, as he concludes: Those of us who want to see Muslims be more active participants in the making of a better civilization, not chronic complainers about the ills (real and imagined) that continue to befall them, have no option but to shelve Said’s theory and move on to newer and bolder paradigms.

Unfortunately, Majid does not tell us what any of these “newer and bolder paradigms” are, but the need, once again, to “go beyond” Said – this time in a manner more thoroughgoingly dismissive than usual – is clear. One of Said’s failings that make the rejection of Orientalism necessary for Majid is in relation to the question of praxis. Majid says, “Said is mostly silent on what comes after protest (or critique, if you want), and it is here that he falls short and reveals the limits of his ambiguously privileged status.” For Majid, what is missing in Said is any mention of forms of praxis. Before we discuss that, however, it is necessary to address the issue of Said’s “ambiguously privileged status,” since the manner in which it is framed raises both critical and political issues. This is not the only occasion Majid makes reference to it, and it is clearly a problem for him, though it is not obvious where the privilege lies: although Said went to a good school in Cairo, his background was not conspicuously wealthy; he was a university professor in the United States, but so is Majid (indeed, one could argue that, as a head of department, Majid is even more privileged). Given that, for Marxists, the question of whether a member of the bourgeoisie could appropriately fight alongside the working class was settled over a century ago, not least because Marx says as much in the Communist Manifesto, Said’s ability to represent and intervene on behalf of “the downtrodden he presumably [sic] defends” need not detain us unduly. Praxis is more of a problem for Majid: Said is not actually doing enough or telling us how to do more; he offers us critique but nothing beyond that. We need the “newer and bolder paradigms” to tell us what to do in the future. Unfortunately, the position is not as simple as “critique is insufficient.” Although the Marxist tradition (generally) accords primacy to practice, both theory/critique and practice are essential and indissolubly linked. In addition, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx

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sees praxis as, among other things, a form of critique, in this case a critique of self-alienation (which might have relevance for the abject intellectuals Majid describes); he also suggests that theory should be regarded as one of the forms of praxis. Since Majid himself has previously written on “Critique as Dehegemonizing Practice,”4 it is hard, in the absence of further information, to see why critique, as the critical-theoretical practice of engaged intellectuals, is inadequate, nor what else we should be doing. If all it involves is the criticizing of Islam that Majid calls for, then the praxis – if that is what it amounts to – is already in place. Majid paints a picture of an enfeebled, would-be progressive intelligentsia, afraid to voice the truth in the face of “the glare of the demonic ghost of Said or any other thinker who wields a crippling influence on the young scholar’s thoughts.” That may, perhaps, be the sad state of affairs in the United States; it is not, I would suggest, the case elsewhere. Even in the USA, a book such as Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur‘an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence5 ought to offer an example of willingness to reevaluate and criticize. One point on which Majid and Said, despite fundamental disagreements, might overlap to some extent relates to the failure of intellectuals as an obstacle to progress. For Said, Orientalism represented individual and collective failure on the part of intellectuals writing about the Orient, and its contemporary persistence signals a continuation of that failure. For Majid, on the other hand, the failure of contemporary intellectuals – guilt-ridden, self-censoring and overly politically correct when it comes to Islam – is the fault of Said and Orientalism. Where both would agree, however, is that intellectuals need to improve. While Said may not give us a set of explicit instructions or “bolder paradigms” in Orientalism, it does not take much to work out what he thinks is required: understand better; represent better; interact and intervene better.

What Future? On one level, the question of whether Orientalism has a future or not is a non-question: it has a guaranteed future in the context of Said’s oeuvre, its foundational analysis of modes of domination complemented by – among so many others – Culture and Imperialism’s focus on indigenous resistance and Covering Islam’s analysis of media coverage of Islamic religion and culture, carrying forward the range of Saidian concerns and contestations. If, however, we take the more artificial step of thinking about whether Orientalism in isolation has a viable future, then very different answers are

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suggested. One would be that Orientalism has a future because its arguments and evidence have never been refuted at an intellectual level and continue to be ever more relevant at an existential one. In relation to the former, Majid seems impressed by the posthumous attacks on Said mounted by various Orientalists: Many [Orientalists] have contested Edward Said’s flippant use of the term precisely on these grounds. I already mentioned Robert Irwin. Daniel Varisco, in a different vein, has done an autopsy of Said’s work and discovered egregious oversights and simplifications that prove that Said had no interest in scholars who didn’t fit into his theory.

While Varisco is certainly the best of the bunch, the high-profile Orientalists, particularly Bernard Lewis, Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq, have failed to match Said analytically or polemically. Better academics, such as the sociologist Bryan Turner, have similarly repeatedly tried and failed to argue convincingly for the obsolescence of Orientalism. (I have written briefly about this elsewhere.)6 At the evidential level of lived human experience, which mattered so much to Said in the face of what he saw as theory’s tendency to depersonalize, the relevance of a Saidian analysis to the rise in anti-Muslim attacks following the UK’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, the Dutch prime ministerial candidate Geert Wilders’ categorization of Moroccans as “scum,” coupled with his desire to kick them all out of his country, or Donald Trump’s preelection promise to summarily halt all Muslim immigration into the United States, and his post-election attempts partially to implement that, requires no comment. A very different kind of answer would relate to Orientalism’s own prefiguring of a future, in this case one not shaped by gross cultural generalizations, demeaning religious stereotypes or dehumanizing racial representations, all of these fueled by, among others, rabid nationalism, mindless xenophobia and a desire to dominate. Here, “[p]erhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective.”7 The aim is a better kind of knowledge, but not knowledge for its own sake, since the ultimate aim is freedom. This is literally Said’s last word on Orientalism: the final sentence of his Preface to the 2003 edition, written shortly before his death, is “I would like to believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom” (p. xxiii).

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For some, the adumbration of such a liberated future would be nothing more than utopian, and, in an interview from the mid-1980s, Said specifically distanced himself from any suspicion of involvement in utopianism: The point is that I am not talking about inventing utopias or utopianism. Chomsky talks about this in reference to C. S. Pierce’s notion of abduction, a formulation of hypotheses based upon the known facts. You posit something, take in as much as you can of the present, and out of that, and in fidelity to that – imperfect though our apprehension of the known facts may be – you abduct from it a possible future hypothesis.8

For the great theoretician of utopia Ernst Bloch, however, what Said has outlined here would in fact count as commendable utopian thinking. Certainly, Orientalism’s astringent critique of discursive power and colonial domination carries none of the warm and fuzzy feel many associate with utopias. That, Bloch would argue, is because the typical image of utopia – and Said may perhaps be guilty of this too – is an erroneous one. Bloch recognizes that utopia has been more criticized than celebrated as a concept, and one reason for that is the unproductive forms in which it has been both imagined and understood. Recognizing that the concept itself requires more rigorous and sustained interrogation, Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, differentiates between what he calls abstract and concrete utopia. The former, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the problem: “Pure wishful thinking has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia were an abstract one. And undoubtedly the utopian function is only immaturely present in abstract utopianizing.”9 Abstract utopia presents a range of negative characteristics: it is compensatory, aiming to offer solace for the dissatisfactions of life; it is contemplative, encouraging a passive orientation; it is orientated toward the past and to that extent relatively divorced from the present or the future; it is, as Bloch says, “immature,” not least because its ideas do not escape the realm of fantasy. These, then, are the abstract utopian aspirations, ones that have dominated both the particular models of utopia and the way that people in general have thought about it. The task then is to rescue utopian thought from the ideological and the fantastic, to reveal what is rational, possible and progressive, in the shape of “concrete utopia.” Bloch is aiming not only to rehabilitate the concept of Utopia generally but also, and perhaps more importantly for him, to demonstrate its value for the Marxist tradition, so much so that he comes to argue that concrete utopia is in fact Marxism. One of the key qualities of concrete utopia is that it is anticipatory: Bloch talks about

