Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms by Lisa Lowe (review)

B ook R ev iew s politics engaged by African Americans are measured through shifts in anthologies (331, n4). A condemnation of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses foregoes any consideration of extra-literary conditions, such as the jockeying for power amongst political leaders in India, Pakistan and Iran that resulted in the banning of the book and the issuing of the fatwa, in favor of issues of representation internal to the text itself (214). In fact, Ahmad’s real purpose is not to provide a detailed and well-documented account of the conditions of production o f literary theory, but to defend the continuing relevance of marxism to a world which he feels has abandoned it. He identifies attacks on marxism from two directions: cultural nationalism, which attempts to replace marxism as the source of emancipatory desire, and poststructuralism, which challenges marxism as a mode of analysis. The two meet in the figure of Edward Said, who is said to be at once a cultural absolutist and a paradigmatic poststructuralist. Ahmad’s critique of cultural nationalism is most persuasive in his chapter on three worlds theory and in the now famous response to Jameson’s reading of “ Third W orld” literature as national allegory. But he never takes poststructuralism (which he sometimes confuses with postmodernism [35]) seriously enough to engage it or even define it systematically. As a result, it becomes a parody of itself, a straw man for Ahmad to ridicule. In defense of marxism, Ahmad argues that its intellectual tradition emphasizes the internal heterogeneity which can disrupt the false unities supporting the binary of West and Third World. To illustrate he repeatedly invokes gender relations, noting that they compli­ cate the putative homogeneity of race, nation, and class. But for all his lip service to gender, Ahmad is clear that, like all other focal points of political struggle, it must concede priority to the global class struggle. Indeed, the book closes with a broad indictment of all social movements that are not class-based as ultimately insignificant quibbles, not about justice itself, but only about the quality of already over-privileged lives. Ahmad levels this indict­ ment at movements that are not explicitly marxist. This is also his primary quarrel with the intellectuals he criticizes. Said and African Americans are not marxists (192 and 89-90, respectively), and Jameson is not marxist enough (10). Such condemnations make for a remarkably monolithic marxism which, when combined with an argument that, for lack of evidence, must be accepted on faith or rejected outright, perhaps accounts for the exas­ perated reviews Ahmad’s book has received from even very sympathetic readers. R a n u S a m a n t r a i Washington University Lisa Lowe. C r i t i c a l T e r r a i n s : F r e n c h a n d B r i t i s h O r ie n t a li s m s . Ithaca/London: Cor­ nell University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 216. $28.95. Some fifteen years have passed since Edward Said’s work on orientalism appeared, but only recently have certain correctives to questionable aspects of that enterprise begun to be published, none more apposite than those of Lisa Lowe in Critical Terrains. The theoretical bases of this study, comparing and contrasting British and French atti­ tudes toward different Orients from the eighteenth century to the present, are nicely pre­ sented and possess the hard-edged beauty of a geometrical theorem or a logical proof. The intelligence and common sense controlling the demonstration are rare enough today, but the way in which the material is marshalled proves a delight and is eminently satisfying. To begin with a cavil: in attempting to assign a date for the use of the word “ oriental­ ism” and its cognates in French (p. 3, n. 3), the author errs on the side of conservatism and does not seem to recognize the relationship of this term to seventeenth-century commerce as it appeared around 1686 in the Mercure. Although this limitation skews somewhat her view VOL. XXXIV, NO. 2 119 L ’E s pr it C r éa te...