Orientalism after Orientalism

Orientalism after Orientalism Ali Behdad Practicing Criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. —Michel Foucault T HE SEMINAL ROLE of Edward Said’s Orientalism in inaugurat­ ing a new phase of (post)colonial critique becomes apparent, if we only consider his 1976 interview with Diacritics where he discusses his new critical project two years before its publication. Here Said argues against the continuous exclusion of “ colonial studies” and critiques of Orientalism in even the most prestigious American and European intel­ lectual circles, considering the exclusion of politics in the new insights of poststructuralists a major theoretical blindness. Said remarks, I find the New New critics [i.e., poststructuralists, and specifically Yale critics] to be quietistic ; their concerns and closures are textual ones, the issues that engage them are—from a historical, social or general point o f view—very restricted. They seem uninterested in political questions. The life of society, or the life of society that bears centrally upon texts and literature, does not occupy our attention. . . . I am as aware as anyone that ivory-tower concerns of technical criticism— . . . are very far removed from the world of politics, power, domination, and struggle. But there are links between the two worlds which I for one am beginning to exploit in my own w ork.1 As a political critique of European imperialism’s cultural economy, Said’s Orientalism has been indeed a powerful point of departure for many postcolonial critics—departure, in its polysemy, as both a starting point and an act of divergence, of moving away. Not only did Said’s text bring the issue of colonialism to the forefronts of the intellectual estab­ lishment by critically displaying the ideological underpinnings of the scientific and artistic representation of “ otherness” in European thought throughout modern history, but it was also one of the seminal books that prompted a shift in the interest of literary and cultural theoreticians from textuality to historicity, from the aesthetic to the political, and from indi­ vidual receptions to collective responses to literary texts. As Homi Bhabha has also pointed out, “ Said’s work focused the need to quicken the half-light of western history with the disturbing memory of its colonial texts that bear witness to the trauma that accompanies the triumphal art of Empire.” 2 Vol. XXXIV, No. 2 3 L ’E spr it C r éa te u r In Orientalism, Said delineates a complex field of discursive practices in Western culture through which Europe constructed and later colo­ nized its Oriental other. An integral part of Europe’s material civilization and cultural self-fashioning, the “ Orient,” he argues, is not only a locus of romance and exoticism in Western imagination, but a place to study, control, and colonize. To map this complicated structure of desire and domination, and by way of demonstrating the complicity of knowledge and power, Said uses the term “ Orientalism” to characterize three inter­ dependent aspects of this discursive formation: the academic institutions and their practitioners who study Oriental cultures, languages, and histories, and produce Europe’s “ knowledge” about its other; “ a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “ the Occident” ; and the ensemble of institutions that “ deal” with the Orient by producing a body of authoritative knowledge about it.3While the second notion is general enough to accommodate a whole range of writers from Aeschy­ lus and Dante to Victor Hugo and Karl Marx, the first and third defini­ tions more particularly address the rise of orientalist consciousness since the late eighteenth century in Europe, a consciousness that was more specifically tied to Europe’s colonial history. In a genealogical approach, following Michel Foucault’s pioneering work on discourse and power, Said takes on the ambitious task of describing the systematically “ coherent” mode of orientalist discourse, the essentialist structure of its representations, and the “ internal con­ sistency” of its institutional formation in order to illustrate the ways in which such an epistemological mastery helped Europeans articulate their imperialist quest. “ The Orient that appears in Orientalism,” Said thus contends, “ is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient...