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<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT size=3>Dear All, </FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT size=3>A book-review that might be of some
interest,</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT size=3>Best wishes</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT size=3>Mustafa Hussain</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Courier New" size=3><FONT
face="Times New Roman">Copenhagen</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><BR>Orientalism and its discontents <BR><BR> BY SHELLEY WALIA
<BR><BR><BR><EM>The book ignores the rigour of Edward Said's work and his
explorations of critical issues of cultural representation</EM>.
<BR><BR><BR><BR><STRONG>For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies
by Robert Irwin; Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2006; pages 409.
<BR></STRONG><BR>THE spectre of Edward Said still haunts the Western scholastic
world. In a rather unacademic manner, Robert Irwin takes him to task for being a
supporter of the Palestinian cause and for his contempt of the Jewish community.
There is absolutely no reason why a scholar cannot have ideological leanings and
focus his scholarship through analysis of history to show how the West has been
responsible for biased interpretations of the East. When Bernard Lewis or Ernest
Gellner took up cudgels on behalf of their discipline, Said was there to refute
them. Now dead, he can conveniently be criticised and lambasted for "carrying
out a conspiracy" against America and Israel, for there will be no rebuttal by
him. Almost 30 years after the publication of Orientalism, along comes Robert
Irwin with a counter-conspiracy to demolish a thesis that has an inherent logic
behind it. <BR><BR>Undeniably, histories are a construction, and it was relevant
to the anti-colonial mood to set the record right or to decolonise histories
fashioned with the motives of endorsing Western agendas. <BR><BR>By 1968, after
the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Said had firmly
resolved not to separate the personal from the political. Time had come to "rub
culture's nose in the mud of politics". The outcome of this decision was to
write a dissident and subversive account of Western representations of the East.
<BR><BR>The enormity of the task of renewal within the context of a
transnational economy and the collapse of socialist projects, particularly the
proclamations of the Western bourgeois school of thought dominated by Francis
Fukuyama and the "End of History" syndrome, posed problems for Said. His major
works need to be discussed in this context by arguing out his position as an
intellectual who critiques and questions history, culture, and literature as
systems of thinking that represent images of their own creation for reasons of
maintaining hegemonic structures of knowledge and power. The role of the
intellectual and the relevance of the issues of culture and identity stand
behind his unabashed commitment to an ideology of historical reconstruction by
critical and political involvement. <BR><BR>The rigour of Said's work has been
ignored in Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their
Enemies. No consideration has been given to Said's explorations of critical
issues of cultural representation by unfolding epistemological shifts that have
taken place under the sway of colonialism, orientalism, nationalism and
xenophobia. Said uses his position of an exile to advantage because he can then
raise himself above the functionless jargon and cowardice of academic
intellectuals who refuse to support ideological issues to which a commitment is
called for. <BR><BR>The tensions and contradictions present in his writings that
seem to obsess critics such as Ernest Gellner and Aijaz Ahmad and now Irwin are
the fundamental ingredients of a critic who is located ambivalently in the
realms of both his professional exigencies and his public involvement, his
transnational theoretical framework and his status as a representative of the
marginalised Palestinian exile. Master narratives here collide with local
histories and academic criticism with public-spirited political involvement. One
sees the working of the hybrid and heterogeneous narrative of a literary
historian who pays as much attention to aesthetics as well as the politics of
aesthetics, which are underpinned by the meta-languages of colonialism and
culture. <BR><BR>CONTRIBUTION OF CULTURE <BR><BR><BR><BR>Said brings to the
foreground the contribution of culture to the making of arts and histories. He
stresses the need for literary criticism to see itself as inextricably joined to
the realities of human experience along with the imperialist institutions of
power and authority. Where in Orientalism, he showed how Western knowledge, far
from being academic, is tainted by power and political motivation, he carried
forward these conclusions into Culture and Imperialism where the creative
writer's consciousness is seen to be shaped by the imperialist tendencies
prevailing in 19th century England. To Said, such intellectual and critically
responsible intervention is the hallmark of a secular critic necessary to draw
the attention of Western readers to non-Western cultures and recognise their
significant role in the ongoing processes of history. <BR><BR>Said has often
been blamed for engaging in almost a ritual of accommodation and assimilation
that does not allow him to be at home in any one culture or, for that matter,
with a single theoretical position. Being geographically dislocated, he has
tried to negotiate his position in the context of globalisation, yet he has
disrupted inter-cultural hegemony by taking an antagonist stance against any
reconciliation with Western hegemonic positions and the production of knowledge.
