ABSTRACT
If Said’s Orientalism is directed against the hierarchical dualism of ‘West’ and ‘East’, other dualisms ceaselessly proliferate throughout his text: Orientalism as representation or real, for example, or as vision or narrative; or, in Said’s own methodology, the opposition of universalism to particularism which repeats through many different forms. Of the many critiques of Orientalism Homi Bhabha’s ‘Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism’ (1983) stands out because it directly identifies this problem of ambivalence at the heart of the book and recasts it in a more positive, enabling form.1 Bhabha seizes on the analogy with Freud’s conflictual model of the dream, which Said himself makes briefly in passing, in order to argue that at the centre of Orientalism there is not a single homogenizing perspective but a polarity: ‘it is, on the one hand, a topic of learning, discovery, practice; on the other, it is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements’ (DDDC 199). Orientalism is a discipline – of encyclopaedic learning, and of imperial power – and yet on the other hand it is also a fantasy of the Other. It is both a conscious body of knowledge (Said’s ‘manifest Orientalism’), and an ‘unconscious positivity’ of fantasy and desire (‘latent Orientalism’). The problem of the book, according to Bhabha, stems from
Said’s refusal to engage with the alterity and ambivalence of these two economies which threaten to split the very object of Orientalist discourse. . . . He contains this threat by introducing a binarism within the argument which, in initially setting up an opposition between these two discursive scenes, finally allows them to be correlated as a congruent system of representation that is unified through a political-ideological intention which, in his words, enables Europe to advance securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient. (DDDC 199-200)
Unlike others who criticized Said for constructing too hegemonic a picture of Orientalism’s discursive formation, Bhabha points to the way in which
Said himself shows that such a discourse is constituted ambivalently. Said resolves this ambivalence, however, in the most traditional literarycritical way by referring to a single originating intention; as he puts it, ‘once we begin to think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient, we will encounter few surprises’.2