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“anticipatory consciousness,” and his notion of Vorschein or “anticipatory illumination” is central to the way in which utopian thought is oriented toward, and perceives, the future. “Expectation, hope, intention towards possibility that has still not become: this is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole” (p. 7). Recognizing what is practically possible, and working toward its emergence or its creation, are linked elements in the production of concrete utopia. To that extent, the concrete, unlike the contemplative abstract version, is an active category, grounded in productive and progressive human agency. The latter is essential, because the desired, anticipated future will not simply happen of its own accord or miraculously be discovered to already exist – such ideas are, for Bloch, part of the reason why utopia can be so easily dismissed. In addition, the desired future is not simply “there,” in terms of a fully worked-out, comprehensively detailed blueprint, which only requires people to follow the plan to make it happen; on the contrary, it is partly glimpsed, partly understood and very much carefully constructed through the ongoing practice of those who desire it. The fact that the future is not given or guaranteed necessitates both vigilance and intervention. Further, not all wished-for futures are good: both Nazism and Zionism embody projects that Bloch is prepared to accept as utopian, though he rejects both as in any way desirable. In the context of all of this, the overcoming of Orientalism through a future-oriented concrete utopian project seems altogether appropriate.

The Engine of Survival For Leonard Cohen, in the context of the rise and fall of nations and empires that is also that of Orientalism, the “engine of survival” is love, and, while that may seem a long way from anything Said is discussing, I would like to suggest that he and Leonard Cohen are closer than they might appear. Readers familiar with the song will of course know that its narrator persona repeatedly reminds us that “I have seen the future – it is murder.” Despite that gloomy prognosis, I would argue that a determinedly optimistic Blochian project remains the way forward. One of the positive things that Orientalism unquestionably produces is understanding – without which we cannot hope to progress or even to love appropriately. The understanding here is not only how we got to the position we are in – how Orientalism and Orientalist attitudes and processes have helped to construct the world we inhabit – but also the

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terrain on which we need to continue to struggle. With understanding comes both the ability to critique and intervene more effectively and also the possibility of at least respecting (if not automatically loving) the Other. In that context, Majid’s call for a stance of “civilized contempt” toward Islam appears utterly misguided, if not disturbingly reminiscent of classic Orientalism: We are civilized; you are not. We feel justified contempt for your unacceptable ideas, appalling behavior and archaic culture … It was mentioned earlier that Said considers the failure of Orientalism to be an intellectual one, but in addition, and more importantly, the failure is human: “Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience,”10 and the necessary response to that is both human and humanist. In the heady atmosphere of theoretical debates in the 1980s and later, Said’s quiet insistence that his book was above all a humanist one tended to go unnoticed by readers, or, if it was noticed, it was only as something of an intellectual embarrassment, an analytical archaism to be passed over as swiftly as possible. Said, however, remained a determined, unrepentant humanist for the rest of his life, and it is no coincidence that the last book he completed before his death was Humanism and Democratic Criticism. At the simplest level, Humanism and Democratic Criticism embodies the future of Orientalism, carrying its humanist impulse and analysis forward a quarter of a century. At a more complex level, its analysis of the nature of humanism in the twenty-first century, the tasks and responsibilities facing humanists, gives some sense of the shape of a much-needed engine of survival. With the idea of Humanism and Democratic Criticism as an important part of the future of Orientalism, I would like to say a little about how it responds to issues raised so far in this essay, as well as how it extends the discussion. One of the first things to note is that, for Said, twenty-firstcentury humanism is not what it was: subject to a kind of Brechtian umfunktionierung, it emerges as pre-eminently a form of critique. “Principally it means situating critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather than in denial of, the constituent historical realities of the post-Cold War world, its early colonial formation, and the frighteningly global reach of the last remaining superpower of today.”11 Humanist critique for Said is an interventionist mode, a sphere of agency for the intellectual: “What concerns me is humanism as a usable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who also want to

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connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens” (p. 6). As critique and praxis, humanism is above all an urgently needed form of resistance: “For if, as I believe, there is now taking place in our society an assault on thought itself, to say nothing of democracy, equality, and the environment, by the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free market), as well as imperialist ambition, the humanist must offer alternatives now silenced or unavailable through the channels of communication controlled by a tiny number of news organizations” (p. 71). The resistance to these oppressive forces is carried out in the name of the human and in order to bring about a more humane state of being. In opposition to the dehumanizing exclusions of Orientalism, imperialism, racism, or xenophobic nationalism, humanism offers a vision and a practice that is all-embracing, inclusive – even loving? In case this is sounding a little utopian, Said repeats his Pierce-andabduction position in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and we can repeat the conviction that he is in fact proposing a project that Bloch would recognize precisely as utopian and of the best sort: practically grounded, humanly oriented, an engine of survival in our troubled times. Other postcolonial humanists have produced more unquestionably utopian plans: Fanon in the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth famously calls for nothing less than the creation of a new humanity (or, as he repeatedly says, “a new man”).12 Said remains more cautious. One reason for the caution is Palestine. One of Majid’s most ungenerous moments is to suggest, somewhat snidely, that “[Said] has managed, in a brilliant literary coup, to reify his own struggles with the issues of Palestine into a global theory that has ensnared generations of scholars and militants, including those in the ArabMuslim world, the sphere of his native culture.” While that reification assessment has nothing whatsoever to do with the book that the comments notionally address, it is obviously true that the question of Palestine troubled Said for the remainder of his post-Orientalism life. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Palestine presents itself as an example of how “some dialectical oppositions are not reconcilable, not transcendable, not really capable of being folded into a sort of higher, undoubtedly nobler synthesis” (p. 143). That the obstacle appears currently immovable is not, however, any reason in Said’s eyes to stop working toward the day when his increasingly Orientalized, dehumanized and routinely oppressed people might achieve peace and freedom. That involves handing on the task and

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the struggle to others, including his friend Mahmoud Darwish. In his moving elegy for Said, Darwish includes this exchange: He also said: If I die before you, my will is the impossible. I asked: Is the impossible far off? He said: A generation away.13

Ensuring the continuing struggle for the achievement of the “impossible” for the good of all of us seems an altogether appropriate legacy for the author of Orientalism.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 23. Runnymead Trust, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, 1997. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 326. See Anouar Majid, “Reply to Joseph and Mayer: Critique as Dehegemonizing Practice,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23:2 (Winter 1998): pp. 377-389. Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006). For example Patrick Williams, “Postcolonialism and Orientalism,” in Geoffrey Nash et al., eds., Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society and Film (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 48–61. Said, Orientalism, p. 24. Edward W. Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 51–52. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1: p. 145. Said, Orientalism, p. 328. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 47. Frantz, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 255. Mahmoud Darwish, “Edward Said; A Contrapuntal Reading,” Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 710 (December 30–October 6, 2004), http://weekly.ahram.org .eg/Archive/2004/710/cu4.htm (accessed October 10, 2017).

Further Reading

Introduction Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols of the East: European Representations of Islam 1100– 1450. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. App, Urs. The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Casanova, Pascale. The Republic of World Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Elmarsafy, Ziad, Anna Bernard and David Attwell. Debating Orientalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Jeffrey Cass, eds. Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. New York: Routledge, 1996. Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Macfie, Alexander Lyon. Orientalism: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Macfie, Alexander Lyon. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 2002. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 353

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1

Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century

Ballaster, Ros. Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Boone, Joseph Allen. The Homoerotics of Orientalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010. Grosrichard, Alain. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1998. Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Europe, 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965–1977. MacLean, Gerald. The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Markley, Robert. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Mitter, Partha. Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sapra, Rahul, The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Seth, Vanita. Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Smith, Woodruff D. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender & British Slavery, 1713–1833. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Kaul, Suvir. Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Art and Letters 1760–1820. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Yang, Chi-ming. Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2011. Zuroski Jenkins, Eugenia. A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

2 The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Fiction/Translation/Transnation.” In A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula R. Backsheider and Catherine Ingrassia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 48–74. Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Caracciolo, Peter, ed. The Arabian Nights in English Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Dew, Nicholas. Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Makdisi, Saree, and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in EighteenthCentury English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Rousseau, G. S., and Roy Porter, eds. Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

3

Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Butler, Marilyn. “Orientalism.” In The Penguin History of Literature: The Romantic Period, ed. David Pirie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, pp. 395–447. Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Krishnan, Sanjay. Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Majeed, Javed. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Makdisi, Saree. Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792; reprt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.

