ABSTRACT
Regardless of how good the intentions and how interested the observer, Orientalism in Said’s sense always led to a simplification of the complexities of the place described, a simplification that, coming from a position of immense discursive and political power, led to greater distortion of perception and even self-perception than ordinary cultural prejudices. Hence, the point of Said’s critique of Orientalism was not that Europe or the ‘West’ had cultural prejudices. All cultures have their prejudices, but the hegemony of Europe in the past few centuries turned many European perspectives, prejudiced or not, into the main and at times the only – definitive – truth about complex non-European places, ideas, histories, customs or peoples. A failure to realize this leads to an inevitable repackaging of Orientalisms, especially in times of perceived threat, such as our post-9/11 era, as Sunaina Marr Maira (2009) and Arun Kundnani (2007) show in two very different studies. A definitive simplification and the centring of perception and experience around a post-imperial West (sometimes Europe, sometimes US, sometimes both) remain distinctive aspects of these re-Orientalisms, as do some reworked Orientalist perceptions. Such re-Orientalisms have various sources. There is a burgeoning rightist,
conservative neo-imperialist discourse, consolidated by political developments like the ‘war on terror’, that has re-employed old Orientalist tropes, such as the pre-historicity of the ‘Orient’, the duplicity of the ‘Arab’, etc. One can take most of these neo-discourses and understand them almost verbatim with reference to Said’s selective but pertinent reading of the old Orientalisms. There is also a degree of ‘marketing of the margins’, as Graham Huggan (2001) puts it, which serves to privilege re-Orientalist tropes from another (liberal, left-leaning) political trajectory. The history of ‘prizing otherness’ in the Booker (Huggan 2001: 104) is just one instance of that. But I would prefer to eschew such temporal manifestations and look at the problem (and development) from a larger theoretical perspective: that of negotiating Otherness in the colonial and post-colonial contexts, before returning to what I consider the definitive aspect of re-Orientalisms in the field of contemporary English-language literature. As I explored in detail in The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009),
the Other can be visualized in various terms of difference – those of gender, sexuality, race, colour, ethnicity, culture, class, nationality, and so forth, or a combination of two or more of these. What the Other signifies is the ineradicability of difference. But this is not the same as absolute difference, across space or time: sheer incomprehension. For this difference to come into being, there already has to be a relationship between the Self and the Other. The very perception of difference insists on an exchange that can be experienced as different and a look, given and returned, which can distinguish sameness from difference along certain avenues of perception. The term ‘Other’ insists on this relationship, which is vital for both the Self and the Other and cannot be reduced to sameness. For the Other to be other, there has to be difference – and space for its acceptance, interplay and recognition. This is very different
from the common colonialist tendency to turn Otherness into sheer negativity, blankness or a waiting-to-be-the-sameness. Much of the recent slippage into Orientalist tropes comes from an inability to conceptualize this problem. This leads to a failure in narrating the alterity of the Other, or a tendency to narrate it simply in colonialist terms of absence and void. These, however, are not exclusive or only options. I would like to illustrate
this with Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick. There are two central encounters with Otherness in Moby-Dick: Ishmael’s encounter with the cannibal, Queequeg, and Captain Ahab’s encounter with the white whale, Moby-Dick. Both are of very different character, though essentially about the same problem. Ishmael’s encounter with Queequeg launches the narrative of the novel. It is worth examining its negotiation of sameness and difference. Ishmael, the narrator-protagonist, has just introduced himself as a man smitten by the sea: after many trips as a sailor in merchant ships, he has now decided to undertake a whaling voyage. This undertaking is itself presented by Ishmael in mock-heroic terms as a major event, sandwiched between imagined headlines reporting the election of the President of the US and ‘Bloody Battle in Afghanistan’ (Melville 2004: 37). Ishmael’s narrative is already full of references to non-European spaces and people, and when he arrives in New Bedford, on his way to shipping abroad a Nantucket whaler, we enter a world that existed in both the Old World and the New, but one that has seldom been described. It is a world of black churches and coloured sailors. The note of cannibalism has already been sounded when Ishmael enters the SpouterInn for lodging and sees an array of spears, whaling lances and harpoons on its walls: ‘You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement’ (Melville 2004: 44). Inevitably, Ishmael uses the binarism of cannibalism constructed as a standard antithesis of (western) civilization, but he also turns it upside down. For very soon, in this very inn, he is to meet, and sleep with, a ‘cannibal’. Ishmael has his prejudices. Let alone cannibals, he is not too comfortable
with racial strangers either. When he is told that he will have to share his room and bed with a ‘dark complexioned chap’, he tries to avoid such a fate and attempts to sleep on two hard and uneven benches: ‘I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of the “dark complexioned” harpooner’ (Melville 2004: 47). As he has not yet met the harpooner, Ishmael’s suspicions are not grounded in any actual experience: they are the result of language and the assumptions he already carries in his mind. The ‘dark complexioned’ harpooner is portrayed in clearly ‘Other’ terms: Not only does he look different, he also earns money on the side by ‘such a cannibal business as selling heads of dead idolators’ (Melville 2004: 54) as souvenirs. When Ishmael finally decides to sleep in the room – the cannibal has still not returned – he rummages around in the harpooner’s possessions and is confirmed in his perception of threat and difference. But even then, when the man finally arrives, Ishmael is in for a shock: ‘What a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark,
purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow’ (Melville 2004: 56). Narrating the story of this first meeting, which results in more frights, Ishmael makes a statement that appears retrospective and is significant to the entire matter: ‘Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself ’ (Melville 2004: 58). Here, we have returned to the common Gothic linkage of the Devil with
the ‘dark complexioned’ Other, the racial/colonial Other. But Ishmael’s story is different: he gets to know this stranger, Queequeg, and they become the best of friends. However, this does not happen at the cost of Queequeg’s Otherness: Queequeg remains a ‘cannibal’, different in his behaviour and beliefs but still able to relate to Ishmael. Perhaps it is this ability to live with the Other, which both Queequeg and Ishmael demonstrate, that finally complicates notions of cannibalism-vs-civilization to such an extent that we have remarks like this one by Ishmael later in the novel:
Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pâté-de-foie-gras.
