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October 29, 2006

Crossing the Borders of Orient

Back in Europe, with my specialisation in Japanese studies, I am, reluctantly, an "Orientalist". So it was with a sense of indulging a deliberately produced self-irony that I found myself, on an early autumn day last year, crossing the Bosphorus straits on a cheap 1-Lire Istanbul ferry with a copy of Edward Said's notorious title at hand. For passing through no checkpoint and remaining within the jurisdiction of the same country, I was yet just moving across one of the most formidable and influential borderlines in mankind's history: there behind me, with the silhouettes of Topkapi palace and the great Suleymania Mosque, were receding the banks of Occident, while ahead, with an indispensable palm tree by the battered moorings, lay the Orient.

To sum it up very roughly, in his long-serving classic Said describes an ideological complex called "Orientalism" which involves Western scholarship, political and economic science, poetic imagination and fiction, linguistics etc., to a major extent in a project of "Orient's" domination by the "West". Behind what many Westerners said and fancied on the topic of the "Orientals", Said perceives a consistent hidden agenda of patronising condescension, dominion, robbing of individuality and construction of essentialist collective identities. He points out a line of cultural dominion fabricated and recreated in works of scholars and artists which runs conspicuously parallel to the line of actual colonial dominion of Orient (here largely Middle East extending to India) by Western empires.

About ever since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the end of the 18th century, "Orientalists" – Western experts studying about the area and its peoples – occupied themselves within frameworks of their respective fields of study with, in fact, "inventing" the Orient and its "typical" identity. What Said subjects to critique is not so much an overt condescending racism with regard to "the Oriental" (the Arab, the Muslim…), but rather the subtle forms of allegedly neutral and unbiased scholarship and, later, literary fiction which in turn fabricate, justify, and reinforce images of the Orient suited, ultimately, to political expediency and the justification of colonial empire.

As a lifetime reader of European and American literature (Said taught comparative literature at Columbia University) with the background of a Palestinian émigré, the author was uniquely situated to detect the marks of Orientalist attitudes latent in the works of Nerval or Flaubert or Conrad or Kipling. The very crude version would be the following: Orientals are essentially such as they are (lazy, passionate, irrational, fanatical, incapable of restraint and self-control, etc.) and thus destined to remain in disorderly and backward misery unless saved by the mercy of White Man's dominion with its values of humanity, civilisation, hygiene, and economic progress. But Orientalism, particularly in its modern forms (we are made aware as we follow Said through his book) is rarely all that crude.

I was intrigued to discover, with a shiver, a very recent example of impossibility of innocent Orientalist scholarship when I came across Bernard Lewis's conclusions on the character of Islamic culture and society featuring prominently in a training manual for U.S. troops destined for deployment on the ground in Iraq. An admittedly brief but all the more authoritative set of statements – by this supreme expert in contemporary Oriental studies – providing the gist of "what an Islamic society is" was here supposed directly to inform how soldiers with loaded guns should perceive the country and its people and how they might interact with both.

It is interesting to note that the same Bernard Lewis (who actually appears in Said's book several times), with his weight of disinterested scholar with unsurpassed knowledge of the "culture of Islam", apparently had a real impact on forming the decision leading to the U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2002.

The breadth of reading and scope of critical evaluation is impressive, but Said's is not careful and meticulously documented scholarship. (This has brought on criticism pointing out factual mistakes, misinterpretation and alleged libel in Said's treatment of many texts and authors: recently, for example, Robert Irwin's "For the Lust of Knowing – The Orientalists and their enemies".) Even to a reader who does not backtrack the author's footsteps to verify all the quotations and check for possible inaccuracy, Said does not sound neutral, calm and disinterested, and he is probably not even trying to. It is clear, though, that the book does not go down in history as a major achievement in scholarly analysis of an academic field, but perhaps precisely as a manifesto pronounced by an identifiably human voice, if sometimes prejudiced, sometimes angry, and sometimes probably wrong.

But Said's main issue remains very pressing subject for consideration: in what ways and to what extent do the seemingly innocent pursuits of meek and endearingly distracted scholars or imaginative story-tellers inform the running of empires in their hard or light forms?

There is more than a touch of Orientalism in much current discourse on "Islamism" and "Muslim threat", notions which evoke images of threatening and eerily incomprehensible culture defined by an essence of fanatism, extremism, irrational backwardness and scary unpredictability. Such Orientalism is no intellectual exercise. It is obvious that such notions inform actual policies and through those affect actual human lives (and deaths). As long as that remains true, it will remain our duty to try and understand the "Orientalist" elements latent in our worldviews and considerations. And Said's book remains a useful handle in that.

Japan, to conclude, has an ambiguous position in all this: the Japanese have been subject to a lot of Orientalist perception on the part of the West (from early on but recognizably still in the post-war era with all the essentialist definition-making in Ruth Benedict's style) and participated quite eagerly in academically reproducing some of that Orientalism in volunteering various all-encompassing definitions of "what the Japanese were" (in all the varieties of the so-called "Nihonjin-ron"). Yet at the same time, from early on in Meiji, Japan found itself in its turn fabricating a lot of discourse recognizably "Orientalist" in its function (of justifying dominion and empire) with regard to other less developed Asian nations. Whatever the case, I do find Said's treatment of Orientalism unobtrusively suggestive for thinking Japan.

Posted by david at October 29, 2006 03:35 AM

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