4 The Victorians: Empire and the East Ballantyne, Tony. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

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Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes to Race. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Mehta, Uday. Liberalism and Empire: Study in Nineteenth Century Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987. Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Orientalism and Victorian Fiction

Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Bivona, Daniel. Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Bivona, Daniel. British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Brantlinger, Patrick. Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Sramek, Joseph. Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765 to 1858. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Sreenivas, Mytheli. Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

6 Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites Arvidsson, Stefan. Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

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Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Bryant, Edwin, and Laurie Patton, eds. Indo-Aryan Controversy Evidence and Inference In Indian History. London: Routledge, 2005. Gobineau, Comte de. Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings, ed. Geoffrey Nash, trans. Daniel O’Donoghue. London: Routledge, 2009. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004. Hutton, Christopher. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Race, Mother-tongue Fascism and the Science of Language. London: Routledge, 1999. McGetchin, Douglas. Indolology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. Poliakov, Léon. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. E. Howard. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Rose, Paul Lawrence. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Thapar, Romila, et al. India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan. Essays. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007. Trautmann, Thomas, ed. The Aryan Debate. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Trautmann, Thomas. Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

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Orientalism and the Bible

Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Kalman, Julie. Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Kalmar, Ivan. Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power. London: Routledge, 2012. Kalmar, Ivan, and David Penslar, eds. Orientalism and the Jews. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005. Librett, Jeffrey S. Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Peleg, Yaron. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Shaffer, E. S. “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. Cambridge University Press, 1980. Sugirtharajah, R. S. Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method, Practice. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Further Reading

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Wilcox, Andrew. Orientalism and Imperialism: From Nineteenth-Century Missionary Imaginings to the Contemporary Middle East. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

8 Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File. London: Fourth Estate, 1989. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K., and W. J. T. Mitchell, eds. Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Byrne, Eleanor. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta, 2000. Suleri, Sarah. The Rhetoric of English India. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1993. Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990. Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Verso, 1999.

9

The Harem: Gendering Orientalism

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Oakland: University of California Press, 2000 [1986]. Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Almila, Anna-Mari, and David Inglis, eds. The Routledge International Handbook to Veils and Veiling Practices. London: Routledge, 2018. Khabeer, Su‘ad Abdul. Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Le Renard, Amelie. A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report 2015. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Renne, Elisha P., ed. Veiling in Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

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Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing

Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Further Reading

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Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Melman, Billie. Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Nash, Geoffrey. From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830–1926. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Spurr, David. Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

11

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism

Aldridge, Alfred Owen. The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Chisolm, Lawrence W. Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. Christy, Arthur. The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. Jackson, Carl T. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lan, Feng. Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. McClellan, Robert. The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes toward China, 1890–1905. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Prebish, Charles S., and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds. Faces of Buddhism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Riepe, Dale. The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1970. Rayapati, J. P. Rao, Early American Interest in Vedanta. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1973. Snodgrass, Judith. Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbia Exposition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Weir, David. American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

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Further Reading

12 Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1994. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1998. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Childs, Peter, and Patrick Williams. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997. Gilbert, Helen, ed. Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. London: Routledge, 2001. Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Poddar, Prem, and David Johnson, eds. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1991. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage, 1984. Said, Edward W. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): pp. 205–225. Said, Edward W. “Third-World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture,” Raritan 9:3 (1990): pp. 27–50. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

13 Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? Brennan, Timothy. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Firchow, Peter Edgerly. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Lorcin, Patricia. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Race and Identity in Colonial Algeria. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. Albert Camus of Europe and Africa. New York: Viking, 1970. Rubin, Andrew. Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Further Reading

361

Vulor, Ena C. Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria, an Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohhammed Dib. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000.

14 From Orientalism to Islamophobia Allen, Chris. Islamophobia. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Kundnani, Arun. The Muslism are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror. New York: Verso, 2014. Morgan, George, and Scott Poynting, eds. Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Runnymede Trust. Islamophobia, A Challenge for Us All: Report of the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. Runnymede Trust, April 1997. Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Tuastad, Dag. “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s).” Third World Quarterly 24:4 (2003): pp. 591–599. Tyrer, David. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy. London: Pluto Press, 2013.

15

Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Recent Writing

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Dabashi, Hamid. Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2015. Esposito, John L., and Kalin, Ibrahim. Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gottschalk, Peter, and Gabriel Greenberg. Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Lean, Nathan. The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. London: Pluto Press, 2012. Sayyid, Salman, and AbdoolKarim Vakil, eds. Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst and Company, 2010.

Further Reading

362

Sheehi, Stephen. Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011. Shyrock, Andrew. Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

16 Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle Eastern American Writing Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds. Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Garland, 2000. Berman, Jacob. American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary. New York: NYU Press, 2012. Gana, Nouri, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Hassan, Waïl. Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jamal, Amaney, and Nadine Naber, eds. Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon, 2004.

17

New Orientalism and the American Media: New York Cleopatra and Saudi “Giggly Black Ghosts”

Al-Ghadeer, Moneera. “Cannibalizing Iraq: Topos of Orientalism.” In Debating Orientalism, eds. David Attwell, Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 117–133. Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich and W. Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Danforth, Loring M. Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia. Berkeley: University of of California Press, 2016. Djebar, Assia. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Little, Arthur L. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-imperial Re-visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Further Reading

363

18 On Orientalism’s Future(s) Berkey, Jonathan P. The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Donner, Fred M. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. New York: Doubleday, 2012. Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006. Majid, Anouar. Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the PostAndalusian Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Ohlig, Karl-Heinz, and Gerd-R. Puin, eds. The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010. Shoemaker, Stephen J. The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

19

“The Engine of Survival”: A Future for Orientalism

Achcar, Gilbert. Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. London: Saqi, 2013. Burke, Edmund, and David Prochaska, eds. Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Iskander, Adel, and Hakem Rustom, eds. Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Said, Edward W. After the Last Sky. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage, 1992. Said, Edward W. Covering Islam. New York: Vintage, 1997. Said, Edward W. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003. Turner, Bryan. Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. London: Routledge, 1994. Williams, Patrick, ed. Edward Said, 4 vols. London: Sage, 2001. Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.

