orientalism

A while ago I pontificated here about Said's Orientalism in its relation to Homi Bhabha's writing. Now the ugly truth about those thoughts is that, at that point, I have had only a superficial familiarity with both Orientalism and the Location of culture, having read mostly about them, rather than simply having read them. So I set out, with amazon.com's help, to acquit myself of such a glaring neglect of the "primary sources". I purchased both books after I found out that the estimated wait for Bhabha in my beloved Bizzell Library was over 3 months (=hoarded by a faculty member or put on reserve = as good as lost).

The introduction to the Location of Culture was promisingly lucid; I was starting to think that Bhabha's infamous worst academic writing award was undeservingly bestowed upon him. But I haven't advanced past a few pages of the first essay when I felt that I was sinking in dense verbiage beyond any hope of comprehension or enjoyment. Bhabha responded to his critics by stating that sophisticated academic writing does not have the obligation to be accessible. There is truth in that statement; however, it seems to me that there are two counterarguments to offer to that. First, sophisticated academic writing can be accessible - even it is groundbreaking and talking about entirely new concepts. Erving Goffman's elegant prose in The presentation of self in everyday life is a fine example of that. Second, as many a complexity scholar would tell you, complexity and complicatedness are not the same. There is a difference between a text that is inaccessible because it is written in a higher level symbolic code (Raymie McKerrow writing on rhetorical theory, James Joyce's Ulysses, and the condensed brevity of Encyclopaedia Britannica come to mind) and a text that is simply ambiguous and convoluted.

So I decided that Location of culture was not going to contain any textual pleasure (plaisir du texte), and turned to Orientalism. Here was a book that was immediately captivating - both because of its content and the clear delivery. The main argument of the book is stated early on and then repeatedly stated again, to a point of oversaturation. But then you start to wonder if such a tautology is deliberate and appropriate - it symbolically recreates the oppressing, continuous, inescapable power of Orientalism over the people that it attempts to describe.

Said is a brilliant polemicist; the 1994 afterword and the 2003 preface to the book are almost more enjoyable to read than the volume itself. In the 1994 piece, he is reacting to the reception of Orientalism by the critics and supporters. In 2003, he is providing a political commentary on the larger social context in which his arguments are embedded. I particularly like one passage where he talks about people like me, who pontificate about a subject without adequate knowledge of it:

Combative and woefully ignorant policy experts, whose world experience is limited to the Beltway, grind out books on "terrorism" and liberalism, or about Is1amic fundamentalism and American foreign policy, or about the end of history, all of it vying for attention and influence quite without regard for truthfulness or reflection or real knowledge. What matters is how efficient and resourceful it sounds, and who might go for it, as it were. The worst aspect of this essentializing stuff is that human suffering in all its density and pain is spirited away.

Edward W. Said: Preface to the 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism, p. xxi; New York: Vintage Books 1978 / 2003 (you can read the whole preface here)

Originally posted on the old blog February 8. 2007

Last Sunday I was in a local restaurant waiting for lunch. It is a relaxed place, almost hippy. The guy came over to clean my table and I lifted the salt and pepper off the table to help him sweep. He was impressed. When he brought the drink, he wanted to be nice to me as well, so he sat it down in front of me and said, "Here you go homie". I have never been called a "homie" before. Made me feel proud.

Incidentally, I was there reading a book about Homi Bhabha. When I was at CETRA this September, I had a great chat with our guest professor, Harish Trivedi. He told me that for the kind of work I am doing I cannot ignore Bhabha's writing. So I followed the advice.

As always, a few qualifiers first. I found Bhabha's work to be centered around the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. This focus tints his perceptions of the processes of cultural travel (which is a far happier metaphor than colonialism). Also, Bhabha seems to be making a heavy use of Said and Freud, taking his arguments into the realms of reality adjacent, but not quite identical to mine. As a result of the focus on colonialism, Bhabha's notion that hybridization (=the process of cross pollination between different ways of living) is a primary process while culture is a secondary process, imposed by the governments and nation states to "still the flux" (page 7 in: Huddart, David. (2006). Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge.) of hybridization - this notion is a novel proposition, but no more plausible than the traditional view that it attempts to reverse.

But only at first sight. As we look deeper, another piece emerges that has to do with Said's orientalism. The usual genre of discourse about the colonized is realism. It gives the narratives a flavor of verisimilitude, finality, and naturalness. It helps portray the condition of the colonized as legitimate and inescapable. The traditional view of culture as a static entity works for the same cause. It is no surprise, then, that Bhabha contests it with his notion of hybridization.

The traditional realist view is also unattractive for another reason. If we agree that culture can be static and predictable, we can hope to explain one day how cultures work in general. Such a universal explanation would require us to produce a totalizing explanatory discourse that would include all cultures, past, present, and future. An explanation like that would require an unhuman level of knowledge, a godlike omniscience. If achieved, it would also promise a godly omnipotence to its possessor.

Bhabha doesn't seem to like totalizing explanations. Neither do I, so I like Bhabha. Time and time again, I realize that the biggest trap for scientists is the quagmire of overconfidence, the temptation to play God. Let me end with a Bhabha quote that cautions against such a temptation:

The post-colonial perspective resists attempts at holistic forms of social explanation. I question the traditional liberal attempt to negotiate a coming together of minorities on the basis of what they have in common and what is consensual. In my writing, I've been arguing against the multiculturalist notion that you can put together harmoniously any number of cultures in a pretty mosaic. You cannot just solder together different cultural traditions to produce some brave new cultural totality. The current phase of economic and social history makes you aware of cultural difference not at the celebratory level of diversity but always at the point of conflict or crisis (page 82 in: Bhabha, Homi K. (1991). Art and National Identity: A Critics' Symposium. Art in America, 79, 80-100).

Thanks for reading - talk to you later, homes.

Originally published on the old blog on November 22. 2006