He is, on the one hand, aware of cultural conflict and, on the other, a defender
of hybridity, urging the rejection of the "rhetoric of blame". While he
understands that powerful representations do get naturally accepted, his
writings argue that their inherent stereotypical nature be countered by an
alternative discourse, which is always conscious of the strategies of power.
<BR><BR>Said's writings have contributed substantially to the history/theory
debate in the last two decades. By taking truth to be only situational and
political, he opens up the discipline of history to subaltern writing and
intervention. Said does not fully reject the validity of the empirical method,
but his marshalling of facts, and emphasis on the iconography of signs, symbols
and language helps to provide the social and literary historian with a wider
vision of history. Although it is unfair to say that all accounts of the past
are false, Said sets out to demonstrate that different writings of European
scholars were shaped by ideological and political exigencies of empire-building,
with racial and cultural superiority inherent in the palpable designs of their
political aims. <BR><BR>While examining Irwin's book, the reader must bear in
mind the areas of historiography and representation, which are vital to Said's
writings owing to their problematic nature in the area of textuality. Our
understanding of the past has been hugely enlarged and deepened by Said's
analysis of literature and culture, which throws light on different classes of
people and large categories of experience that we were as yet unaware of. In
order to stress the political character of all such literary pursuit, Said
offers alternative epistemological systems to dislocate the Eurocentric
perspective, which is shaped by Western literature and histories. He focusses
his attention on the intervention of history and literature in historical
writing itself, showing how literary narratives and politics are inextricably
bound up in the texts of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, and Verdi's opera "Aida". As he argues in Culture and Imperialism: "I
suggested that<BR> studying the relationship between the `West' and its
dominated cultural `others' is not just a way of understanding an unequal
relationship between unequal interlocutors, but also a point of entry into
studying the formation and meaning of Western cultural practices themselves. And
the persistent disparity in power between the West and non-West must be taken
into account if we are accurately to understand cultural forms like that of the
novel, of ethnographic and historical discourse, certain kinds of poetry and
opera, where allusions to and structures based on this disparity abound."
<BR><BR>On the other hand, post-Orientalist history writing attempts to
demystify this delusive enterprise, which conceals, in the words of Gertrude
Himmelfarb, "its ideological structure behind a scholarly facade of footnotes
and the pretence of facts". But it is equally vital that all such
representations promulgated in the name of "authentic" and "true" accounts are
also questioned, and their authority and coherence closely re-examined. As Said
writes: "Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about
strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonised people use
to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history." This
bifocal view of any writing, which is always a representation, brings into play
the creative combination of fact and fiction hinting at the multitudinous and
infinite possibilities of writing. <BR><BR>UNDERSTANDING IDEOLOGIES
<BR><BR><BR><BR>Representing reality from either side can never be an
ideologically neutral activity. Said realises the problem of representation in
contemporary historical and mythical-religious contexts, fully aware how they
falsify and caricature and demean. His work becomes part of a larger body of
theoretical analysis, which spells out the understanding of ideologies behind
the writing of history and the use of materialist criticism in coming to grips
with the literary mode of production. Exercising considerable influence on the
direction of literary studies in universities around the world, Said has helped
to turn "reading against the grain" into a critical methodology that at one
level reconciles with postmodernist thinking and at another warns literary
theoreticians to take a sceptical view of the lapses into extreme relativism.
<BR><BR>There is a deep-seated concern in Said with keeping ideological
phenomena at the forefront of dialectical analysis. His emphasis is on the
adoption of a more globally oriented stance that rejects totalising viewpoints
and academic compartmentalising to subvert the intentions of the author.
