Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food

4. Barbecue between the Lines

Barbecue between the Lines Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) has held great importance for Savage Barbecue as it has for numerous inquiries into race, identity, and the cultural bases of empires old and new. Almost thirty years after its publication, Orientalism’s frank talk of the United States as an “Imperium” following in the footsteps of Britain and France now seems less controversial than it once did, while Said’s identification of the fundamentalist Muslim as the emergent nemesis of Western cultures has come to appear prescient. No less influential, at least in postcolonialist and likeminded circles, has been Said’s understanding of Orientalism as that at once bureaucratic and academic discourse by which Europe has historically fixed the “Orient” in place, nurturing its own pristine image by projecting its barbarisms eastward. Orientalism, of course, was not the first to call attention to this dialectic process. Years before Frantz Fanon had pioneered this approach, drawing on Marxist and Hegelian tradition to insist that, in the colonial system, “the settler’s town” and the “town of niggers and Left to its own devices, unlit by the spotlights of the story and before the first fitting session with the designers, the world is neither orderly nor chaotic, neither clean nor dirty. It is human design that conjures up disorder together with the vision of order, dirt together with the project of purity. —Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives 4 { 137 } { 138 } chapter four dirty arabs” depend on each other and determine each other’s identity.1 What always distinguished Orientalism, however, was its insistence that writing and culture lie at the heart of this dialectical process. Ernest Renan, Gustave Flaubert, and others receive a starring role in Orientalism, Said’s masterpiece effectively approaching Western letters as a hegemonic if rich and complex discourse powerful enough to call empire into existence: In short, as a form of growing knowledge Orientalism resorted mainly to citations of predecessor scholars in the field for its nutriment. . . . In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos , a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. (175–77) Effectively, over the course of this book, I have tried to draw attention to the range of rhetorical strategies that, appearing in diverse writings about America, bear comparison to those Said uncovers from Europe’s invention of the Orient. Embarking on this project has led me to realize that even now our discourse remains surprisingly reluctant to recognize in full the close resemblance between Europe’s Orientalization of Asia and its Americanization of America. But it has also made clear that this reluctance begins life in Said’s own thinking and stems in part from the fastidious care he takes to heed particularities of time and place and to avoid oversimplifying global culture’s chaotic and finally uncountable transactions. For such care and attention, while undeniably admirable in almost all respects, in this particular instance can lure Said toward the old sirens of U.S. exceptionalism , his works here and there falling a little under the spell of democratic progress among other nationalistic mantras and compromising his ability to uncover in full the imperial origins of the United States. In Culture and Imperialism’s outstanding vision of the grim procession of Eurocentric power, something unspoken seems to ordain that the United States should inhabit the last word and occupy the final chapter. Promises of democracy and freedom do their old clandestine work, at some level excusing the United States its imperial expansion and insulating it a little from outright attack. America’s magic persists, allowing the United States to cling to its familiar status as a less naked imperial power whose imperial credentials we must work that much harder to reveal. barbecue between the lines { 139 } Even as Orientalism heeds cultural specificity almost to the point of closing off its wider imperial applications, it remains easy to see how the American frontier might be regarded in Orientalist terms as another liminal territory that is “less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics.” To critics of U.S. hegemony if not always to Said himself...