ABSTRACT
When Captain Mac, in King Vidor's Bird of Paradise (1932), repeats Kipling's nostrum that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," he receives the joking response: "Hey, Mac, what's the dope on the North and South?" This apparently frivolous exchange calls attention to the geographical imaginary that imposes neat divisions, along a double axis (EastlWest, North! South), on a globe inhospitable to such rigidities. Like its orientalizing counterpart the "East," the "West" is a fictional construct embroidered with myths and fantasies. In a geographical sense, the concept is relative. What the West calls the "Middle East" is from a Chinese perspective "Western Asia." In Arabic, the word for West (Maghreb) refers to North Africa, the westernmost part of the Arab world, in contrast to the Mashreq, the eastern part. (In Arabic, "West" and "foreign" share the same root - gh.r.b.) The South Seas, to the west of the US, are often posited as cultural "East."
