Globalorientalization: Globalization through the Lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism

This article aims to show, first, that Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) offers a critical genealogy of globalization avant la lettre, an account of Orientalism in its global orientation that I call “globalorientalization.” Globalorientalization not only precedes but also resembles “globalatinization,” Jacques Derrida’s genealogy of Europe’s ascent to global power. Second, Said’s book, anticipating some of the problems posed by globalization, provides an outline of a contrapuntal humanist cosmopolitanism that can free us from static and unproductive oppositions such as that between an essentializing identitarian logic and a universalizing homogeneity, between the local and the global. Said’s contrapuntal cosmopolitanism refuses any easy passage or accommodation and emphasizes a critically interactive and restless movement not unlike Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s metaphor of globalization as an awkward, unstable, and uneven process of “friction.” This frictional, contrapuntal cosmopolitanism allows Said to question and unsettle identitarian claims that are still made today—claims that rely on static binary oppositions such as the Occident and the Orient, us and them, and the global and the local.