Index

Abdel-Malek, Anouar, Orientalism in Crisis, 25 Achcar, Gilbert, 25 Achebe, Chinua, 18–19, 226–227, 235, 236–239, 242, 247 Addison, Joseph, 45, 51, 53 The Vision of Mirzah, 52 Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo, The (Eliza Haywood), 54 Aeschylus, 2, 186 The Persians, 4, 269 Afghanistan, 23, 169, 271, 276–278, 279–281, 289, 292, 294 2001 invasion of, 23, 274, 288 Afghans, 111 Africa, 10, 80, 107, 239 African studies, 327–328 Camus, 243 Conrad, 19, 226–227, 243 Ham, 118 nationalism, 241 North, 3, 103, 173, 242, 289 Algeria, 242 Religions, 145 sub-Saharan, 102 African writers and postcolonialism, 228, 231 Achebe, 18, 226–227 Ngugi, 18, 222–223, 224, 228–231 Ahmad, Aijaz, 26 In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 18, 19, 26, 235, 338 Ahmad, Eqbal, 338 Ahmed, Leila, 178, 274 Women and Gender in Islam, 284 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 5 Idols of the East, 5 al-‘Azm, Sadik Jalal, 25 Orientalism in reverse, 25 Alatas, S. H. The Myth of the Lazy Native, 221–222 Alexander, the Great, 35 Alexander, William, 62

The History of Women, 59 Algeria, 19, 242 French conquest of, 195 independence, 19, 242, 248 Meursault (Daoud on Camus), 236, 247–248 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 275, 278, 294, 295 Alloula, Malek, 183, 318 Al-Qaeeda (Al-Qaida), 263, 281 America. See the United States American journalism, 23 media, 23–25 American Oriental Society, 17, 205, 208 American Orientalism, 1, 16–18, 23–25, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208–209, 211, 216, 289, 308, 316 American War of Independence, 8 Ancient Greece, 31 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 6, 11, 119–120, 134 anthropology, 3, 9–10, 85, 92, 94, 124–125 anti-colonial resistance. See Resistance anti-Semitism, 22, 119, 121, 126, 261 Antonius, George The Arab Awakening, 221–222 App, Urs, 11, 47 Arab American, 295 identity, 290, 292, 293, 296–297, 299–301 literature, 295–297, 299 writers/writing, 24, 292, 295–296, 297–299, 301 Arab nationalism, 26, 325 Arab Spring, the, 24 2011, 282, 308, 309, 315 Arabia, Arabs, 328 Arabia, 80, 191, 195 Arabs, 9, 11, 17, 22, 23, 41, 68, 189, 243–244, 286–289 Saudi Arabia, 307–308, 311–312 Arabian Nights, (Alf layla wa layla), 7–8, 48 Arabic, 69, 77, 122, 123, 139–140, 141–142, 158–159, 196, 204, 208, 289, 296, 314, 324 Aramaic, 35 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 6–8, 42, 48, 54, 57

364

Index Aryan, Aryans, Aryanism, 10, 12, see also Indo-Aryan, European, Germanic Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin The Empire Writes Back, 223 Asiatic Barred Zone Act (Immigration Act, 1917), 203 Aubin, Penelope The Noble Slaves: Or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies, who were shipwreck’d, 53 Austen, Jane Mansfield Park, 13, 18, 225, 247 Baedeker’s guides, 198–199 Bage, Robert The Fair Syrian, 59–60 Bahramitash, Roksana, 283 Bakhtin, Mikail, 152 Ballaster, Ros, 6, 8, 51, 62 Banerjee, Sukanya, 9–10, 11, 82 Baptists, 206–207 Barbara Harlow, 219 Barnum, P.T., 17, 203, 205 Bar-Yousef, Eitan, 11 Batchelor, Robert, 39, 40 Bayley, C.A., 97 Beattie, James, 59 Beckford, William Vathek, 60–61 Behdad, Ali, 15–16, 185, 257–258 Beirut civil war of 1975–76, 24, 307 Benedict Anderson, 79, 342 Bhabha, Homi, 18, 26, 151 The Location of Culture, 13–14, 151, 152, 153, 224 Bhagavad-Gita, 69, 209–210, 213–214 Bible, 35, 133–145, 157, 207, See also Orientalism Bin Laden, Osama, 280, 281, 306 Blavatsky, Madame, 17, 127 Bloch, Ernst, 348–349, 351 Bloom, Harold, 144, 163 Boehmer, Elleke, 18, 223 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 5 Book of Job, 142 Bopp, Franz, 123, 136, 208 Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 210 Brantlinger, Patrick, 238 Britain, (and British Orientalism), 1–3, see also Orientalism and Empire colonialism, 123, 227, 229 empire in the East, 8, 9, 40, 58, 82, 84, 85–87, 89–90, 94, 101, 103, 107, 137 liberalism, 85, 90 rule in India, 3, 6, 44, 161, 334 trade with the Orient, 36–39

365

British artists in India, 7, 43 Broca, Paul, 124 Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 86 Brown, Lancelot “Capability,” 46 Buddhism, 3, 17, 145, 205, 207, 209, 215, see also Zen-Buddhism Budgell, Eustace, 52 Burke, Edmund, 46, 74–76, 78 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75 Burkhardt, Jean Louis, 194 burqa, 169, 174, 278, See also veil Burton, Richard, 16, 102, 186, 195–196 Bush, George W. administration, 21 Butler, Judith, 152, 313 Byrne, Eleanor, 14, 151 Byron, Lord Turkish tales, 71 Calcutta, 58, 83, 206, 207 Cambridge, Richard Owen, 57 Camus, Albert, 242–244 L’Étranger (The Outsider/The Stranger), 19, 235–236, 242, 243 Canada, 86 Canton, 83 Capability Brown, Lancelot, 46 Caribbean, the, 86 Carlyle, Thomas, 107 Carter, Jimmy, 204 Casanova, Pascale, 20 The World Republic of Letters, 20 Cass, Jeffrey, 12 Celtic languages, 120, 122 Césaire, Aimé, 13, 221 Chaldean, 141, 209 Chambers, Sir William, 45–46 Chang Yu Sing, 203, 205 Chang, Elizabeth, 45 Chardin, Jean, 187 Charlie Hebdo, 328–329, 333 Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de, 24, 134, 136, 143, 307 Childs, Peter, 13 China (and Chinese), 7, 17, 35–40, 44–46 Exclusion Act of 1882, 17, 203 history, 20, 39–40 Ming and Qing emperors, 36, 46 Chinese landscaping styles, 7, 45 Chinese Tales, 50 chinoiserie, 39, 44, 57 Chippendale, Thomas The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, 45

366

Index

Christians, Christianity, 6, 11–12, 53, 79, 105–106, 133, 135–137, 140, 141, 143–145, 159, 202, 208, 214, 324, 328, 332, 335 Christendom, 67 Christian missionaries, 78–79, 87, 136, 141, 158, 172, 188, 202, 206–207, 208 Christianity, 36, 38 class, 7, 15, 26, 38–39, 88–89, 91, 105, 166, 177, 237, 249, 313 empire and, 168, 171 lower (working), 107, 230, 243, 261, 345 middle (bourgeois), 18, 68, 87, 172, 198, 200, 219, 315 race, 105, 114, 127, 152, 154, 164, 168, 225, 292 upper (aristocracy), 73, 105, 162, 323 Cleopatra, 306, 310 Cohn, Bernard, 70 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 187, 190 Cold War cultural critique, 19, 235, 245–246, 249 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61, 135, 137, 140 Collège de France, 16, 187 Colley, Linda, 56, 79 Collins, Wilkie, 102–103 Moonstone, 10, 87 colonial discourse, 4, 13, 14, 40, 154–155, 156, 241 colonial subject, 10, 13, 87, 90, 155, 160, 231 colonialism, 6, 7, 11, 18, 19, 26, 40, 44, 117, 137, 224, 228, 230, 235, 238, 239, 325, 341, See also Britain and France, Europe and Western Compagnie du Levant, 187 Conant, Martha Pike, 51 Confucian, 17, 205, 209 Conrad, Joseph, 18, 226–227, 230, 235, 237–242, 245–247, 249 Heart of Darkness, 13, 18–19, 224–225, 226–227, 235–236, 237–238, 239–242, 246–247, 249 Lord Jim, 10, 103–104, 112, 114 Constantinople, 119, 166, 174, 197–198, 199 Cooke, Miriam, 274 Coryat, Thomas, 187 Coventry, Francis, 54 Crawfurd, John, 9, 85–86, 92, 93–97 President of the Ethnological Society, 86, 92 Cromer, Lord, 8, 66–68, 80, 102, 255 Modern Egypt, 66, 68 cultural translation, 23, 286, 304, 305 D’Israeli, Isaac, 61 Dabashi, Hamid, 27–28, 258, 270, 273, 282 Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror, 27 Dabschelim, Indian king, 51 Dante, 2, 4, 186, 213 Inferno, 5