<BR><BR>One may relate the earlier alignment of Said's liberal humanist cultural
tradition imbibed from Eric Auerbach and Lionel Trilling with the larger
concerns of contemporary literary theory and its post-Enlightenment loss of
faith in "origins", "centre" and "end". Implicit here is the notion of unequal
relationships of economic and political power that work behind myths of
representations about the Orient which is integral to the European discourse and
its material civilisation. Without this discourse analysis, Said argues in
Orientalism, "one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage - and even produce - the
Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically,
and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period." <BR><BR>David
Pryce-Jones, who belongs to Irwin's camp, in his recent indictment of Said and
Orientalism is, therefore, absolutely off the mark: "That book shifted the
intellectual climate - more exactly, degraded it - by propagating a new and
unusual sort of hatred, aimed at scholarship and scholars. But in Said's
opinion, everybody who had ever studied or written about the Middle East [West
Asia] had done so in bad faith. Epigraphists, archaeologists, grammarians and
linguists, papyrologists, geographers, the lot, including poets and travellers,
had nothing to do with the advancement of learning or the recording of their
findings and impressions. With sinister purpose, they were imposing themselves
upon innocent and harmless people. Century after century, the activity of these
assorted men was not at all what it might seem but only `a rationalisation of
colonial rule' and, since for most of the time there was no colonial rule, a
justification of it `in advance'." <BR><BR>Like Pryce-Jones, Irwin forgets that,
in fact, the book has to a great extent been responsible for provoking serious
scholarship. Recent explosions in scholarly research on the subject of
imperialism as a phenomenon that continues to dominate our understanding of
culture both theoretically and empirically have shown the consequences wrought
by the European colonial enterprise. The concept of cultural imperialism is now
integral to the critical vocabulary of both cultural theory and international
politics, and throws light on many existing systems of value, and on the ways
the West looks for power structures they can understand and promote; if they do
not find one, they create one. Through its contrapuntal practice, the
methodology underscored by Said as well as its impetus towards the building of
an interrogative practice in studying the construction of histories inspired
scholars throughout the world to decontextualise and recontexualise Western
scholarship and thereby<BR> endeavour to decolonise knowledge.
<BR><BR>Cultures to be subjected <BR><BR><BR><BR>The Western narrative paradigm
in which the author-anthropologist fashions the other is a form of domination
created through a hegemonic discourse formation whose sensationalism and
inaccuracy is now being questioned through the revisionist programmes of
historians and post-colonial cultural critics. It is clear that the Victorian
travelogue conceived of the East as "a grand harem" with endless possibilities
for pleasure and perversion, thereby suggesting its moral inferiority and
dog-headedness. Owing to this feature it was, therefore, ripe for colonisation.
The travel narrative with its exaggerated information and fantastic accounts of
far away lands produced an ethnological discourse of immense significance as it
offered information about the native cultures that were to be subdued. It became
the agent of the "superior" civilisation forging images of the alien by imposing
its own self-perpetuating categories and alterations from the norms. <BR><BR>For
instance, Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines is a clear account of Western
imperialism and its accompanying patriarchal discourse that sets out to take
control over the colonised woman, a material commodity at the disposal of the
dominant power. Haggard's map of the mines converts the female sexuality
repressed as a captive under the technology of Western enterprise into a site
for economic production. Gender here, therefore, becomes something more than
only the sexual category; it takes on the semantics of not only labour, but also
exploitation and control. <BR><BR>Similarly, Baudelaire would experience intense
passion for the black woman, Jeanne Duval, on his first journey to Mauritius.
