ABSTRACT
As a concept addressing the representational strategy enacted in literary texts, the term ‘Orientalist’ focuses attention on issues of characterization and voice. The question at hand is whether specific portrayals are essentialist and objectifying, whether they replicate the strategy of Otherness that Edward Said investigated in his influential work Orientalism. When adopted as a reading strategy, this mode of inquiry draws support from Nietzschean currents in contemporary thought, in particular from Said’s identification of an affinity between Orientalist practice and ‘Foucault’s notion of a discourse’ (Said 1995: 3). While critics have rigorously questioned the fit between the work of the two men (Brennan 2000; Prendergast 2000), the textual approach associated with Said has become an accepted norm in literary exegesis. As a means of textual explication, it appears to gain urgency in an era which, mindful of the depredations of social exclusion, seeks inclusiveness and participation by all sectors of society. In adopting what amounts to a subjectcentred stance, however, such practice may overlook the historical and social situatedness of texts as well as their formal intricacy or inventiveness. This chapter pursues these questions and asks whether texts deemed Orientalist in some manner or form are recoverable when viewed against a wider historical or formal context. It approaches these issues through an analysis of Gopal Baratham’s novel, A Candle or the Sun.1 Published in 1991 in Britain, Candle won for its Indian Singaporean writer a slot in the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist and hence constitutes a milestone of sorts for Singapore letters. As will be explained below, there is an Orientalist disposition to aspects of its configuration. However, the interesting feature about Baratham’s text is that its recourse to the last is couched in opposition to a self-same move by statist discourse. In the name of cultural pluralism, it could be said (but using problematic means), Candle excoriates statist rhetoric which makes precisely the kind of cultural homogenizing move that underpins Orientalism as a discourse. Orientalism perpetrated by Orientals has been termed ‘re-Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), and understood in that regard, Candle allows us to appreciate the multifarious vicissitudes of the latter as it functions within a polarizing global
capitalist environment. While investigations of Orientalism often implicate the enlivening contexts created by South-North migration and/or cultural exchange, Candle allows us to track the re-Orientalism that issues from South-South migration, but one which still bears the subtending influence of the international division of labour and global power realities. More specifically, the novel provides insights into the tensions and challenges besetting the portions of the Indian and Chinese diasporas that have fetched up in Southeast Asia; and thus it potentially widens the scope of a theoretical discussion that at times treats the concerns of the marginalized in the metropolis as an emblem for all postcoloniality. Tracking this topic specifically, a recent issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies lamented that Southeast Asia is noticeably absent in the expanding archive of the field; hopefully the ensuing discussion will help to address that shortfall. In what follows, I will first provide a synopsis of Candle before elaborating
on its formal and cognitive features. Adopting a contextualist approach, I explain how the book implicates and resists a postcolonial governance mode that relies on hypostasizing cultural and ethnic differences, both internally, in its national setting, and externally, in the imaginative geography that it proffers, one that reifies the entities East and West. More specifically, I look at how Baratham’s novel broaches and negotiates the twin dangers of enclavism and assimilationism. I close by suggesting how this analysis sheds light on the rhetorical reach and multiple operational domains of re-Orientalist identity claims. In recent years the grammar of political contestation has shifted away from economic equality to foreground the social recognition and acceptance of marginalized and inferiorized identities. The upshot of my exposition is that the two domains are complementary, that criticism which seeks to further a politics of difference benefits from paying close attention to materialist categories of analysis.