Daoud, Kamel, 329 The Meursault Investigation, 236, 247 Darby, Philip, 224, 225, 227–228 Darwinism, Darwinian theory, 11, 124 post-, 93, 126 pseudo-, 214 social, 211 Darwish, Mahmoud, 221, 228, 352 Das, Nandini, 42 Davis, Lennard, 239 de la Croix, François Pétis. See also Persian Tales The Thousand and One Days Persian Tales, 52 De Quincey, Thomas, 82–84, 90 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 9, 67, 82, 86, 87 Defoe, Daniel, 248 Roxana, 8, 53 Derrida, Jacques, 152, 155–156, 163 Dickens, Charles, 91, 102–103, 107 Hard Times, 86 digital activism, 25, 313–314 Disraeli, Benjamin, 10, 101, 103–104, 105–107, 142–143 Tancred, 10, 87, 103, 104, 105–107, 142 Doughty, Charles, 196 Travels in Arabia Deserta, 195 Dutch, the, 1, 37, 39, 47, 347 East India Company, 37, 42–43, 44, 57, 69, 70, 83, 91, 103, 108, 159, 207 East, the, 7, 8, 9, 17, 42, 83–84, 85, 86–87, 89–90, 97 as radically distinct from the West, 2, 4, 8, 13, 20, 66–67, 71, 80, 169, 273, 274, 296, 302, 316 Edib, Halidé, 173, 174 Egypt, 35, 172, 193, 197, 198–199 French invasion of, 4, 5 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 147 Eldem, Edhem, 30, 177 Eliot, George, 244 Daniel Deronda, 10, 103, 104, 105–108 Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 17, 205, 213–214, 215, 245 Ellison, Grace, 173, 174, 177 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17, 205, 207–209, 215 Engels, Friedrich, 27 English literature, 3, 41, 88, 159, 303 Englishness, 46, 60, 88–89 Englishwomen in the novel, 87 Enlightenment, 9, 42, 118, 169, 332 Enlightenment Orientalism, 6, 54 secular/post, 136, 161

Index the, 136, 236, 332–333 writers, 74 Ethnological Society, 9, 86, 92–93, 94, 95–96, 124 eunuchs, 15, 167, 173 Euripedes, 4 The Bacchae, 4 Europe Euro-centrism, 31, 333 European colonialism, 20, 125, 274 evolutionary theory, 124, 128 Eyre, Governor, 89, 93, 99, 107, See also Jamaica Fabian, Johannes Time and the Other, 190 Fadda, Carol W. N., 23 Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 220–221 Fanon, Frantz, 220–222, 228–230, 242, 262 Black Skin, White Masks, 156, 261 Wretched of the Earth, 19, 219, 222, 229, 230, 351 Far East, 17, 39, 57, 102, 135, 202, 204–205, 206, 208, 209–210, 214, 215–216 feminism, feminist studies, 3, 4, 14, 24, 110, 153, 168, 169–171, 173, 174, 224, 274–275, 293–294, 312, 315, 346 Orientalist feminism, 166, 172, 270 Fenollosa, Ernest, 211–213 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 119 Fielding, Henry, 54, 160, 162 Joseph Andrews, 54 Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 37, 39 Firchow, Peter, 238 Flaubert, Gustave, 185, 196, 197, 255 Forster, E. M., 101, 221, 235 A Passage to India, 14, 160–161, 222 Foucault, Michel, 2, 4, 5, 13, 16, 27, 120, 123, 152, 186, 194, 235–236, 257, 272, 334, 337 Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 201 France (and French Orientalism), 1–3, 6, 16, 42, 50–51, 187–188, 190, 194–195, 198 ancien régime, 75 colonialism, 19, 236, 243, 244, 286, 334 Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 206 From the Morals of Confucius, 204–205 French literature, 16, 19, 24, 41, 51, 55, 74, 102, 134, 136, 143, 174, 185, 196–198, 200, 235–236, 242–244, 255, 307 French Revolution, 118–119, 332 Frères, Abdullah, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 155, 156, 160 Galland, Antoine, 52, 54 Fables of Pilpay, 7, 50–51 Les Mille et une nuits, 41–42, 48–50, See Arabian Nights

367

Gallien, Claire, 5, 6 Ganguli, Debjani, 20 Gaskell, Elizabeth Mary Barton, 86 Gay, John To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China, 38 gaze, the, 197, 211, 281 female heterosexual, 175 islamophobic, 262 lesbian, 175 male heterosexual, 41, 175 male/female heterosexual, 15 orientalist rescuer, 275 panoptic imperial, 183 western imperial, 176 gender, 13–15, 88–89, 109 harem, 166–168, 169–170, 172, 173, 175–176, 177–178 studies, 25 George IV, King, and Prince of Wales, 44 Germany (and German), 124 nationalism, 11, 117, 126 Nazis, 126, 127, 143 Orientalism, 1, 134, 145 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 175 Ghadeer, Moneera, 24–25, 306 Gibbon, Edward, 40 Gibran, Kahlil, 296 globalization, 21, 351 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, comte de, 117, 127, 143 Essai sur l’inégalite des races humaines, 105, 122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 118, 124, 129, 137, 140, 213 Goldsmith, Oliver, 55 The Citizen of the World, 51, 57 Gramsci, Antonio, 13, 186, 235, 236, 337–338 Grant, Charles, 78–79 Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, 159 Greco-Persian wars, 4 Greek (language), 70, 82–83, 119–120, 124, 140–141, 144, 206 Greenberg, Clement, 19, 235, 245, 249 Grimm, Jacob, 123 Grosrichard, Alain, 40–41 Guha, Ranajit, 221–222 Gulf War, 1991, 23, 274, 288, 297 Halfpenny, William and John Chinese and Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented, 45 Hall, Radclyffe, 170 Hall, Stuart, 153 Halliday, Fred, 259 Ham, 10, 118

368

Index

Hamdi, Osman, 177 Hamitic, 118 Hammad, Suheir, 24, 300–301 Hanim, Nazli, 177 Hanoum, Melek, and Zeyneb Hanoum, 173 harem, 14, 41 harem literature, 14–15, 171, 173–174, 175, 177, 179 Harlow, Barbara, 227–228 Harris, John Navigantium atque Itinerantium Biblioteca, 39 Hassan, Waïl, 296–297 Hastings, Warren, Governor-General of Bengal, 44, 69, 71, 78 Hawkesworth, John, 55–56 Haywood, Eliza The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo, 54 Hebrew, 35, 105, 122, 124, 135, 140–142, 144, 147, 208 Heetopades (Hitopadesa) of Veeshnoo Sarma, 207 Heffernan, Teresa, 169 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 25, 142, 143–145, 211–212, 334 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 143, 211 Heidegger, Martin, 255 Henley, Samuel, 60–61 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 121, 134, 137, 141 Herodotus, 4, 35 Heron, Robert Arabian Tales, 8, 59 Heschel, Suzannah, 143 hijab, 178, 299, See also veil Hindus, Hinduism, 3, 7, 17, 42–43, 96, 97, 105, 120, 123, 125, 145, 202, 205, 207–208, 210, 213–214, 223, 227 trimurti of Brahma, Krishna, and Vishnu, 42–43 Hobsbawm, Eric, 31 Hoeveler, Diana Long, 12 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 137, 140 Holy Land, the, 11, 139, 143, 202 Hugo, Victor, 2, 186 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 124, 143 Hunt, Leigh, 62 London Journal, 65 Huntington, Samuel, 22, 257, 272 Hutton, Christopher, 10–11, 117 immigrant fiction, 231, 288, 293, 296–297 Imperialism, 6, 13, 168, 190 British, 323 Culture, 18–19, 219, 220–221, 222–224, 225–226, 227–228, 231 European, 102 free trade, 103