For her he would experience sexual passion and for a white-only love. Duval
symbolises for him, as Rana Kabbani mentions in her excellent study of
orientalism, "a voyage East, providing sexual possibilities but precluded from
respectability". Her dark body becomes the "flower of evil" for him. You crave
for it and yet it ruffles and agitates. We see how "Europe was charmed by an
Orient that shimmered with possibilities, that promised a sexual space, a voyage
away from the self, an escape from the dictates of the bourgeois morality of the
metropolis". <BR><BR>Although Irwin gives a detailed account of research on
Islam by scholars such as Hammer-Purgstall in Germany, Ignatius Kratchovsky in
Russia and Ignaz Goldziher in Budapest, he ignores the strategies of the likes
of Macaulay who set out with the aim of emphasising the inferiority of Eastern
culture. <BR><BR>It is understandable that scholars such as Robert Irwin or
David Pryce-Jones are still stuck in foundationalism that views narratives and
historical research as free from ideology and containing basic objectivity.
Controversies concerning objectivity or subjectivity, singularity or plurality,
relativity or universality of truth abound in the revisionist post-orientalist
historiography which treats areas of knowledge, culture, and tradition as sites
of conflict. Its main purpose is freedom from essentialism. Apparently, this is
a reaction to Western anthropologists and ethnographists who have traditionally
followed the conservative assumption that culture is a sphere of privileged
social expression. <BR><BR>It is this history and the writing of it that has
given rise to recent exchanges between the foundationalists and the
post-foundationalists, the modernists and the post-modernists. And behind these
debates Said sees the struggle to reformulate variant identities and unstable
polities. <BR><BR>Ideological expediency is always behind the biased narratives
of history. On one side lies the romance of knowledge and research carried out
for reasons that are not motivated by utilitarian philosophy. Whether there was
intellectual curiosity or imperial conspiracy behind the corpus of knowledge of
the Arabic world is debatable. Irwin mentions interesting examples of the
research of the 17th century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who worked on
Egyptian hieroglyphics absolutely out of conjecture. So was Richard Burton, who
pretended to be a serious Arabic scholar only to realise at a late stage that he
should have been reading from the right to the left instead of the left to the
right. Irwin disparages the work of 19th century French writer Ernest Renan who
is almost put on a pedestal by Said for his remarkable research. Here too Irwin
is wrong in claiming that Renan researched on Ibn Rushd from Latin translations
of Arabic, whereas Renan claims that not a single text<BR> was available on
Rushd in Arabic. <BR><BR>Irwin's arguments thus indicate that there was either
not much serious research of any consequence or innumerable disagreements in the
findings of scholars that lends the field of orientalism a rather ambiguous
character. Said's account of the Arabic history too has been put under scrutiny
and found wanting. However, it cannot be denied that there were a few serious
Arabic scholars such as Sir Hamilton Gibb or Albert Hourani, and in contemporary
times, Said, who do offer support for Arab nationalism and explore significant
aspects of Islamic culture, thus awakening an interest in Islamic history.
<BR><BR>However, many scholars not only had little knowledge of either spoken or
written Arabic, they never visited the East, or had any contact with the Arabic
people. Those who did venture forth, lacked the linguistic ability to
communicate. Irwin rightly emphasises this. He has thus committed the very
mistake that he accuses Said of. Cataloguing research by various Arabic
scholars, he emphasises the inaccuracy of knowledge about the East, a view that
is more in agreement with Said than a refutation of it. It is therefore, clear
that orientalism exists as a body of contradictory accounts where various
scholars are either guilty of ideological bias or have an inadequacy of
communication skills. <BR><BR>On the other hand, recent explosions in scholarly
research on the subject of imperialism as a phenomenon that continues to
dominate our understanding of culture both theoretically and empirically have
shown the consequences wrought by the European colonial enterprise. <BR><BR>The
concept of cultural imperialism is now integral to the critical vocabulary of
both cultural theory and international politics and throws light on many
existing systems of value, and on the ways the West looks for power structures
they can understand and promote; if they do not find one, they create one. Much
that critics may argue that the existence of disinterested truths is an antidote
to the anti-humanism of post-modernist thinking, there is yet hardly a body of
writing that can claim the value of unbiased "truth". <BR><BR>Said might have
desired a reconciliation of Israel and Palestine before his death, arguing for a
common human understanding, but such utopian envisaging of a future at the
moment seems to be remote.
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