ABSTRACT
According to Edward Said’s Foucauldian take on imperial discourse, the cultural construct of Orientalism was the European imperialistic strategy of composing a positive image of the western Self while casting the ‘East’ as its negative alter ego, alluring and exotic, dangerous and mysterious, always the Other. As such, ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 2003: 1-2), emerging as an intricate part of western culture itself and as a way to face internal contradictions. Self-evidently, Orientalism still persists in both popular and institutional constructions of culture and identity, but has developed in a rather curious trajectory over the last few decades. One direction of particular interest has been identified and designated as ‘re-Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), where ‘Orientals’ are seen to be perpetrating Orientalisms no less than ‘non-Orientals’ and, moreover, perpetrating certain and selected types of Orientalisms. Where Said’s Orientalism is grounded in how the West constructs the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, re-Orientalism is based on how cultural producers with eastern affiliations come to terms with an orientalized East, whether by complying with perceived expectations of western readers, by playing (along) with them or by discarding them altogether. As a consequence, the present critical project aims to situate itself within the reconfiguration of modes of cultural analysis that observe, identify and comment the operations of new Orientalisms in the twenty-first century. Re-Orientalist discursive practices and rhetorical strategies are often sites of subversion where meanings are in constant flux. In this sense, re-Orientalism theory exposes the power of Orientalist discourse while underscoring its instability and mutability, and as such provides avenues for questioning the endurance of Orientalist practices today. One purpose of this collection is to observe how re-Orientalism is deployed,
made to circulate and perceived by cultural producers and consumers within the specific context of South Asian identity politics. The concept of re-Orientalism is applicable in a large number of Asian contexts; this volume case studies South Asia and South Asian diasporic cultural formations, illustrating the delicate negotiation of power and influence within the spaces of
South Asian textual practices, specifically in literary works and through the media of film and television. This collection therefore places itself at the centre of a politics of power and representation; one which is not pitting the ‘West’ against the ‘East’,1 but strives for a much more complex and nuanced understanding – an understanding that could not be confined within those discursive structures – of postcolonial cultural production and its engendering of re-Orientalist perspectives. In fact, this project is attentive to the implications of the heterogeneity embedded in categories such as the West and the East, given that, as Said influentially argued, ‘the ontological and epistemological distinction … between “the Orient” and … ”the Occident”’ (Said 2003: 2) resulted from a colonial discursive power structure devised for ‘dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 2003: 3). Following the arguments of Said’s foundational theorization, one way of
approaching re-Orientalism theory is to note that it concerns the ontological and epistemological force of a conglomeration of discursive practices on the subjects it demarcates. In this sense, although this volume was sparked off by widespread interest and responses to Lisa Lau’s 2009 essay ‘Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals’, the concept of re-Orientalism, even if under slightly different guises and in different terminologies, has been buffeted around for at least the last two or three decades. The most significant occurrence of this term (spelled alternatively as ‘reOrientalism’) dates back to Samir Amin’s, Giovanni Arrighi’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1999 counter-critique to ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998) by the economic historian and sociologist André Gunder Frank. In their responses titled ‘ReOrientalism’, Amin et al. dispute Gunder Frank’s defence of a ‘reOriented’, non-Eurocentric economic historiography and social theory. This critical controversy has even reached the pages of Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994: 4-5), but this volume proposes a usage of the term which differs somewhat from its previous similar employments. In fact, albeit employing a variety of terminologies, the concept of re-Orientalism has been in circulation in academia for at least the last three decades, termed as ‘ethno-orientalism’ (Carrier 1992), ‘self-orientalism’ (Dirlik 1996), ‘internal orientalism’ (Schein 1997) and ‘reverse Orientalism’ (Tony Mitchell 2004), to name a few. Indeed, the current promotion and profiteering of a fashionable alterity as a marketing strategy that repackages the Orient for global consumption has not failed to attract considerable critical attention. Spivak’s concept of ‘new orientalism’ in Outside in the Teaching Machine (Spivak 1993: 277), Elleke Boehmer’s assessment of ‘neo-Orientalism’ in the essay ‘Questions of Neo-Orientalism’ (1998) and Anis Shivani’s reading in the article ‘Indo-Anglian Fiction’ (2006) of a ‘new orientalism’ in recent Indian Writing in English (IWE) novels have laid the foundations for the development of re-Orientalist theory. These and other postcolonial critics have raised the issue of how some Orientals – South Asian-origin authors, for instance – are aggressively promoted in order to make a marketable commodity out of exoticizing the Orient or products from the Orient.