liberal, 98 Victorian, 87, 107 Imperialist adventure fiction, 10, 104, 225 India, Indians, 7, 9, 14, 21, 35–37, 39, 40, 41, 42–44, 68, 79, 88–89, 90–91, 94, 96, 103, 109–110, 122, 123, 125, 143, 334 Bengal province, 42, 57, 69, 83, 221 Bihar province, 83 Indian Uprising/Mutiny, 1857, 90, 108 Seringapatam, battle of, 87 Indo-Aryan, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, 9, 11, 85, 98, 117–118, 143, 144 language family, 104, 120, 122, 126 race, 106 Indology, Indologists, 3, 11, 122, 135 Iran, Iranian, 17 hostage crisis, 1979–1981, 256, 271, 288, 293 immigration to United States, 122, 293 revolution, 1978–1979, 21, 256, 271, 288, 291, 293 Iraq, 292, 294, 295 US-led invasion, 2003, 21, 259, 288 Irwin, Robert, 327, 347 Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, 324 ISIS “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” 263 Islam, Islamic world, 5, 17, 26–27, 335, 346, see also Orientalism concepts, 260 culture, 27 gender, 317 gender conventions, 172 law, 20 Orientalist clichés, 277 revival, 178 society, 258 studies, 325, 329 tradition, 327–328, 329 Islamism, Islamists, 26, 263, 315, 328, 334, 343, 344 Islamophobia, 4, 21–23, 255, 259, 261, 263, 269 Runnymede Trust Report, 1997, 259, 344 Jamaica, 93 slave revolt, 1865, 89, 93, 107 uprising at Morant Bay, 1849, 89 Jameson, Fredric, 114, 227, 228 Japan, Japanese, 17, 35–36, 37, 56–57, 120, 139, 205, 210–211, 212–213, 214 Edo and Tokugawa shogunate, 36, 46 Japhet, Japhetic, 10–11, 117–118, 121, 122 Jasanoff, Maya, 44 Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 204–206, 212 Jerichau-Baumann, Elisabeth, 171, 177

Index Jesus, 143, 144, 206 search for “Aryan Jesus,” 143 Jews, 11, 36, 106, 107, 108, 118–119, 121, 126, 128, 138–139, 142, 144 jihad, jihadism, 260, 263, 264, 271, 333–334 John of Segovia, 4 Johnson, Samuel, 8, 54–56 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 55–56 Johnstone, Charles The Pilgrim, 58 The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis, 58 Jokic, Olivera, 5, 6 Jones, Sir William, 6, 7, 9, 11, 61, 70–71, 78, 85, 94, 96, 97, 105, 119–121, 136, 208 A Hymn to Camdeo, 42–43 Judaism, 105, 106, 140, 142, 143–145, 261, 335 Kahf, Mohja, 24, 273, 302 54 Emails from Scheherazad, 299 The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, 300 Kalmar, Ivan, 11–12, 133 Kaplan, Robert, 257 Kapoor, Anish, 153 Karim, Persis, 293 Kaul, Suvir, 6, 7, 8, 35 Kennedy, Valerie, 18–19, 219 Keshavarz, Fatemeh, 275 Kiernan, V. G., 114 Kipling, Rudyard, 18, 111, 249, 281 Kim, 13, 101, 103, 110, 221, 225 Without Benefit of Clergy, 10, 103, 110 Knox, Robert, 124 Kundnani, Arun, 260, 262 La Convivencia, 271 Lacan, Jacques, 152, 160 Lampert-Weissig, Lisa, 4 Landry, Donna, 60 Lane, Edward William, 11, 102, 139, 172 Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 197 Lane-Poole, Sophia, 139, 172 Lebanon, 178, 295 civil war, 1975–1990, 24, 288, 295, 300, 307 Levant, the, 59, 103, 105, 108, 188, 289, 295 Lewis, Bernard, 22, 257, 272, 347 Lewis, Reina, 14–15, 166 Linnaeus, Carl Systema naturae, 190 Locke, John, 52 Lockman, Zachary, 20 London, 53–54, 67 Blitz, 214 commerce, 8, 39

369

London Corresponding Society, 68 Long, Andrew C., 19, 235 Lorcin, Patricia M. E., 244 Loti, Pierre, 197 Les Désenchantées, 174 Lott, Emmeline, 172 Lowe, Lisa, 14 Lowth, Robert, 137, 141–142 Lukacs, Georg, 236, 249 Lustful Turk, The, 102 Lyttelton, George Letters from a Persian in England, 54 Macaulay, Thomas, 68, 76–79 Minute on Indian Education, 77, 159 Maclean, Gerald, 48 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 289 Mahmood, Saba, 181, 184 Majeed, Javed, 69 Majid, Anouar, 26–28, 323, 338–347, 350, 351 Makdisi, Saree, 8–9, 41 Malay, 95 De Quincey, 9, 67, 82–83 Mamdani, Mahmood, 263 Manji, Irshad, 278 Mannheim, Karl, 27 Marana, Giovanni Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy at Paris, 51 Markley, Robert, 39 Marx, Karl, 2, 25–26, 28, 236, 325–326, 338, 340, 342, 345, 348, see also Said and Marxism Religion, 334 The British Rule in India, 323, 334–335 medieval studies (and Orientalism), 4, 5 Mehta, Uday, 90 Mein Kampf, 127 Melman, Billie, 14, 15, 172, 174 Mernissi, Fatima, 170, 174 Metcalf, Thomas, 100 Michaelis, Johann David, 142 Middle Ages, 5, 328 Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 289 Middle East studies, 327 Middle East, Middle Eastern, 17, 18, 21, 23–24, 84, 173–174 American writing, 23–24, 286, 288, 291–293, 295, 296, 297–299, 301 education, 158, 172 gender, 167, 170 migrants, 23, 292 travel writing, 185–188, 190, 192, 194–195, 200 Mill, John Stuart, 10, 90 Mills, Sara, 14, 169 Ming dynasty, 36, 46, See also China

370

Index

Missionaries. See “Christian missionaries” under “Christians, Christianity” Mogul Tales, 50 Moluccas, the, 36 Montagu, Lady Wortley, 14, 168, 172 Embassy Letters, 15 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 41, 74, 102 Persian Letters, 51, 53 Monticello, 205 Moore, Thomas Lalla Rookh, 61–62 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 8 Morey, Peter, 22–23, 269 Morocco, 174, 327, 328–329, 331, 343, 344 Mosaic triad, 10, 118 Moses, 135, 142 Moussa, Sarga, 137 Mufti, Aamir, 20–21, 231 Mughals, 36, 40, 44, 45, 46, 110, 123 Muhammad, (Mohammed), the Prophet, 5, 324, 333 Mujahideen, 271 Müller, Friedrich Max, 9, 11, 85, 94, 96, 97, 122, 124–125 Murray, John, 172 Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and Constantinople, 198–199 Muslim, Muslims, 21, 36 fashion industry, 15, 167 microblogging Saudi women, 24, 307–308, 312–313 “misery memoirs,” 270, 275 modest fashion, 167, 178–179 representation of (as ‘Other’), 21, 24 “saving Muslim women,” 23, 262, 270, 274, 279, 294, 311 self-fashioning, 170, 178, 186 veiling fashions, 170–171 Mutman, Mahmut, 21–22, 255 Nafisi, Azar, 258 Reading Lolita in Tehran, 257, 274 Naipaul, V. S., 21, 163–164, 236, 241 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 176 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 9, 86, 92, 93, 95–98 Observations on Mr John Crawfurd’s Paper on the European and Asiatic Races, 85 Napoleon I, 4, 118–119 Nash, John, 45 native informants, 22 Negrophobia, 22, 261 Neo-classicism, 43 Neo-conservative writing, 22, 256, 260

