Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (review)

REVIEWS form. Melnick's book, while limited in scope to the modernist period, is an informed look at the tandem course of music and literature by a writer skilled in both musical and literary analysis. Judith Barban Winthrop University XIAOMEI CHEN. Occidentalism: A Theory ofCounter-Discourse in PostMao China. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. viii + 239 pp. In his influential 1978 book on Orientalism, Edward Said argued that the Orient is not simply a geo-political reality, but, to a large extent, a representation, a discursive construct produced by the imperialistic West. Raising as many questions as it offers answers, Said's immensely important, if controversial, book has since made possible an entire critical discourse that has profitably extended, revised, and criticized its theoretical positions. Zhang Longxi, Lisa Lowe, Masao Miyoshi, and others have applied Said's theories to China and Japan, pointing out that Orientalism encompasses a variety of ideological subject positions and rhetorical devices, many ofwhich are deeply self-critical ofthe West's power and its views of the East. As its title indicates, Xiaomei Chen's excellent Occidentalism also takes its point ofdeparture from Said. An innovative "deconstruction" or reversal of Said's view of Orientalism as the hegemonic construction of a silenced Other, Chen's study shows that Chinese Occidentalism is a pluralistic reading ofthe West either as a condemned "Other" or as an admired model. In contrast to what Lowe has called Said's monolithic view of Orientalism, Chen demonstrates that Occidentalism , responding to Western theories and practices, is a complex, multivocal, and shifting discourse "marked by a particular combination ofthe Western construction ofChina with the Chinese construction ofthe West, with both ofthese components interacting and interpenetrating each other" (5). She aptly distinguishes between the Chinese government's official Occidentalism, which construes the West as a negative Other tojustify nationalism and oppressive politics, and various forms of anti-official Occidentalism, fashioned by oppositional writers and intellectuals. These figures appropriate and reinvent a positive notion ofthe Western Other—its literature, history, and ideological self-understanding—as a "metaphor" (8), a powerful discursive instrument to promote political liberation and resistance to totalitarian politics in China. Chen's examples are compelling and wide-ranging. The television documentary series He shang (1988) appropriated an image ofthe modern, technological, and democratic West in order to criticize China's oppressive past and present. Plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Brecht were performed and viewed in the new contexts ofthe Cultural Revolution and the ensuing climate ofconspiracy, censorship, and suffering. The menglong writers ofthe early 1980s creatively rewrote the poetics ofWestern modernism, a movement represented by authors like Ezra Pound, who had himselfconstructed his aesthetic self-understanding partly by a productive misreading ofChinese "ideographs." Similarly, Chinese playwrights appropriated the Vol·. 20 (1996): 192 THE COMPAnATIST theatrical models of authors like Wilder, Artaud, and Brecht, whose works in turn resemble, or had been influenced by, conventions oftraditional Chinese theatre. May Fourth playwrights, writing about women's liberation, employed images of Western women against the Confucianist suppression of females; paradoxically, this attempt to promote women's rights appealed to a new "father" tradition—the West—which has itself perfected patriarchal discourse and the domination of women. Finally, Chen argues that from the perspective ofpostcolonial and other Western cultural theories, the recent best-seller A Chinese Woman in Manhattan could be condemned as an opportunistic celebration of a stereotypical American success story. From the point ofview ofcontemporary Chinese society, however, it might be more appropriate to see the book as a legitimate expression of a woman's longing for freedom and self-fulfillment, aspirations denied by the oppressive rule at home. Relying on hermeneutics, reception theory, and Harold Bloom's notion of literary history, Chen rightly emphasizes that cultural exchanges like these should not bejudged by whether Chinese or Westerners read the other culture "correctly," in terms of original intentions or authentic meaning. Rather, Chen convincingly shows that the East and the West (mis-)read and rewrite each other creatively within their own historical contexts, political structures, and aesthetic horizons. Texts, discourses, and essentializing notions like "the Orient" or "the West" have no stable, intrinsic, or ahistorical meaning, but are ever-changing systems ofcultural signification that...