Said’s Orientalism and the Discourse of (Hetero)sexuality

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 1992, pp: 127-147 Said's Orienta/ism and the Discourse of (Hetero)sexuality Tom Hastings 127 The "Orient," writes Edward Said in Orienta/ism, has provided the West with "its deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1). By tracing the power/knowledge configurations through which Europeans have historically mapped "otherness" onto the "Orient," Said takes a model of alterity from continental philosophy and deploys it in contemporary American political struggles. "My real argument," he writes, "is that Orientalism is-and does not simply represent-a considerable dimension of modern politicalintellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with 'our' world" (12). "Orientalism" is thus defined by Said as ''a Western stylefor dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (3). The political ramifications of Said's theory of Orientalism for AngloAmerican literary and cultural studies are far-reaching. With the publication of Orienta/ism in 1978 and his introduction of the discourse of Orientalism into the critical lexicon of American academia Said not only underwrote a study of the relationship of Eurocentrism (understood as including the United States) to colonialism, thus helping to undertake an anatomy of colonial discourse, but, concomitantly, helped to shake up what he calls the "politically quietistic" attitude of the American "literary-cultural establishment" to "real-world" issues such as imperialism which, he claims, it has refused to explore or discuss (Interview 38-39). Such a refusal is for 128 Canadian Review of American Studies Said an overtly political act for which he faults the academy and against which he personally positions himself and his project. By his own declaration, the writing of Orientalism is therefore to be understood as an antidote to this climate of political acquiesence, and as an attempt to infuse American academia with a sense of "political action" (Interview 46).1 He claims that "the focus of interest in Orientalism for me has been the partnership between a discursive and archival textuality and worldly power, one as an index and refraction of the other" (Interview 41). Said thus locates the major political value of 01ientalism in this "partnership": a partnership which both justifies his study and provides a means of evaluating it. Robert Young exemplifies those critics who adopt the criteria that Said proposes for judging the value of his work. In 'WhiteMythologi,es:Writing History and the West, Young argues that Said succeeds in realizing his intentions: Said's major theoretical achievement, the creation of an object of analysis called 'colonial discourse,' has proved one of the most fruitful and significant areas of research in recent years. The concept of colonial discourse, necessarily still being debated, has been extended to other categories such as 'minority discourse,' and is increasingly being used to describe certain power structures within the hierarchies of the West itself, particularly the relation of minorities to the dominant group. (173) Young makes important claims for Said's influence in the academy: "much of the current pressure for the political, particularly in the US where there is no recent substantial tradition of political criticism, has followed from the work of Said" (126). In p(\rticular, Said's "injunction that criticism must be affiliated to the world of which it is a part" has, according to Young, "enabled those from minorities, whether categorized as racial, sexual, social, or economic, to stake their critical work in relation to their own political positioning" (126).2 Orienta/ism is perhaps most influential in having the author's political positioning support a project which introduces a new way Tom Hastings I 129 of conceptualizing an entire field of study that is encyclopedic in range and ambition. Young is correct to call Said's study politically enabling rather than, for example, politically original, given the previous history of African American and feminist criticism in the United States. Said obliquely acknowledges this preexisting tradition of theoretical/political activism when he refers to the work of a feminist Marxist in a Diacritics interview: Such systems [as Orientalism] hide the human being who is the object of study from history-Sheila Rowbotham's phrase for what happens to...