Neo-Orientalism, 4, 21–22, 255–257, 269–271, 273–274, 281, 282, 287, 298, see also “Orientalism” Nerval, Gérard de, 16, 196–198, 307 Voyage en Orient, 24, 196 New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists, 206 Transcendentalists, 205 Unitarians, 202, 205 New York Times, 24, 306, 308–309, 310, 311, 315, 316–317, 327 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 13, 18, 219, 220, 222–223, 227, 228–231, 237 Decolonizing the Mind, 19, 224, 228–229 Nicholas of Cusa, 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 19, 240, 241 novel, the, 2, 7, 19 eighteenth-century, 8, 248 romantic, 4, 13, 225 Victorian, 9, 86–87 Nussbaum, Felicity, 41 O’Keeffe, John The Dead Alive, Aladdin, The Little HunchBack or a Frolic in Bagdad, 59 Obama, Barack, 271, 308 Occident, Occidental, 13, 36, 46, 66–67, 72, 78, 80 Occident, the, 2–3, 5, 75, 186, 189, 256, 286 Occidentalism, Occidentalist, 9, 67–68, 72, 79–80 in the Romantic age, 8, 66–69, 77 oil crisis of 1973, 21, 256 Orient, the, 2, 4, 5, 17, 25, 46, 66, 71–73, 75, 82 Oriental languages, 1, 16, 187, 192–193, 208 Oriental Renaissance, 6, 11, 119, 134, 135, 137, 138 Oriental style, 45, 75 Oriental tale, 4, 7–8, 42, 50–51, 57, 58, 61, 62 Orientalism, 8, 11–12, 13–14, 15–17, 19–20, 25–28, 40, 185 Afterword to the 1995 reprinting Orientalism, Orientalism and the Bible, 142 Orientalism, Orientalist, 1–3, 7 and (Middle East) travel writing, 4, 9, 12, 15–16, 41, 169, 185–188, 190, 194–195, 198, 200 and colonialism, 11, 19, 40, 244 and culture and power, 2, 9, 16, 84–85, 98, 185–186, 190, 192 and empire, 4, 8, 35, 36, 82, 84, 85, 89, 349 and literary studies, 1–2, 3, 20–21, 152, 286 and race, 8, 10, 117, 122, 123–124, 125–126, 302, 351 and the arts, 1, 7, 18, 42–46, 78, 210

Index and the Bible, 10–12, 133, 134–136, 137, 139–141, 145 and the eighteenth-century traveler, 191–192, 193 and the romantic traveler, 196–198 Anglicists and Evangelicals (in India), 84 as field of scholarship, 1, 9, 84–85, 86, 98, 119, 134, 141 Enlightenment, 6, 54, 136, 236, 332–333 fiction, 10, 54, 57, 59, 102, 104, 114 image of Islam, “Muslim/Oriental mind,” 21–22, 133, 256–258, 260, 263, 272 in the eighteenth century, 1, 4, 5–8, 10, 11, 16, 35, 36–37, 38, 39, 40–46, 69, 119, 190, 204 in the Romantic age, 4, 6, 8, 9, 61, 71–72, 75, 102, 119, 135, 137, 138, 271 latent and manifest, 12, 13, 154 neo-, 4, 21–22, 24, 255–257, 264, 269–271, 273–274, 275, 281, 282, 286, 287, 290, 294, 298, 301–302, 311 post-, 25, 27, 166, 236, 270, 351 Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern Taste, The, 56 Orr, Bridget, 41 Ottoman, Ottomans, (and Ottoman empire), 7, 41, 51, 176, 189, 190, 204, 295 modernity, 177 Orientalism, 56, 177 women, 15, 53, 166, 172–173, 175, 177, 178, 189 Ouseley, William, 61 Paine, Tom, 68, 74–76, 332 The Rights of Man, 74 Palestine, Palestinian, 11, 18, 107–108, 163, 191, 198, 219, 220, 222, 228, 235, 236, 242, 244, 246–247, 269, 295, 300–301, 323, 325, 351 Peabody, Elizabeth, 209 Peirce, Leslie P., 166–167 Persia, Persians, 35, 40, 41, 46, See also Iran Persian (language), 11, 21, 42, 120, 121, 123 Persian Tales, 50 Persianists, 11, 135 Phillips, Caryl, 236, 247, 249 Philology, 9, 11, 122, 125, 126, 127–133, 135, 137, 139–140, 145, 192, 208 Pictet, Adolphe, 122 Pipes, Daniel, 22, 257 Pococke, Edward, 141 polygenism, 93 Porter, David, 39–40, 45, 57 postcolonial studies, postcolonialism, 3–4, 8, 13, 14, 18–19, 20, 25, 26, 153, 219, 220, 224, 226, 269, 312, 327, 343 postmodernism, 151 poststructuralism, 14, 27, 152, 343

371

Pound, Ezra, 17, 205, 211–213, see also American Orientalism Pratt, Mary Louise, 18, 169, 190, 219, 222, 224 Pratt, Samuel Jackson The Fair Circassian, 55 Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India (1858), 91 Protestant evangelicalism, 11 psycho-analysis, psychoanalytic literary theory, 14, 152, 155 Qing emperors, 36, 46 Quetin’s Guide en Orient, 198 Quinet, Edgar, 137, 138 race and racism, 4, 8, 13, 19, 23, 35, 125, 126, 226, 227, 229, 231, 235–236, 238–240, 241, 243, 244, 247, 248, 261–262, 282, 287, 295, 298, 302, 333, 351, see also Orientalism and race racial anthropology, 11, 124, 125–127 Rambler, 54–55 Razak, Sherene, 169 Reform Act First (1832), 76 Second (1867), 87 Regency style, 45 Renan, Ernest, 11, 12, 16, 124–126, 138–139, 140, 142, 143–145, 194 General History and Comparative System of the Semitic Languages, 138 Repton, Humphrey, 45 Resistance, resistance literature, 13, 18, 26, 221, 222–223, 225, 227–229 Retzius, Andres, 124 Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea, 18, 225 Richardson, Samuel, 54 Ridley, James Tales of the Genii, 58 Rihani, Ameen, 296 Roberts, Mary, 15, 174–175 Rodinson, Maxime, 25 Europe and the Mystique of Islam, 25 Romantic Orientalism, 4, 8, 66, 135, 137, See also Romanticism Romanticism, 6, 8, 68, 69, 71, 77, 121, 124, see also Romantic Orientalism Roy, Rammohun, 206–207 Royal Geographical Society of London, 195 Royal Pavilion, Brighton, 44 Rushdie, Salman, 21, 153, 220, 230–231, 236–237, 241, 323 Rushdie Affair, 21 Ruskin, John, 107

372

Index

Russia, 104, 111 Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, 107 Sacy, Silvestre, Baron de, 11, 16, 139–140, 194 Safavid dynasty/empire, 189, 190 Said, Edward, 1–6, 8, 9, 11, 16–17, 18–20, 21, 22, 25–28, 35, 40 After the Last Sky, 220 and Frantz Fanon, 19, 219, 220–222, 242, 351 and Marxism, 25–28, 236, 337, 340, 342 and Palestine, 163, 219, 220, 222, 228, 235, 236, 242, 244, 246–247, 269, 323, 325, 351 colleagues in comparative literature at Columbia University, 19, 235, 245 contrapuntal reading, 19, 221, 225, 236, 240, 242, 246, 249 Covering Islam, 21, 27, 220, 256, 257, 263, 269, 346 Culture and Imperialism, 13, 18–19, 27, 86, 166, 219, 220–221, 222–224, 225–226, 227–228, 230, 231, 235–236, 240, 241–242, 243, 246, 249, 346 on Camus and Algeria, 19, 242, 243–244, 249 on Conrad, 18, 19, 222, 235, 239–242, 245–247 on humanism, 18, 219, 236 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 27, 350–351 Out of Place, 158 Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 240 The Politics of Dispossession, 220 The World the Text and the Critic, 240 “voyage in,” 13, 18, 221–222, 227, 229, 231, 240 Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, 236, 246, 247 Saint-Simonians, 137 Salaita, Steven, 287 Salih, Tayeb, 220, 227, 230–231 Season of Migration to the North, 19, 219, 222, 231, 240 Salisbury, Edward E., 205, 208 Sanskrit, 7, 11, 17, 21, 42–43, 69, 77, 85, 94, 117, 119, 120–121, 123, 134, 205, 208, 213 Saudi Arabia relations with US, 308 women, 24, 307, 309–310, 311–312, 316 digital activism, 313 Savary, Claude Etienne, 16, 191–194 Scheler, Max, 27 Schlegel, Friedrich, 121, 136, 138, 143 Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 121 Schwab, Raymond, 6, 11, 119, 134–135, 136–138 The Oriental Renaissance, 6, 11, 133, 135 secularism, 9, 93, 136, 176, 179, 191, 208, 210, 315–316, 326, 334, 338 Seierstad, Åsne

The Bookseller of Kabul, 23, 274, 275–276, 281 Semites, Semitic, 10, 12, 117–118, 122, 124–125, 126, 134, 138–140, 141, 143–144 September 11, 2011, 24, 290, 294, 306, 309, 311 Seven Years’ War, 56, 57 sexuality, 10, 13, 103, 154, 156, 169, 174–176, 260–261 and china(ware), 7, 38 harem, 15, 166–167 Shaffer, Emily, 135–137 Shakespeare, William, 213, 222 Antony and Cleopatra, 306 Shakespeare Jungle Fever (Little, Arthur), 306 Shebbeare, John The History of the Excellence and Decline of the Constitution, Religion, Laws, Manners and Genius of the Sumatrans, 57 Shem, 10, 118, 122 Sheridan, Frances, 56 Simon, Richard, 135 Sinha, Mishka, 17 slave trade and plantation slavery, 38 Smith, William Robertson, 148 Smollett, Tobias, 57 The History and Adventures of an Atom, 56 South East Asia, 83, 95, 97, 103, 105, 112 Southey, Robert, 61, 76–78, 79 Colloquies, 76 Thalaba the Destroyer, 59, 61 Spectator, The, 7, 51–52 Spence, Joseph, 140–141 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 18, 169, 219, 220, 224, 225–226, 227, 231, 255, 274, 311 Steel, Flora Annie On the Face of the Waters, 10, 103, 108, 110 Steele, Richard, and Mr. Spectator, 51 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 158 Subaltern Studies group, 220 Suez Canal, 107 Suleri, Sara, 162–163 Suleri, Susan, 14 Sultan, Tipu, 87–88, 90 supersessionism, 143–145 Suzuki, D. T., 215 Syriac, 35, 122 Tagore, Rabindranath, 203, 222 Taliban, 169, 274, 276, 277, 281 Tartarian Tales, 50 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 187, 189 Temple, Sir William, 45 Terranova, Tiziana, 22, 263–264 terrorism, 22, 257, 260, 264, 273, 327, 333 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 102 Vanity Fair, 86

Index Thelwall, John, 68, 76 Théophile Gautier, 197 Theosophy, Theosophical Society, 17, 117, 127, 145, 205 Thévenot, Jean de, 187–188 Third World intellectuals/writers, 13, 18, 19, 236–237, 240 Third Worldism, 26 Thoreau, Henry David, 17, 205, 209–210 Thousand and One Nights. See Arabian Nights Tobin, Beth Fowkes, 44 Tokugawa shoguns, 36, 46 Tories, 40 Trautmann, Thomas, 84–85 travel writing, 4, 9, 12, 15–16, 41, 169, 185–188, 190, 194–195, 198, 224, 255, 275, See also Orientalism Trilling, Lionel, 19, 235, 245, 249 Trump, Donald, 271, 330–331, 347 Tuastad, Dag Henrik, 22, 256–257, 260 “new barbarism” thesis, 22, 257 Turkey, Turks, 35, 40–41, 53, 83, 102, 187, 198, 199, 289, 295 Turkish Tales, 52, 71 United States, 1, 16–18, 23, 202, 204, 206, 208, 215–216, 249, 271, 275, 327, 330–331 11 September, 2001 attacks, 21, 24, 290, 294, 306, 309, 311 Immigration Quota Act, 1924, 290 presidential election, 2016, 282 Utopia, Utopianism, 6, 42, 54, 275, 348–349, 351 Varisco, Daniel, 327, 347 Vedas, Vedic texts, 137, 206 veil, 24, 139, 167, 170–171, 173, 197, 258, 262, 274, 312, See also “burqa,” “hijab” harem, 15, 166, 168–169, 174 political mobilization, 178–179 un-veiling, 310 Victorians, 9, 82, 90 attitude towards empire, 84, 90 literature, novel, 9–10, 85, 86–87, 89–90, 91, 101–103, 104, 108, 110, 112 bildungsroman, 86 travelogues, 10, 87, 172, 195–196, 199 Vietnam War, 204, 216 Viswanathan, Gauri, 163 Volney, Constantin-François, Comte de, 16, 191–193, 197, 204–205

373

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 41, 134 Candide, 55 Walpole, Horace Hieroglyphic Tales, 57 War on Terror, 21, 22–23, 257, 264, 270, 271, 272, 277, 286, 288, 293, 294, 297, 300 Warner, Marina, 50, 62 Washington Post, The, 153, 308, 309, 315, 317 Watt, Ian, 42 Watt, James, 7–8, 50 Watts, Cedric, 238 Weir, David, 17–18, 202 Wellhausen, Julius, 148 Weltliteratur (world Literature), 20 West Indies, the, 39 West, Western civilization, 8, 9, 17, 21, 22, 25, 39, 144, 172, 280, 287, 333 as radically distinct from the East, 2, 4, 8, 13, 20, 169, 273, 274, 296, 302, 316 humanism, 18, 27, 134, 219, 236, 350–351 Western colonialism, 219, 326 Western media, 21, 22, 220, 256, 258, 307, 311, 313, 314 Westernness, Western self, 67, 71, 80 Whigs, 40 Wilfred Scawen Blunt, 196 Wilkins, Charles, 207–208, 209–210 Williams, Patrick, 13, 27, 337 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 72–76, 79 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 72 Women. See Orientalism, Orientalist:and (Middle East) travel writing. Orientalism, Orientalist:and (. . .) traveler travel writing, gender:harem. Harem, harem literature. sexuality: harem. veil:harem, Muslim, Muslims: fashion industry, modest fashion, selffashioning, veiling fashions, Feminism, feminist studies and feminism, feminist studies, 3, 24 Englishwomen in the novel, 87 in Islam and in Muslim societies, 24 The Englishwoman in Egypt (Sophia Lane Poole), 172 Wordsworth, William, 136 The Prelude, 72 Yacine, Kateb, 21 Yang, Chi-ming, 39 Yeats, William Butler, 221 Yeǧ enǧ olu, Meyda Yeǧ enǧ olu, 14 Young, Robert J. C., 14, 103, 152, 155, 162

374 Zen-Buddhism, 17, 215 Zend Avesta, 120, 134 Zhuang, Yue, 45 Zionism, 103, 105, 107–108, 236, 246, 247, 349 Zizek, Slavoj, 161

Index Zoffany, Johan, 43 Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, 43 Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings, 7, 44 Zonana, Joyce, 172 Zoroastrianism, holy scriptures, 134, 137